Carl-Richard

Are intellectual abstractions meaningless? Doesn't that make your words meaningless? Be careful to not throw the baby out with the bathwater . By describing water as H2O, you can make some predictions that can be validated in your direct experience. For example, you can know something about what makes you experience it as a liquid, a solid or a gas, or how much water your body exhales by burning x amount of sugar, or why it is able to dissolve polar substances like table salt and not non-polar substances like butter etc. Does that mean that science has unlocked "the truth" about water? Absolutely not, but again, there are a few things you can say about water by using the models provided by chemistry, and these things can absolutely be meaningful to your life in a multitude of ways. Being critical of the limits of science is fine as long you know the limits of your criticism

Enlightenment isn't like that. It doesn't make you special. Now go get a job

Be genuinely motivated by what you love, not what you fear.

Omg even atheistic me would ask "but what about abiogenesis?"

Welcome to Stage Green. You're now drowning in relativism, and your job is to construct a life raft and enter Stage Yellow. Your current problem is that you're discovering relativity while still being zoomed in to a partial view, mainly a "me"-centered view, which means your old value structures start to seem faulty and unreliable. You want to gradually zoom out and catch a glimpse of the system view. From that perspective, the relativity becomes more compatible with your lens and is not seen as a problem. It's from the system view that you start to successfully maneuver this new territory that relativity has opened up. Here is what relativism looks like from a system view looks like: Notice the lack of "I" or "me" language.

Big Five is based on something called the adjective lexical approach. You scan the dictionary for words that are associated with a certain personality trait and find the traits based on the words that have the most synonyms, in this case adjectives. For example, "outgoing" would be a synonym for the trait now known as "extroverted". I think it's a very cool method, but it's not without its flaws. When you say "using empiricism", you have to be careful. It's true that they have found a lot of empirical support for the theory, but the traits weren't "found" by simply using empiricism. Empiricism doesn't stand on its own as a methodology. You always start with a specific a priori conceptual framework when building a theory. Empirical studies can be used as a refinement tool, and that is one of the strengths of Big 5.

I have an alternative way of describing the relationship between these two worlds: the materialist's arrogance stems from adopting the neopositivists' wish of eliminating metaphysics while simultaneously sneaking in the metaphysics of science-friendly philosophers (Popper etc.). It's similar to how philosophical theology (Scholasticism) were slowly bred out by dogmatic theology (Lutherianism etc.) during the middle ages. Essentially, what they both have in common is "don't question my metaphysics!" True, but unfortunately it most often does.

LOL. Fortunately, I didn't start posting here regularly since last year. Infact, today it's been exactly one year since I made my first topic EDIT: That means I've been posting 8.2 posts a day. Damn ?

I used to be like that. I cringe every time I run into my old YouTube comments.

@Someone here Is your name actually Socrates?

Red admires itself. To admire Orange, you must be so Blue you're sick of it.

It takes a genius to nudge a discipline away from seductive reductionism, although his Language Acquisition Device model isn't as popular nowadays. The behaviorists were like "this is what actually exists" while the cognitive revolutionists were like "but your models suck". This is one reason why it takes a degree of system awareness to not misunderstand cognitive models, because the behaviorist tendency of wanting to view everything as real/physical is still running strong in people's minds. For example, psychology students will often conflate a cognitive model with a model of the brain. There is an impulse of wanting to assign a physical slot for everything. And of course, nobody understands what a brain model really is either (that is the deeper problem) . When the teacher mentions in passing "remember, we're talking about "neural correlates", it mostly falls on deaf ears.

Yo ego so fat it's like Buddha before he became a yogi. (kill me now )

I believe SD comes in handy here. I'm mainly mentioning psychoanalysis as it laid the groundwork for therapy as a concept (although CBT is a popular and separate tradition). Freud established psychoanalysis within a very Blue framework. His entire intrapsychic structural model of id-ego-supergo is centered around taming egocentric impulses (id — beige-red) by training your ego to mediate between that and your sociocultural conscience (superego — blue). With that as a foundation, therapy was a means for making people well-behaved citizens. The goal was not to make people more happy or self-actualized (happened later with A. Maslow and C. Rogers). This thinking is still a common pathology within the mainstream, although there is hope. We're moving more and more towards an integration with Eastern knowledge (mindfulness etc.), and if anything, my work will be to steer it in that direction (locally of course ).

Is there a goal from an absolute perspective? No. Then what would your goal be as a spiritual teacher; maybe help people to get in contact with the absolute? Well, how does a disregard for human needs help with that? Morality is all about satisfying human needs. Satisfying lower needs directs your attention towards higher needs. Therefore, morality does not contradict the goal of raising consciousness.

True, but that is not what I was asking about

...I'm studying psychology in university

If you can't rely on yourself to make that judgement, are there really any other options? It's in some ways easier to pinpoint what stage someone else is at than yourself. You don't have to be told it directly, but you can take a hint.

What do you mean exactly?

Psychopaths and pedophiles existed before they were formally defined by any psychiatric diagnostic manual, and society dealt with them accordingly, albeit with less understanding and compassion. It's also not a crime to be any of those things unless you do something to break the law. Psychologists don't catch predators — the law does

That was going on way before psychology existed My exact thoughts. This is why spirituality exists and why it's a separate field. When a celebrated clinical psychologist has been suffering with depression, anxiety and existential dread all his life, it makes you question the value of the field.

People will tell you.

It's not about you. It's about the question you're asking . Clarifying what experiences you've had can help give more insight into the question.

"Weird" experiences? Not "oh my god I'm fucking dying" experiences?