Carl-Richard

If you understand what is meant by suffering and what is meant by desire, it makes perfect sense. My first ever trip was a lesson in The Four Noble truths. I'll try to rephrase it for you: 1. You're never satisfied. 2. You always try to gain satisfaction. 3. Satisfaction is attained by letting go of the need to gain satisfaction. 4. Spirituality is the path to letting go of the need to gain satisfaction.

Brilliant.

Somehow they managed to make it sound even spookier than the original ?

I'm not denying that animals or children or autistic people may have a vastly different experience of reality than "normal" people, and that this state may be devoid of many of the kinds of thought-laden suffering that the majority of humans experience. However, historically and pragmatically speaking, enlightenment is a term created by "normal" people in order to describe a level of attainment or a process, namely the human experience of self-transcendence. When you take a term that is so tightly meshed together with a specific context and start separating it from that context, it kinda starts losing its meaning. After all, when you're thinking about "enlightened people", you're thinking about humans.

It could be a case of the pre/post fallacy in a broad sense. People think the same about animals and small children. They conflate the lack of presence of the thought faculty with the lack of thought-identification. I think the term enlightenment deals with a transformation from a thought-identified state to a non-identified state. If there didn't exist the capacity of thought-identification in the first place, it doesn't make much sense to call it an enlightened state. Enlightened people are very capable of deep thought. They might not either experience thoughts the same way as a thought-identified person, or they may lack the first-person experience of it all together. Regardless, they do indeed express the behavior associated with having a thought faculty. Small children and advanced animals are also capable of a degree of cognitive activity that may be classified as thought, and some may even be capable of creating a self-concept and thus identification. So even there, it may not necessarily be the case that they would qualify as existing in a state free of the drama of thoughts.

Orange stomping on Blue while Green is watching:

I'm the third person who thinks God is everything but is too afraid to fully commit to that reality.

There is this girl at work who has a certain energy that makes me think about this. Like, what past lives lead to her to become like this? Maybe I'm just fooling myself because of her Indian ethnicity

So powerful! Every time I'm at the gym and about to do a heavy set, I imagine that I'm Eric Bugenhagen and it makes me 50% stronger

i.e. it's all Love.

Accepting the truth goes against all survival instincts. Survival is about fighting the inevitable. You don't accept the truth before your final dying breath. That is why the Buddha had to literally starve himself to death to realize the truth. And the truth is that you never die. Humans are not mere creatures of flesh and blood. Humans are a collection of survival drives. Awakening is merely an insight into the mechanics of these drives and their illusory nature. These drives go deep, deeper than you can imagine with your finite survival brain.

It's all Love when you realize that. Before you realize that, survival is obfuscating it by creating separation.

It was what lead to the insight of the middle way ‐ that extreme deprivation was yet another survival drive. He didn't actually have his final dying breath while fasting. That was only when he finally awakened

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiral_Dynamics

@Husseinisdoingfine Ah, I remember that one. Tbh, the video I just posted is almost a better example of Blue, because it doesn't even give a formal definition of what distinguishes pseudoscience from science, and he never explained how each example he mentioned relates to such a definition. He simply stated a list of dogmas.

Super dry, Orange sawdust straight from the Sahara.

?

Imagine what life would be like if all of it disappeared.

This is real life. Nothing unexpected. I had suicidal thoughts before I found Actualized.org, and it saved my life.

Herein lies your problem. 1. Life is where happiness is experienced. 2. Spirituality should not be used as a source of happiness. Avoiding life, no matter how painful, will only lead to more suffering. Therefore it is crucial that you either get help to deal with life from somebody with the right experience, or that you drop spirituality and choose life. Life comes first, always. Without life, there is no spirituality.

This freaked me out.

I strongly agree. Ever since I read about Hegel (which was rather recently), I started to see SD and its offspring as a form of Hegelian developmental psychology, in the sense that it highlights the dialectical movements as an intrapersonal process (within the individual) and not just as an interpersonal or collective process.

That's true. The same applies to historical events, ideologies and sociopolitical movements. For instance, people often like to label Ancient Greece and the like as Orange. They might not appreciate the extent to which the philosophical and scientific advancements in the early and late Antiquity and Middle ages were tightly interwoven with religious and mystical schools of thought.

Even within the original SD framework, this is not true. Your center of gravity can lay between two stages, marked by e.g. either BLUE/Orange or Blue/ORANGE depending on your advancement. This in the SD book. In SDi, this is mostly only true for the spiritual line of development, but this insight shouldn't impede one's vision of a better future. That would be to conflate the Absolute and the relative. In the original SD, turquoise has actually nothing to do with spiritual awakening. Holism as a concept is not completely synonymous with spirituality. Look up Rally For Rivers, Cauvery Calling, Project GreenHands etc. Even if Sadhguru is highly enlightened, he is obviously taking it seriously.

This idea is taken directly from Ken Wilber, who collaborated with Don Beck to create Spiral Dynamics Integral (SDi), which is a far superior framework than SD on its own. I often use "SD" to refer to SDi. Wilber makes the distinction between levels and lines of development, and he does this based on empirical data: