Carl-Richard

Us unenlightened folks only have our best guess, but I believe having 0 self-referential thoughts (except when hypoglycemic) qualifies as a non-dual baseline state of awareness a.k.a enlightenement. Are there deeper levels? Sure. "It only keeps unfolding in more and more spectacular ways" as Gary Weber would've put it (paraphrasing). If Gary is "definitely not enlightened", what is your requirement for considering somebody enlightened? Btw, at 16:47 he goes into how he stopped experiencing thoughts.

@LastThursday Ah that's so cool! So essentially it's classical conditioning combined with reconsolidation. I have always played around with mental tricks like this in some form or another. For example, when I struggled with substance addiction, I would reprogram my initial response to addictive thoughts (which I would describe as anguish and hopelessness) with optimism and motivation. I took the mental pain as a sign of mental progress, much like the pain from lifting weights is a sign of physical progress. I like the quote "pain is weakness leaving your body" In this case, the mechanism is classical conditioning (one thought being associated with another), but meditation was a significant part of me being able to catch these thoughts and not let them overwhelm me so I could actually employ the technique. Addiction is especially tricky because it's like a personality in the way that it expresses itself consistently across different situations. It's actually very fitting to call it demonic possession, because it's a very intelligent personality with sneaky manipulation tactics, clever arguments, rationalizations and emotional harassment. The addictive thoughts will be associated with a vast collection of different outlets, and it takes time to eliminate them all. When you're no longer maintaining the rewarding stimuli through these outlets, the "addiction network" is progressively weakened, but this requires a lot of determination, clever techniques, luck and ideally a transcendent goal as a driving force (in my case meditation itself). I say luck because I also found a particular strain of spirituality which said "drugs no-no!" (although I always knew it was interfering with my meditation) . There are of course parallells between substance addiction and addiction to thoughts/experiences/sensations in general, which is why so many people find it so hard to keep a consistent spiritual practice.

LOL how so? He said he suddenly stopped experiencing self-referential thoughts after 20000 hours of spiritual practice. That is very advanced. You seem to have this idea that enlightenment somehow puts more limits on yourself. It's exactly the opposite: limitations will only be lifted. It's not an animal-like existence at all. You'll be more capable of being human.

I hope you're not mixing up acceleration with velocity, but it's true that the Earth is infact accelerating on its journey around the Sun due to the eliptical shape of the orbit and Kepler's laws of planetary motion. However, the type of acceleration you experience in a gravitational field is not equal to the type of acceleration you experience in an accelerating car. Imagine jumping off a cliff and into a lake. When you're in the air, it simply feels like you're floating, but you're somehow accelerating at a rate of 9.81 m/s^2 towards the lake. It feels nothing like sitting in a car. The acceleration of the earth around the sun is like that: you're in free fall, falling extremely fast, but you don't actually feel it. Exactly how gravity is different from the type of acceleration you experience in normal everyday situations on Earth requires a comprehensive technical grasp of General Relativity which I don't possess. You'll have to read some physicist's explanation of it on Quora or something or make yourself content with my analogies

This a belief. This dude got enlightened and continued running a quarter billion dollar research project with 1000 people working for him like nothing happened: 16:47 He goes into how he stopped experiencing thoughts.

It's without a doubt important to distinguish between direct experience and fabrications, but don't forget that your sense organs are also a type of instrument, in the sense that they're bound by certain mechanical limitations and that they're treated as data collecting devices in a scientific context. Whether or not the data stems from a mechanical or biological instrument, the scientist's job is to find the correct data interpreting instrument, which appears as an abstract pattern in the scientists' own mind. Here is where you'll find the usual critique of science and its arrogant tendencies, in the idea that these abstract interpretative instruments are somehow not subject to the same level of limitations as the "physical" instruments, and that this instrument is somehow something more than a part of the scientist's own limited mind. Here the distinction between direct experience and abstractions becomes important, because the abstract interpretative instruments themselves do not infact exist in direct experience, but instead they're derived and "abstracted out" from it. When it comes to creating a science based on less bad assumptions and that is more in alignment with the actuality of direct experience, that would of course involve deconstructing these discontinued materialistic frameworks and look to alternative ones where maybe pure insights into consciousness take center stage in front of physical instruments. However, once the frameworks have been established, you would still rely on various data collecting instruments to actually do science. Just as much as some theory has to supersede observation, other aspects of theory and observation exist in a dialectical relationship where changes are made along the way.

(Bumping and changing the title to increase the value in the market of attention ).

Are intellectual abstractions meaningless? Doesn't that make your words meaningless? Be careful to not throw the baby out with the bathwater . By describing water as H2O, you can make some predictions that can be validated in your direct experience. For example, you can know something about what makes you experience it as a liquid, a solid or a gas, or how much water your body exhales by burning x amount of sugar, or why it is able to dissolve polar substances like table salt and not non-polar substances like butter etc. Does that mean that science has unlocked "the truth" about water? Absolutely not, but again, there are a few things you can say about water by using the models provided by chemistry, and these things can absolutely be meaningful to your life in a multitude of ways. Being critical of the limits of science is fine as long you know the limits of your criticism

Enlightenment isn't like that. It doesn't make you special. Now go get a job

Be genuinely motivated by what you love, not what you fear.

Omg even atheistic me would ask "but what about abiogenesis?"

Welcome to Stage Green. You're now drowning in relativism, and your job is to construct a life raft and enter Stage Yellow. Your current problem is that you're discovering relativity while still being zoomed in to a partial view, mainly a "me"-centered view, which means your old value structures start to seem faulty and unreliable. You want to gradually zoom out and catch a glimpse of the system view. From that perspective, the relativity becomes more compatible with your lens and is not seen as a problem. It's from the system view that you start to successfully maneuver this new territory that relativity has opened up. Here is what relativism looks like from a system view looks like: Notice the lack of "I" or "me" language.

Big Five is based on something called the adjective lexical approach. You scan the dictionary for words that are associated with a certain personality trait and find the traits based on the words that have the most synonyms, in this case adjectives. For example, "outgoing" would be a synonym for the trait now known as "extroverted". I think it's a very cool method, but it's not without its flaws. When you say "using empiricism", you have to be careful. It's true that they have found a lot of empirical support for the theory, but the traits weren't "found" by simply using empiricism. Empiricism doesn't stand on its own as a methodology. You always start with a specific a priori conceptual framework when building a theory. Empirical studies can be used as a refinement tool, and that is one of the strengths of Big 5.

I have an alternative way of describing the relationship between these two worlds: the materialist's arrogance stems from adopting the neopositivists' wish of eliminating metaphysics while simultaneously sneaking in the metaphysics of science-friendly philosophers (Popper etc.). It's similar to how philosophical theology (Scholasticism) were slowly bred out by dogmatic theology (Lutherianism etc.) during the middle ages. Essentially, what they both have in common is "don't question my metaphysics!" True, but unfortunately it most often does.

LOL. Fortunately, I didn't start posting here regularly since last year. Infact, today it's been exactly one year since I made my first topic EDIT: That means I've been posting 8.2 posts a day. Damn ?

I used to be like that. I cringe every time I run into my old YouTube comments.

@Someone here Is your name actually Socrates?

Red admires itself. To admire Orange, you must be so Blue you're sick of it.

It takes a genius to nudge a discipline away from seductive reductionism, although his Language Acquisition Device model isn't as popular nowadays. The behaviorists were like "this is what actually exists" while the cognitive revolutionists were like "but your models suck". This is one reason why it takes a degree of system awareness to not misunderstand cognitive models, because the behaviorist tendency of wanting to view everything as real/physical is still running strong in people's minds. For example, psychology students will often conflate a cognitive model with a model of the brain. There is an impulse of wanting to assign a physical slot for everything. And of course, nobody understands what a brain model really is either (that is the deeper problem) . When the teacher mentions in passing "remember, we're talking about "neural correlates", it mostly falls on deaf ears.

Yo ego so fat it's like Buddha before he became a yogi. (kill me now )

I believe SD comes in handy here. I'm mainly mentioning psychoanalysis as it laid the groundwork for therapy as a concept (although CBT is a popular and separate tradition). Freud established psychoanalysis within a very Blue framework. His entire intrapsychic structural model of id-ego-supergo is centered around taming egocentric impulses (id — beige-red) by training your ego to mediate between that and your sociocultural conscience (superego — blue). With that as a foundation, therapy was a means for making people well-behaved citizens. The goal was not to make people more happy or self-actualized (happened later with A. Maslow and C. Rogers). This thinking is still a common pathology within the mainstream, although there is hope. We're moving more and more towards an integration with Eastern knowledge (mindfulness etc.), and if anything, my work will be to steer it in that direction (locally of course ).

Is there a goal from an absolute perspective? No. Then what would your goal be as a spiritual teacher; maybe help people to get in contact with the absolute? Well, how does a disregard for human needs help with that? Morality is all about satisfying human needs. Satisfying lower needs directs your attention towards higher needs. Therefore, morality does not contradict the goal of raising consciousness.

True, but that is not what I was asking about

...I'm studying psychology in university