Carl-Richard

No U! There is no past. There is only the present moment. "The present moment" is an invocation of non-duality. That is why Eckhart Tolle talks about it all the time. What you're talking about is the duality of past&present, which is only accessible through thought. The non-dual "present moment" is before and beyond thought.

WHAT???

...will you guess what I'm going to say? Relative/absolute conflation. (I marked "A" and "R" to indicate which is the absolute and relative statement). In other words, it's not a paradox <3

It's not a moment. It's the moment. One, not two

What slips is your illusory grip on a finite object. The present moment is always there.

This may be a case of the pre-trans fallacy. When a stage Blue Christian talks about God, his concept of God is very different to the mystical God encountered in deep spiritual experiences. So when a stage Orange person has one of these experiences, he may not realize this distinction and think that the bible thumping Christians are actually onto something, while in reality they're dealing with a dogmatic paradigm and not a mystical paradigm.

?

@Loving Radiance Feels like zoning out on some psychedelic visuals.

I bet you think that is interesting

Oh I'm sorry, I was talking about seeing patterns and faces in objects when talking about positive symptoms. The song thing is just a sign of having an immersive imagination, but then of course it has to be said that these things are linked (although not necessarily the same). You could say that the positive schizophrenia symptoms is just when your imagination gets out of hand. Like schizophrenia, imagination exists on a spectrum, and reality is a dance on that spectrum.

I managed to do that when I was very high on weed once. Fun times. According to your descriptions, those do indeed sound like they fall in the category of the so-called "positive symptoms" of schizophrenia, which with enough number and regularity, could qualify as a diagnosis. Now, I'm wasn't trying to out-do your doctor or anything stupid like that ? (simply curious). It's interesting how "spectrumy" these conditions can be.

While it's possible that you have a higher level of physiological activation than the average person, this has to eventually interact with the worrying component in order to express itself as anxiety. The physiological activation also makes you more able to experience blissful states (like flow states), but you just need the correct cognitive-emotional context, and meditation is one way to get there. In the study I mentioned earlier, worrying inhibits flow, but the physiological component actually promotes flow. From this perspective, the non-dual state allows for a perpetual state of flow with a refined, stable and relatively low level of activation due to 0 worrying. Flow then becomes associated with baseline physiology rather than arousal. In that sense, flow is the natural state of an uncluttered mind.

Just be, my friend

Firstly, it's not that simple, though I will say they're not the same. However, you have to continue reading to know why that is and what that even means in the first place. In psychology, there are a couple of useful distinctions: phenomenology, cognitive models and neurophysiological models. The experience of what it's like to have a mind is what phenomenology is concerned about (how thoughts, feelings, sensations appear to you as you're having them). Thoughts, feelings, sensations; any phenomena that is arising and that you can experience is also called "mental representations" ("representations" because they represent the external world internally, inside your mind). This is the experiential approach to the mind. (I won't have to give an example of phenomenology because you already have direct access to it.) Cognitive models describe the mind as a "way" that mental representations are structured and predict how they unfold given certain conditions. I call it a "way" because it's not a physical structure like the brain. When you look at a cognitive model, you're not looking at a "thing" per se. It's more accurate to say that you're looking at a process. This is the cognitive approach to the mind. Here is an example of a cognitive model of working memory: Neurophysiological models describe the brain. Cognitive neuroscience then uses these models similarly to cognitive models to predict how mental representations unfold (which may include actual cognitive models as well), but the difference is that they point to something physical (the brain) as a mediating mechanism. In this case, the mind becomes grounded in something external. Although you can only make correlations between mental representations and brain states, there are still different claims of different degrees of "causality" of this mechanism based on various experiments. Here is an example of a neurophysiological model and how it relates to a cognitive model of the working memory: An important take away here is that when we're talking about the brain and the mind, as long as we're not talking about direct experience of mental representations (phenomenology), we're talking about models. Models are not the real thing. They are merely descriptions. When you're looking at cognitive models, you're not actually looking at the process itself. You're looking at a description of it. Likewise, when you're looking at neurophysiological models, you're not actually looking at the brain (only a description of it). It's also important to not equate cognitive processes to mental experiences or to brain states. They are separate things (related? – maybe). So if we take that last point into account, then the mind and the brain are not the same "thing", but depending on your perspective, they're not even "things".

Is this an unavoidable part of the journey? I don't want to do that to them, not with what I've already put them through.

They can be both, but ad hominems are often directly addressing some personal quality which deviates from the content of the discussion. For example, if you said that you think math is often portayed as more useful than it truly is, an ad hominem answer to that could be "you think that because you're stupid". Ad hominem is essentially when you turn an initially impersonal discussion into a personal matter when it isn't warranted or appropriate.

@TheDao Your entire existence on this forum consists of straws as far as I'm concerned ?

Strawman: you can't defeat the person's actual positions so you make a simplified caricature out of them that are easy to defeat. Steelman: the opposite of that.

Actually same ?

What symptoms do you have then? There are many so-called "schizofreniform" conditions and schizophrenia is only one of them. Although it's technically possible to be diagnosed with schizophrenia without specifically hearing voices, in that case it's much more likely that you would be diagnosed with something like schizotypal personality disorder (but I don't know what your doctor told you).

The sympathetic nervous system that is associated with anxiety is also activated during sexual arousal and highly pleasant emotions.

Nobody really knows what is going on in general. People will still speak their mind, always, even if their minds reside inside a peanut-sized skull.

I read in a book about cognitive science that consistent meditation increases things like executive functioning (selective working memory a.k.a mental focus), and the effect is mediated by a reduction in unwanted thoughts (worrying). Anxiety has a worrying component (cognitive) and an arousal component (physiological) which interact with eachother, so meditation can certainly help with anxiety.

My dad has bipolar type I and my mom is a hyper-conscientious neurotic. Makes for an interesting mix ?

Consistency.