Carl-Richard

To expand on my previous response, being sober is something that can be refined and mastered, in the sense that the benefits you get from it puts you off wanting to take any mind-altering substances. This idea goes hand-in-hand with physical health, emotional mastery and spiritual growth. The overarching concepts that unites these three realms are "vitality" and "resilience", or "internal regulatory capacity": your ability to tackle stress and control your internal and external environment. This is the goal of all therapy, all psychedelic drugs, all meditation. Hedonic drugs are external regulators, and once you get dependent on them, you ride the hedonic-adaptive slide all the way to the bottom until you discontinue use either voluntarily or by force, either intermittently ("tolerance break") or permanently (when you overdose on heroin at 27). How severe this process is depends on your internal regulatory capacity, which is controlled by the amount of trauma you have, your genes, your cognitive-emotional style etc. To maximize regulatory capacity means to heal trauma, recognize your genetic predispositions and learning healthy cognitive-emotional regulative patterns, i.e. physical health, emotional mastery and spiritual growth. Once your vitality and resilience is maximized, you're turned off by any type of non-essential external regulators, because your internal state allows for a much more refined state of consciousness (more meaningful, more resourceful, more blissful). Hedonic bliss is not the same as existential bliss, at least not in the long run. One is self-contained, self-improving and organic, the other is dependent, degenerative and synthetic.

Based on what you're saying, unless you're microdosing the stuff, I don't see how you're not constantly high. I'm saying this as an ex-stoner who has had both his mind completely deleted from it on multiple occasions and has used it merely as a morning coffee. The difference comes from how often you use it (or maybe people are just extremely different).

If you're approaching cannabis like a nootropic, you're underestimating the depths of sobriety.

There is a recontexualization from "what do I want or need?" to "what does the world want or need?" These two are not necessarily incompatible, but your perception of both also evolves over time. However way you choose look at it, when it comes to creating and providing, you probably want to balance your personal strengths and your higher vision. Maybe this conversation could give some insight into the dyadic split that is going on in your mind: Notice how Allan Wallace has studied both physics and Buddhism, and that his vision is to create a rigorous scientific study of consciousness using introspection as a methodology (Santa Barbara Institute for Consciousness Studies). He is playing on his strengths: marrying his technical side and his higher self, which means he isn't dismissing ordinary physics or scientific methodology, but is simply looking to expand (modern science is not very friendly to introspection). If my say is worth anything, this kind of thinking is what drives my study of psychology. I want that synthesis of science and mysticism. In my view, "science" and "not science" is not as much of a dilemma as a challenge.

They're babushka dolls

You could say that cults display totalitarian tendencies, so just a large scale version of that. Still, the article has a lot of square peg action going on (forcefully jamming things into categories, primarily hypotheticals). A global mean Green will most likely never be a mean Red.

Why are you assuming this?

"Be inclusive. If you're not, we'll exclude you."

With that said, I'm not trying to undermine the dark side of the New Age. I've been inside that world myself. Totalitarianism married with relativism is a two-headed beast.

I understand the point, but I think this observation is less about New Age and more about ideology in general. All ideologies do this: 1. they are corrupted by power hungry egos, and 2. they touch people at the deepest levels of their existence. Western ideologies (modernism) are more similar to each other than the New Age (which stems more from the East). It's simply a matter of contrast. In other words, New Age is not necessarily more epistemologically infectious than other ideologies, but rather it sticks out in comparison to the relative homogeneity of the Western worldview. We can instead reformulate the question and say that the Western worldview contains something which we would like to conserve (which is what metamodernism is about) and that a New Age religious uprising could endanger that project. I think this is the real drive behind Hanzi wanting to compare New Age to things like communism and fascism, because it highlights what is under threat, namely modernist values (democracy, progress, rationality).

The teachings in the Vedas were also orally passed down.

New Age religion has the same problems as old religion, but spirituality has always been an individualistic pursuit. It's your job to get it, not to throw some book in someone else's face.

Meditation changes your thinking in a positive direction.

@Bernardo Carleial Good video

? Happy holidays!

@Natasha "They're minerals, Marie!"

It has been said once already, but it bears repeating: you severely misunderstand the point of spirituality if you use it to justify evil actions.

Humans who want to live with other humans should probably learn to consider the preferences of other humans. It's not an absolute "should", it's a relative "if-should."

You're getting hung up on word games. Spirituality has nothing to do about harming other people. "Evil and good are not absolutes" refers to the fact that different moral frameworks are made by different people with different preferences. This doesn't mean that we're generally clueless about how to treat each other, but it's nevertheless not so easy to argue that any one of these moral frameworks are somehow absolute or universal.

Evil and good are usually not the same. Most people define them differently based on personal preferences. Ah, so you're asking me about my personal preferences. Nothing new there

Thanks! Sort of Thank you! If you're staying in psychology, you'll most likely run into some systems thinking sooner or later (some sub-fields are more explicit about it than others). So my advice is to stay curious and wait for the right curriculum It's very helpful in itself to just be aware of the fact that systems thinking is a thing when you come across it in some of your books, because that makes the reading so much more interesting. Other than that, I suggest checking out "The Systems View of Life" by Fritjof Capra and Pier Luigi Luisi. It's a very comprehensive summary of everything about systems thinking: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Systems-View-Life-Unifying-Vision/dp/1316616436

The three main facets might be simple to grasp intuitively, but to really embody them is far from simple. The mature systems view is without a doubt highly academic. This post was simply an overview. https://www.amazon.co.uk/Systems-View-Life-Unifying-Vision/dp/1316616436 Thank you!

JP presents concepts from Gestalt psychology and cognitive psychology that deal with perceptual structures, which relates to aspects of construct awareness.

If you act in accordance to your belief, then that is kinda pushing it less in your favor, making it more unknown, higher risk.