Carl-Richard

I think talking to many women as friends helps to understand that the women you're talking about in the thread are mostly a sub-section of women, and that if you talk to men, you find a similar sub-section mirroring them. I don't have many female friends per se, but I have been in psychology for many years which is dominated by women, and you inevitably have to talk to them 😝

I'm saying death doesn't grant you lasting awakening, because you quickly go back to sleep again (granting reincarnation, which we are already granting, because life is you reincarnating moment to moment). I would claim everybody has had small moments of awakening, but they quickly go back to sleep, so it mostly doesn't even register. The profound moments of awakening are those that last a bit longer and that cause a kind of transformation or shift in perspective and an opening to what is possible. The "awakening" at death is similarly only a relatively small one, and it will quickly end. If you want lasting awakening (enlightenment), you have to aim at it, be it before death or after death.

Text no sense makey.

Truth is being revealed to you right now, but you go back to sleep, same as will happen at your death.

@OBEler Do you have many female friends?

The best description I've heard for enlightenment is becoming lucid within the dream. The dream doesn't disappear, your body doesn't disappear, your mind ultimately doesn't disappear, but you simply wake up within the dream, and the dream keeps going. Waking up is realizing that the dream character you thought you were, and the reality you thought were real, was an illusion, a kind of story, an intoxication. The only thing that is real is the dreamer. The dreamer is infinite being, creating the dream and the characters within it. And waking up from the dream, while continuing to dream, that is what the enlightened person is doing.

Damn it, it was Wittgenstein, not Heidegger. Wrong German-speaking philosopher. Language got me there, heh. Maybe because I'm not fluent in Western philosophy, or German 🫠 That's what I think when I think about how Wittgenstein's use of the word "language game" means something quite different to how I use the word 🥵 That's itself a language game (in my use of the word) 🥵🥵 😏 👉

I recently talked to a friend who studies philosophy and he started talking about the famous Liar Paradox: "this sentence is false". I replied saying there is a conflict between the context and the "text", in that we assume that sentences are to be taken as "true" when interpreting them (the context), but when the content of the sentence conflicts with that assumption, an apparent paradox is created. Then he started talking about Heidegger's concept of "language games" (e.g. "pen!" meaning something different depending on what action it's referring to, or what game or context it's happening within).

How OP described women (some of it), is how I would describe "normie women". But you also have normie men: they mostly talk about sports, their job, taxes, videogames, movies, things like that. Even there, we could say the men have a slightly higher "NFC", as they're mostly talking about "stuff" (and how stuff works, which is more abstract) rather than relationships (and usually their own, which is more concrete). But the stuff they're talking about is not very "high openness" stuff. And you can very quickly make talking about relationships a highly cognitive endeavor.

My mom is very open and curious and can talk with me about intellectual as well as spiritual things, be it medicine, brain science, meditation, and just random shit my mind throws out. She is also very feminine, very caring, loving, cares about people. My mom's husband, is extremely masculine; he gets shit done, he says things as they are, he is immensely forward-driving; but he has seemingly zero interest for the things I mentioned above. He literally said one time (a bit lowkey) when we were talking about random stuff at dinner, "what use does this have?". What you're referring to is openness to experience. I've never heard openness being described as a mostly male trait. To the contrary.

No, that's called ego backlash 😁

Yas. But even in liberation, there is refinement, in terms of outward behaviors. That's where the different karmas come in (and the difference between enlightened jerks and saints). And you of course have ending bodily incarnations which is a different kind of liberation. Liberation in this life is "jivan mukti". Liberation from all life is a step up. Compulsive thoughts about yourself virtually disappear. I gave the caveat with 5%, because Gary Weber reports those thoughts booting up again when his blood sugar drops. But he reports being able to use thoughts for problemsolving. But even there, he talks about a lessening of thoughts (he gives the rider and the elephant analogy; that most thoughts about problemsolving is like a secretary reporting what is happening, but the real action happens underneath, and often you don't need that reporting for problemsolving).

First time I meditated and thought I was going to disappear forever and never come back, that was an awakening. Then I kept chasing that state all I could, until it happened again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again. Does that look like liberation? No. But it was many awakenings. Awake and liberated: Sadhguru. He talks about having the awakening experience and then it happening again and again and again, until it stabilized and he became the awakening experience. Rupert Spira. He talks about the "moth and the flame" analogy. He talks about at some point he was just tired of going in and out. Then he stabilized. Gary Weber. He spent 20 000 hours practicing yoga and meditation, speaking about "always meditating until you got the mystical experience, like a carrot or reward for the session". Then at one point, he came out of a yoga posture and his thoughts just stopped. He went to a meeting without any thoughts and has since remarked (paraphrasing) "you would think somebody would notice, like there is a halo around your head or something, that shows there is nothing going on in there", but nobody noticed. It remained that way since then.

So no. 👍

These are the things that are keeping me from being enlightened, based on direct subjective experience.

If you eat banana with your blueberries, you can inhibit the absorption of the antioxidants by 84%. It's due to polyphenol oxidase, the thing that makes banana brown when you cut it (and it's also in apples). Also, if you eat blueberries, you can inhibit the absorption of iron by 80-90%. Because the antioxidants form complexes with iron (and other minerals). Tea leaves, walnuts, the list goes on; foods that contain tannins, oxalates, phytic acid and other anti-nutrients; influence the absorption of other nutritents. Anti-oxidants are anti-nutrients(!) But they are good for you, right? Yes, but they compete with other things that are good for you. Nobody taught you this in school. We need a "systems nutritional science": interactions between nutrients matter. I've always had the intuition (or maybe I heard it from Sadhguru) that when you eat many different foods at the same time, it is more difficult for your system to process it, because there is more complexity to compute, more different things to digest, more recruiting of different digestive enzymes and processes, more different structures to unpack. But I didn't make a particular connection to absorption, but now it's clear (but I still think there are other processes involved). This also makes me think about Schmachtenberger telling a story about this holistic health guy who made his patients "eat close to the biosphere" (essentially go out in the wild and pick what you feel like eating). Of course there is a point there about using interoception as a barometer for health, but also when you do that, you will be forced (or incentivized) to eat one thing at a time. You will likely eat a large amount of the same food, maybe until you're full, and then you move on to the next food when you're hungry again. That way you actually absorb the nutrients and don't get deficiencies, which is maybe why some hunter-gatherer Indians lived until they were over 100. I think actually eating based on interoception is the crown jewel of nutritional health, because there are probably so many interactions between nutrients that we don't even know about in science, and that even if you say separate banana from blueberries, there could be other things you're eating that you should separate but which there is no data on, or there could be benefits with banana and blueberries together that we don't know about. But if what you're eating is decently good overall, you can pick that up interoceptively. And this points towards a greater point, that process (the "how") can matter just as much as substance (the "what"). Separating nutrients, eating them at different times, can be just as important as eating them. I'll make a more detailed personal account demonstrating this later.

As you get older, the past gets recontextualized. It's wild for me to think that 20 years ago (2005), it was the beginning of grade school for me, and 20 years before that, it was 1985. Metallica had only released two albums back then.

My grandmother had a vacation house in Spain that she recently gave to my aunt. That's where I got my tan for most of my summers since I was little. I've spotted people from my high school there lol, there are so many Norwegians, it's like a colony. And we also eat "Tran" (cod liver oil), although I've switched to the pharma-grade Omega-3 capsules.

I was abroad in the summer, and two times, we were sitting waiting for someone at a gate at the airport, lots of people, and I would randomly look up and directly catch the people we were waiting for when they were 10-20 meters away.

Yes. No. You can have achievements, you can have drive, energy, industry, but on the inside, you're no one. "People that are a little more perceptive, clearly see that I don't even exist" — Sadhguru

When you challenge the self-deception of the collective, it's easy to fall to the self-deception of the individual. But self-deception is really not more sinister in the non-physical realm. To the contrary: what you take as solid, that is arguably what hides the most sinister forms of self-deception. Thinking you're on the right side of a world conflict, that's one of the biggest examples of solid self-deceptions. But yet you have an opinion, you have a sense, you have a moral compass, so you give it life. You have an experience, and you will argue for it. And you should do that, with anything, be it non-physical or physical. The only antidote to self-deception is ultimately self-awareness, not denying what you think or holding your mouth.

It's the only way. You can use psychedelics alone in isolation, without social distractions or theological dogma to explore DMT realms and talk to entities, without aiming towards enlightenment. You can use meditation alone in isolation, without social distractions, merely to reduce stress and anxiety and become more calm and productive, without aiming towards enlightenment. You can use contemplation alone to become better at your business, your academic work, your social life, your emotional life, your intellectual life, without aiming towards enlightenment. But once you aim towards enlightenment, you can use all these things to move you in that direction. The practice, the path, is just that. It's not the goal. And it's generally not simple and one-dimensional. But your aim, ultimately, can be.

The question means you're not enlightened. Enlightenment is the most profound thing there is. But I can ask my reductionistic scientific questions: Do you experience yourself thinking about yourself, your issues, your problems, being lost in thought? Do you experience any thoughts about yourself more than 5% of your day? Conversely, do you experience a profound stillness, tranquility and peace, beyond thought, more than 95% of your day? Do you always know what to do? Do you simply channel the will of God through you without doubt, without hesitation, without self-concern? Is there really anyone doing anything or is the movie of life simply running with you as an eternal witness? Is there anything you want to achieve or do in the world, or does achievement just happen, without desire, without resistance? Do you fear death? Do you fear insanity? Do you fear ultimate lack of control? Do you fear non-existence? Do you fear eternity? Do you fear suffering? What is love?

They didn't mention the Danish statue they removed 🐒

The irony is spirituality is survival all up until you're liberated. Spirituality is spiritual ego all up until you disidentify with the ego. The true way to separate fake from real spirituality is what your aim is.