Carl-Richard

Did you know that you can save your favorite posts so you can read them later? It's the bookmark function! I wish more people started using it so I could read what people think is the best stuff on the forum (from yourself or other people). This is essentially me asking you to do that (make them public of course) Here's a challenge: what is the most mind-blowing post you've ever read on the forum? Bookmark it! Then post the link to the post below for us to see

There are no objects, just change. There is no change, just being. There is no being, just isness.

LOL what a nice thought that is

He is talking about spotting narcissism, not being a narcissist. To spot narcissism, use feeling and intuition.

You can't use past events to make absolute statements about future events. This is called "the problem of induction", formulated by David Hume (1711-1776). You can use past events to make probabilistic statements about future events, but not absolute statements. The statement "the sun will rise tomorrow" is therefore only an assumption that is likely to be true.

Don't get hung up on words.

You still want to minimize the overall amount of attachments, especially the ones that are broad and cause frequent thoughts. "I need to meditate given any chance" is such an attachment. Attachment to spirituality can be crippling, and some are worse than others. Maybe if you're in a persistent thought-free state. Thoughts arise around attachments. It's unavoidable. That happens because you haven't decided yet. Uncertainty breeds questions. Be decisive: don't observe (or do). Growth happens during rest.

@Gesundheit2 On a second thought, definitions might be good for relatively simple things like corruption. I was thinking more about describing more complex things things like fields or sub-fields of psychology. I think corruption (in the moral/legal sense) is a combination of dishonesty and exploiting an authority position. Definitions also tend to collapse when trying to categorize objects. For example, what is the definition of a chair? There are many things that you would want to categorize as a chair that is hard to fit into an universal definition.

Your definition assumes a system of law, but is it specifically modern law or any system of rules? Can a tribal leader be corrupt? Are the rules implicit or explicit? Can a person be corrupt with respect to personal relationships? (social/moral codes).

Definitions don't accommodate nuances well. Examples can help with that. If I were to "debunk" your definition, I would give an example where the definition doesn't apply.

High-intensity exercise can put you into transpersonal states if you're already inclined towards those things. But so can cooking food, or just sitting.

There seems to be a synergistic relationship no doubt. My dad becomes a somewhat holistic thinker when he is manic even though he isn't conventionally "spiritual" (doesn't meditate). He talks about the arbitrary and relative nature of arriving at and deploying interpretative frameworks ("are we actually just drawing connections that don't exist?"), the importance of presence ("being, here, now"), that the knowledge of the world is evolutionary and progressing exponentially etc. ("our kids know so much more than us").

So you're saying if you push a ball a certain way, it will fall a certain way. What if not all balls are the same? Does a balloon fall like a golf ball? Let's use me as an example: my dad has bipolar type 1 and my mom is not diagnosed with anything. I could make a good case for my early childhood to early adulthood being much more stressful than my dad's ("stressors"; life event predictors of mental illness), but I didn't get diagnosed with anything, even though I'm supposed to have some of his genes. The vast majority of people with psychotic illnesses get diagnosed before they're 20. Not coincidentally, my life was the most stressful at 20 – my life was shit, but no diagnosis. Now I'm 24 – still no diagnosis. I'm not going to lie though, I would probably have ended up with something if I kept spiraling down, but I was lucky. Still, my dad's life was not nearly as shit as mine if we look at the presence of stressors. That could just be a reductionist analysis though. Maybe there are some deeply seated traumas that nobody is aware about.

The body is happening within experience, not vice versa. You cannot not have an experience. Here is a challenge: try having an experience, and then try not having an experience. Can you find the difference?

This can lead to Spiritual ADHD. It's monkey mind hijacking spirituality and turning it into another survival mechanism. By removing structured meditation, you only move the structure inside your head. It's called attachment: cyclical thoughts driving cyclical behavior. Your mind will make up any excuse to think about meditation: "is this a good time to meditate?" "maybe I should meditate now that I have time" "am I meditating enough?" "how long have I meditated today?". By making your practice a well-oiled habit and restricting it to short and intensive periods, you have no reason to think about meditation for the rest of the day; cyclical behavior with minimal cyclical thoughts. One less thing to worry about, one less thing to get your mind stuck on. If your goal is less monkey mind, actually practice what you preach. Cultivate an embodied spiritual practice, not an opportunistic mind game.

Ah thank you for noticing. I added a third option now

1. Understanding Absolute Infinity - Part 1 & 2 (blew my mind so hard) 2. What Is God? - Part 1 - A No Bullshit Explanation For Smart People (blew it) 3. Understanding How Paradigms Work (blew it) 4. Jacques Derrida, Deconstruction, Post-Modernism & Nonduality (blew it) 5. 40 Signs That You Are Neurotic - Understanding Neurosis (saved my life)

Seeing the beauty, the interconnectedness, the intelligence, the mystery, the unexplainable, the funny, the fascinating (it's all one thing ).

Thank you ?

Thank you ? The understanding of the lower levels is required in order to perform the operations in the lower levels, so in this sense, the higher tasks always involve the lower tasks, but maybe more in an implicit way rather than explicitly. The hierarchical structure means that you can start at a higher operation and trace it all the way down to the first level. I'll try: Cross-paradigmatic (14) : Crossing two different paradigms (e.g. evolution and economics) means seeing how they interact, e.g. the competition between market strategies fulfilling the conditions for adaptive evolution. Paradigmatic (13): To see how they interact, you must have a basic understanding of both paradigms (evolution and economics). That means you need to have an understanding of specific aspects of each paradigm (or the relationships between different metasystems): e.g. in evolution, you have the relationship between reproduction and different selection mechanisms; or in economics, you have the relationship between scarcity and supply and demand. Metasystematic (12): There are different systems under each of those. For example, for reproduction and selection, you have assortative mating and directional selection respectively (let's stick to evolutionary theory for now). Systematic (11): Examples of systems within those metasystems could be inbreeding and splitting selection respectively. Formal (10): To understand these systems, you have to commensurate synthetical statements (empirical observations) and analytical statements (logical facts), formulate hypotheses and make logical deductions, a.k.a the scientific method (or "the hypothetico-deductive method"). Let's take inbreeding as an example: "if individuals in a population with a shared ancestry mate with each other, they're practicing inbreeding. Me and my cousin are related and are mating, therefore we're practicing inbreeding". Abstract (9): To perform these operations, you must be able to form variables and quantify propositions, e.g. analytical statements ("inbreeding is when individuals in a population with a shared ancestry mate"), or synthetical statements ("me and my cousin are related and are mating.") Concrete (8): That requires the ability to understand complex interactions, plans, deals e.g. "me and my cousin mate every sunday, because that seems like a good time with respect to our responsibilities". Primary (7): This requires an understanding of times, places, actions, e.g. "me and my cousin mate every sunday, because that is when our parents are gone". Preoperational (6): This implies "when, then, why etc.". e.g. "me and my cousin mate every sunday, because it's fun". Sentential (5): "me and my cousin mate every sunday". I think I've made my point

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model_of_hierarchical_complexity It's one of the few Neo-Piagetian theories of cognitive development. It seems useful framework for understanding how big-picture thinking relates to ordinary ways of thinking (holistic vs analytic thinking), concepts like construct awareness, context awareness. It's a spiraling model like SD ("transcend-include", integration). When people say things like "why don't actual scientists see the links between mysticism and quantum mechanics?", you can clearly see here that it's sufficient for a scientist to operate from the lower stages most of the time (1-10). One the other hand, taking one field (Quantum Mechanics) and seeing the connections to another field (mysticism) initiates cross-paradigmatic operations (stage 14). When that is said, just because an operation is at a lower hierarchical complexity doesn't mean it's not complicated or difficult work. It's precisely why they don't have time to think about the big picture, because it might cost them their job. That's why most scientists are technicians and not innovators. Being a career scientist (staying within your paradigm) is not the same as being a revolutionary scientist (initiating paradigm shifts). The physicist Lawrence Krauss once said "physicists feel sorry for the social scientists, because physics is simple and social systems are complex". What more do I have to say?

Just a correction: I did watch the video of Professor Dave in its entirety. You might've misread what I wrote. I recently made a thread about a model that is useful for understanding construct awareness. I used this exact topic as a way to demonstrate the different levels of the model, so I highly recommend reading it (that and the video underneath about Lagrangian mechanics) What is accepted by society is to eat carcinogenic foods, drink toxic chemicals (alcohol), and watch the same news channel every day. It's obvious that this work is not going to resonate with that. This goes back to how to approach sensemaking: do you intend to think your own thoughts or not? Of course you're always going to rely on other people's thoughts, but intention is key. The intention is that you want to understand; you. When something resonates, there is a feeling of understanding rather than confusion. It happens when you have an internal framework that is able to accommodate what is being presented. That framework can be based on things like logic (rationality), or it can be based on thing like experience (personal empiricism). You've accurately pinpointed the problem, which is that the teachings have a lot more to do with experience rather than logic (although they might overlap from time to time), so the correct solution is to grab that experience. That might not be possible from someone like Professor Dave who is stuck on rationality, but there the solution is development.

It's not a complete representation of the phenomena. It's a visualization for the means of deconstructing falsehood and point to truth. Truth can never be represented. It can only be presented.

Every distinction can be deconstucted.

The thing is that not all communication involves sound or intentional signals. Like the communication theorist Paul Watzlawick once said: "you cannot not communicate." Communication and sharing of thoughts happens in a shared environment, and it can be broad and subtle. The environment also isn't limited to a specific locality in space and time. It stretches across past and present (past events, interactions, interpretations, thoughts; general behavior patterns). This is why telepathy tends to occur more easily among relatives and close friends, because they're more behaviorally locked in to eachother. If you have strong empathic abilities (the ability to "see the other"), the amount of information you can gather from perceiving behavioral patterns increases. That is how a guru can simply look you in the eyes and know your past, present and future. Spirituality increases telepathy because it dissolves the boundaries between self and other.