Carl-Richard

How do you walk something that heavy?

I believe Terrence wasn't primarily talking about non-duality but more general existential insights. He was very left-brained in many respects. There is also a distinction between talking about non-duality and experiencing it. Don't underestimate the role that luck plays in getting exposed to the right culture and being able to conceptualize it properly. It's also not really about being smart either. It requires first and foremost spiritual intelligence. Non-duality in its most basic form isn't that difficult to understand conceptually (if such a thing is even possible). It's infact too simple that people over-intellectualize it and look past it. I mean there have been illiterate non-dual people all throughout history.

I swear there is like an universal internet law that whenever you mention the words "smart" or "IQ", you'll start to see the opposite of those things as the conversation progresses

Yeah duh! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_system People tend to get the idea that Tier 2 is just a way your mind operates. Oh no - there is an entire field of study out there that resonates at that frequency. In that sense, doing the work can mean either 1. actually study complex systems or 2. do self-improvement. Both are useful, both are hard. My point is don't expect too much from an open forum

I believe sophistry became a naughty word in part because Socrates and Plato feared the sophists and their ethical relativism. In that sense, there is a lot of sophistry on this forum

There ain't gonna be no "we" unless you have some spectacular plan you haven't revealed yet. Leading by example ain't gonna cut it. Why limit yourself to just ego developmental theory? Why not start using all the jargon from all the subfields of complex systems theory? That would truly be a tier two practice But you ain't gonna do the work and neither will other people.

A big reason why many people doubt the existence of psychic powers is due to the fact that you can earn one million dollars if you're able to demonstrate it under a set of experimental conditions (James Randi's challenge) and so far nobody has been able to complete it. Is this really a good reason to say that psychic powers don't exist? Now, what I'm going to claim is that you don't have to go outside the paradigm of conventional scientific methodology in order to understand why this doesn't necessarily have to be the case. When it comes to observing behavior in a scientific context, there is a distinction between observing a phenomena in its organic environment and observing it in an experimental situation. This is a huge methodological issue in fields like social psychology. In the experimental approach, you create an artificial environment where you can isolate different causal factors, but you can never be sure if you've demonstrated a causal relationship outside of that artificial environment. This is especially true when you're dealing with complex things like mental phenomenas and social dynamics. There are many reasons to believe that the functioning of subtle behaviors like psychic powers are highly sensitive to specific conditions, both in the external environment and within the psychic's own mind. It's a well-established fact that once you put a person in an experimental setting, you're impacting the normal functioning of that person. Therefore, the inverse of the statement in the previous paragraph is also true: just because you can't demonstrate a causal relationship in an experimental environment does not mean it cannot exist outside of that environment. If you're still in doubt, you can also venture a bit outside the realm of conventional thought and more into the spiritual realm (this is also just based on my opinion). I think that psychic powers work similarily to how more normal intuitional insights seem to work, in the sense that from the perspective of the person having them, it doesn't feel like "you" created the intuition, but rather that it simply "came to you". It's like this piece of information you were given is not really just about you specifically, but that it's a part of something greater than yourself. You can also describe this as a plan, a natural unfolding, the creative evolutionary impulse of the universe, or God. From this perspective, trying to prove the existence of psychic powers in an experiment for you to win a million dollars seems rather silly. Why should the universe care about you doing that? In what way is that a part of the plan? I also think that once your intention is to further your own survival through these lower motivational forces (recognition, fame, greed), this naturally closes you off to these higher intuitional domains. When you're operating from these lower aspects, you're messing with your connection to the greater flow of the universe. Just imagine the difference between a mind that is at ease with itself and a mind that is fuelled by egoic desire. These more subtle aspects aren't allowed to bubble up if your mind is constantly filled with all this noise from impulsive thoughts, desires and fears. Let me know what you think. I would appreciate if you could primarily talk about your personal experiences rather than some belief you have. Have you ever experienced psychic powers or any subtle intuitional experiences? Please share

What - are you some kind of social engineer? What are your motives?

Why haven't you updated your vocabulary to complex systems theory? You only want to talk with yourself?

A bit off topic, but are you a native Spanish speaker?

Why is this bad? What if this is what you need?

This is a warning sign. Don't be surprised if you end up an addict. I'm talking from experience. You calling ketamine a "low hedonistic drug" tells me that you know very little about drugs

But bliss is still you.

High information flow comes with the cost of low accessibility. So he is strategic in some ways but less in others.

Why do you think that?

Isn't LSD = heroin?

"There is only one you" yet he says it's not him.

Take the individual and trace their life back to when they were just a child. At which point along that line did they become a responsible adult deserving of judgement?

Firstly, causality is an iffy term in neuroscience. The term "neural correlates" is preferred. Even then, sure, it's not very straightforward. Regardless, the methodological issues around neuroscience and how it relates to more general epistemological problems (hard problem of consciousness, mind-matter causality, physical/non-physical interactions, qualia vs. brain states) is a separate issue. I was talking from within that framework, not from some meta-perspective. I think you misunderstand what I mean by top-down vs. bottom up. Let's take visual perception: light hits photosensitive pigments in the retina, they break and form a neurotransmitter that binds to a receptor. This creates an action potential that travels along afferent neurons that end up in the visual cortex which creates the experience of vision (very simplified). This explanation is reductionistic and "bottom-up" (from one type of receptor and to the brain). Your starting point is one unit and your end point is more complex. Notice how this single transmitter-receptor-nerve complex is similar to the "mystical experience = endogenous DMT" idea. After all, what is DMT but a neurotransmitter that binds to a receptor? Now, the top-down explanation explains the visual perception as not exclusively being a result of activity coming from the lower levels ("bottom"; transmitter-receptor-nerve) but that the information from the lower levels is somehow modified which then produce the finished product. In other words, you can't say that just this receptor or this nerve brought about the perception (one unit), but rather that it's a result of a large network of neural connections working together (many units), hence Default Mode Network. The top-down/bottom-up distinction is used in psychology to explain things like the impact of memory and individual experience on perception: context-dependent recognition of objects, monocular cues in depth perception etc.. You can also look at different cultures and predict perceptual differences: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Müller-Lyer_illusion These effects are again explained using the top-down model. It's not like the amount of stimuli from the retina is somehow different across different cultures (which would instead warrant a bottom-up description). The differences are not found on the level of transmitter-receptor-nerve. My critique of the bottom-up model is primarily on the grounds of it being reductionistic and that it alone will most likely not lead to a comprehensive view of the phenomena. You'll either way gain more on taking a larger perspective. In other words, saying that mysticism = endogenous DMT is not necessarily a good model.

No.

Yesterday we had a guest lecturer, a psychosis specialist. To sum up, it was a psychotic person trying to teach a bunch of psychotic people about psychosis

This is so true. After all, my first post on this forum was about me freaking out after experiencing the dissolution of myself and asking for advice about how to make it stop, and while it wasn't my intention (atleast initially), these more intellectual ideas turned into a way of distracting myself from that

Yeah. I can't do much but be fascinated

What is so cool about Daniel is his strategic approach to language. He has incorporated so many systemic words into his vocabulary that he always speaks at a very high level of generalizability without losing information density. It's the art of making broad statements without becoming too vague. Infact, in a weird way you're being more accurate by using those types of generalizations, because it saves you from needing to perform long deductions where you otherwise increase the risk of running into more ambiguous words. Systemic words contain the crux of a wide range of concrete things. It doesn't make you immune to having to elaborate, but it's still a very effective way of communicating. Some of the terms make intuitive sense, but some are also taken from literature which can sometimes make it hard to follow. Here a few of examples from only a couple of Daniel's sentences: Game-theoretic, catastrophe weapons, planetary boundaries, confidence margin, generator functions, collective action problem, local optimums, global minimums, multi-polar traps, fully globalized exponential tech etc..