Carl-Richard

But are there any immediate ways of knowing if you're getting damaged other than the damage itself? I'm asking because as far as I know, the retina contains no pain receptors.

How do you know you're not damaging your eyes?

Meditate your ass off and then don't even bother thinking about it for the rest of the day.

Top positions have high attention trade-offs. You have a limited amount of attention, and getting to the top of a field requires deep specialization, which means prioritizing one thing over another and narrowing your focus. In other words, attention trade-offs generally skew towards analysis and away from holism. Another example would be career scientists. They've invested so much time and attention into looking very closely at some very particular details (analysis) that they lose the big picture view (holism; metaphysics, epistemology). High consciousness and spirituality is fundamentally holistic.

Oh no you did not just do that . Are you really this good at puns or is it just all in my mind?

You have no original thoughts. Change my mind

This guy talks about what it's like to "lose your mind" while having to do important work (spoiler: nothing happens ):

Almost 1 year ago I decided to give up searching for enlightenment because I realized I wasn't ready for it. Ever since that day, I've been forced into a state of no-mind every single waking moment of my life, and I've been fighting it with all my might, because I fear it. Effectively, I'm actively trying to re-ignite my mind everytime it disappears for too long. So in that sense, I would have to answer no, but in another sense, I don't doubt that it's possible, because if I just relax and go about my day, sooner or later no-mind happens. It also happens at times where I would otherwise expect my mind to be active (for instance during a written exam or when I'm reading a book), but even then, my mind can suddenly disappear and whatever I'm doing just happens on autopilot. I've also heard Sadhguru talk about that sometimes he can go weeks without one single thought entering his mind. Regardless, I don't see the problem either way as long as you're doing the work, with thoughts or without thoughts, as long as you're being true to what "is".

I'm sorry but this reminds me just too much of one line in this song: "Relax, turn around and take my hand" (hand meaning fist)

No need to transcend the mind if there is no mind in the first place

Keep meditating and no-mind will become your default state. No need to "be present". It will unfold naturally and you don't have to worry about thinking or not

Integration of no-thinking state into practical life is what I've been talking about all the time.

You can only know one thing. You can think a lot of things

Intellect is a thought. Knowing is not a thought. Knowing is.

Thinking can be useful. However, worry only happens within the mind. When there is no mind, there is no worry

Psychedelics bring you there because infinite consciousness made it so. It's infinite, so it must necessarily be that way atleast one place within itself. Some other place in infinite consciousness, you eating a flower makes you realize infinite consciousness. Some other place, you not eating a flower makes you realize it.

There is only one substance. The fact that you are aware could only mean that this substance is consciousness. If there is only one substance, there are no other substances that can limit it, and therefore it has to be infinite => infinite consciousness!

I think you're the one in denial if you know there is nothing to worry about but worrying is still happening You think there is nothing to worry about, and you worry because you think

Come again?

When there is no mind there is not even a you doing anything, so why worry?

How to kill your soul^

Nobody truly starts from scratch though LOL

So basically the Cartesian method (analysis -> "certainty" -> synthesis), a.k.a modern mainstream thought I personally wouldn't call it 1st principle thinking, because apparently there are many types of so-called 1st principles.

What's that?

Look at the example I gave about people from different cultures perceiving different things. How come that given the same picture, the same type of light hitting the retina, which triggers the same amount of receptors of the same type, leading to the same neural signals being sent to the brain; how come that there still happens to be a perceptual difference in different people? The top-down answer is that the people from the same culture draw upon the same types of stored information in the long-term memory because of similar experiences, and that this information which comes from the "upper levels" (cortex) somehow modulates the raw sensory information coming from the "lower levels" (sensory apparatus). There is no bottom-up answer that can explain the perceptual difference. That would be just one concrete example. My point is that this distinction applies more generally aswell. In general, the bottom-up approach looks at the start of just one kind of signalling cascade and says "Look here! It all started here with the receptor binding a transmitter substance!" while the top-down approach says "well hold on, there is a lot more going on here!". One perspective is analytic and reductionistic, and the other is holistic and systemic. Some of your confusion may stem from the fact that there is some overlap, because "bottom" is connected to "down" and "top" is connected to "up". That is not a problem. The problem is that bottom-up alone is inherently an exclusionary approach because of its tendency towards reductionism. You ideally want a synthesis of the two. I have no problem if you want to say "it's DMT and...". Top-down recognizes that there isn't just one type of one type of transmitter or one type of receptor at play. There are infact many, and they all interact with eachother in complex ways. That is also just one level of analysis (transmitter-receptor level; ligand-binding). There is a myriad of different phenomenas going on: networks, pathways, homeostasis, adaptation, feedback loops, emergence etc.. Research done on The Default Mode Network is just one example of a top-down, relatively holistic approach. I say relatively, because realize that all of this is still constrained within a fundamentally broken materialist paradigm that is reductionistic in its own twisted ways, but again that is a separate discussion.