Carl-Richard

I have compiled a list of techniques for providing relief during spiritual emergencies, based on personal experience. The items in the list are ranked in order of significance. You should also obviously discontinue any form of spiritual practice when using these techniques: Again, based on my experience (although it could be different for you), be very careful asking AI for "tips on providing relief for oneself during a spiritual emergency"; it seems quite clueless on this. Other than what it says about engaging in spiritual practices, it has some useful tips. There are other real sources on providing relief during spiritual emergencies that mention some of the same advice I give. Maybe you can look more into those.

I added an extra 50-ish grams of lean meat to my daily intake over the course of this year as I had increased my workout volume by 50% and I noticed I needed more fuel. Then I recently cut back to 30 grams because I was getting fat and slow, and now a month or so later, I'm feeling better AND bigger. Any increase in intake has to be minimal and proportional to your progress and workout volume, protein or not.

A big thing psychedelics do is they reveal what is true about yourself and what your strengths and values really are. If you are unhappy about something in your life, and those things were largely set in motion or settled before you started taking psychedelics, that could indicate some re-evaluation is in order. What do you really value? What are you really good at? What do you really want to do? Now, of course this has to be balanced with your sense and a holistic real-life view, but still, a re-evaluation might be in order. If you do that in the personal domain and make the changes and still realize that something isn't right, maybe you need to work in the transpersonal domain (transcending the self).

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Do you have to smoke? Do you have to trip? What are you doing with your life outside smoking and tripping? Could you focus on doing that without smoking or tripping?

And now for my dangerously sharp reductionist razor that hurts only by looking at it: so Nietzsche essentially realized that the map is not the territory, and that instead of retreating back into the comfort of the map, he abandoned map-making/reading altogether? I feel like I'm @thisintegrated talking to myself in an alternate universe. Now, what does this have to do with solipsism being a result of individualism and urban structures again? 🤔

Day 2 of @Razard86 not answering my question 😴

I didn't ask ChatGPT about anything? 🤔

That's one possibility I've thought about, but it sounds like really tough. My main strategy must ideally be something that doesn't require too much energy. It's the same with handing out flyers by hand, I've figured I can only do that so many times a week. Oh well, thanks for the advice anyway 🙂 Let me know what you think about something I will send you in the PMs.

It's both cowardice and courage for different reasons. It's not one or the other. It's cowardice because you're trying to escape the pain of life, but it's also courageous because it's painful to do so. Immature statements tend to be black and white statements, pretending to be absolute when they are in fact not

If you focus on transcending without including, you might find that you only wanted to transcend because you didn't include. And you might find that actually transcending is not going your way either, and that you have to include at least something in order to transcend. So in this way, the personal development aspect of spirituality merges with the transpersonal aspect. It's actually the same project. It's usually only taken for granted, or in the case of the Puer Aeternus, neglected:

AI will be the end of us all 🙈 I only had a vague understanding of IFS from before, and now I spent 1 minute reading through the wikipedia, and this is my understanding: In IFS, the mind is conceptualized as many sub-personalities acting together like in a family relationship and quite logically uses lessons from systemic family therapy to inform that understanding. In other words, the "family" in this case is "internal" to the person (and is a "system"; a relationship between parts). Go to wikipedia or other "real" sources for facts and theories. AI will rot your mind and enable your biases.

I can like community and nature while also acknowledging the points of postmodernism. Isn't that what they call "postmodern Neo-Marxist" (or eco-terrorist) 😆? Ironically, I'm going to ask for the opposite with respect to meat on the bones. You're way beyond me right now. You're doing the Peterson; many references, fewer points (which is beautiful, when you understand it). Can I get just the outline, the bare bones?

I asked my advisor about this back when we started and he said I shouldn't worry about it (yet). It was only when we started talking about a specific type of research design for the brain measurements (posttest-only measurements) that I was suggested by another advisor to look into a more stratified form of sampling, but we probably won't do that anyway. I guess those are great for more normal advertising, but one problem with "advertising" research studies is that the messaging (as I've gleened from the general ethical milieu in research) cannot be too edgy or provoking. It has to have a relatively innocent, formal and neutral emotional tone, so that people do not feel "pressured" or "manipulated" into it. Also, in the general text of the materials, one should probably limit the use of exclaimation points or strong calls to action like "sign up today!". For titles especially, I think things like humor, wordplay and playing on absurdity is generally as far as you can go (for example, I saw a title of a poster at my campus that read "can we borrow your brain?", which was sort of funny). I'm using Canva It's pretty cool. I'm doing that with the designated poster pillars and public poster boards in our city and on campuses (hanging them up anywhere else is considered littering; Norway — the last Soviet state). I also got one of my family members to use their office as distribution outlets for flyers and hanging up posters there (and I can get one more, which I will save for when we advertise brain measurements). I've thought about setting up a booth once. Do you have any real experience with this or is it just an idea you had? My current poster/flyer has a sentence about how their participation could "contribute to a wave of new treatment methods for people with various psychiatric illnesses" (which is actually what my advisor said) and that "these methods could be used to help people in their local community" (which is a trick I got from some professor on YouTube talking about recruiting; highlight how it benefits them locally, not just some abstract ideal like furthering knowledge). It's also implied that they will learn these methods for themselves when participating in the study, which is of course a direct benefit to them (granted they are efficacious at all). I sense we are derailing the thread, so maybe only one last response (or drag it to PMs)

@Razard86 "I answer all the questions. Nobody answers as many questions as I do. If it's anybody who doesn't answer questions, it's you."

Here are two minutes to sum it up:

The way we advertise it is starts like this (roughly translated from Norwegian): "do you have a smartphone and often think negative thoughts? We are looking for participants for a study that tests whether new smartphone-based methods can help reduce negative thinking". It lasts for one month and they use an app to collect data while out and about in their daily lives. And that's pretty much what the study is about as far as what the new participants get to know. In reality, we are comparing a "music with mindfulness intervention" with an active control group (some Cognitive Behavioral Therapy video course) and a passive control group (no intervention, just collect data with the data collection app). We are in principle looking for people with a high tendency towards negative thinking (or more specifically "rumination"), but in terms of recruiting efforts, we are targetting everybody we can (no specific target group), because it's assumed that the people who are interested in the study will self-select based on high negative thinking. They also have to be over 18 years old, have no history of psychiatric illnesses, and have to be available to meet physically in my city for one meeting (or two, when we finally get the ethical approval for the brain measurement part of the study 😴). I should maybe have mentioned this in the beginning, but anyways, we are currently not advertising it as a brain study, only a behavioral study (because that is what it is so far). Nothing, nada. We only mention that the participants in the passive control group who do not get to use any of the methods during the study itself, are offered access to the methods after the study is over.

If you keep going, you can expect big transformations to happen. But it's not a joke, which you might already have realized. You either keep going or you stop when you get to that point or stop entirely.

Omg true. Any advice on hanging up posters and how to approach people during flyer distribution (or other recruitment ideas)?

Immediately refer him to suicide helplines: https://www.unitad.un.org/content/suicide-prevention#:~:text=If you are struggling with,or Text TALK to 741741.

You use your sense. Imagine what an emotionally mature person is and try to embody that. For Red specifically, some useful concepts are proactive vs reactive aggression. Are you able to say "no" when somebody is violating your personal autonomy, e.g. violating your personal space or want you to act against your values? That's reactive aggression. Some of that is needed to survive. But remember to always couch it in nuance. Generally, don't make aggression your go-to solution. Mostly, it should to be a last resort. Rationality should lead. Are you able to do things that might cause discomfort to somebody else but which might be right in the bigger picture? Are you able to step in and say "no" to somebody who you see is violating somebody else's personal autonomy? Are you able to assert yourself and claim situations, things; to reach out and take? That's proactive aggression. In my personal experience, this one is more tricky to calibrate in a way that does not discount some other values you hold. I would therefore also suggest additional caution when dealing with it, as it can have some definite consequences if done indiscriminately. The trick for many people who feel they lack aggression is that they habitually repress the feeling or aim it inwards towards themselves (internalization). So a part of the job for those people is to learn to identify when the aggression arises and then intentionally express it outwards at the intended target (externalization). This might require some experimentation and testing to calibrate, but over time as you unwind the habitual repression and/or internalization, you can focus more on applying it in the right situations.

I will reveal my little trick: I asked a relative question, and you gave an absolute answer. Here is another relative question: if you close your eyes, do you stop seeing the flower vase in front of you or not? What answer will you give here? Will it be absolute or relative? I would bet it will be relative. So why were you unable to answer my original relative question with a relative answer? I think it's because it's a tricky one and it goes right at the heart of the issue of the thread: people conflate the relative with the absolute when it comes to solipsism. They think concepts, ideas and assumptions that point toward solipsism are absolute when they are in fact relative. But wait, in the very next sentence, you actually gave a relative answer! Because what is "current"? Is current absolute or relative? Can "current" exist by itself without "not current"? The answer is: no. It's relative. So let's recap: in the first sentence, you gave an absolute answer, but in the very next sentence, you gave a relative answer — without warning, without clarification, as if you were still talking about the absolute. It's almost as if you conflated the relative with the absolute. Is that what happened or are we missing something? Will you tell us or will you not answer the question? So in summary, when you pull in concepts like sense perceptions (colors, sounds, smells, etc.) or time ("current" vs. some other time) while purporting to speak about the absolute, you are conflating the relative with the absolute.

It was really just a way to explain the ubiquity of solipsism, but sure, I like community and nature. What if I say "yes and I'll take both"? It's an interesting phenomenon, and I think I've commented on it before in my "relativity of meta-lenses" thread from back in the day. It was back when I started to undermine the perceived infallibility of Spiral Dynamics (Sacred-cow Dynamics; excuse me for including that forced joke):

Ok, Donald Trump. Yes. Now answer the question. I will re-phrase it and make it more specific: Is it possible that the colors, sounds and smells you currently are perceiving (perceptions), are not the only perceptions that could be perceived, and that some perceptions could be currently hidden to you?

I can see that, but those are surface level things (forms). It's the Shakti, the pure energy underneath all that. And like Jan talks about, it requires not just openness but love and devotion to really open yourself to it. When I talk about the times I managed to tune into his state, I treated it like an intensely focused and love-filled meditation. You really have to sit there and try to merge with what you're looking at. And you have to not listen to the words and focus fully on the sensual aspects and the energetic response you feel in your body. I like that approach and commend your impassioned speech. But here again, I would propose the Rumination-Reflection Questionnaire (and others like the Ruminative Response Scale), brain measurements of Default Mode Network activity at rest, maybe even endocannabinoid levels. These are relevant "actions" or behaviors of the relative person who is after my book (and Jan's and others) enlightened. Maybe you are more interested in what Jan calls "sainthood", i.e. where the personality structure has been significantly molded (from repeated mystical experience or other factors) to represent these more virtuous actions (actions proper). But that takes time and is rare if it's indeed authentic and not just a facade of spiritual ego or repression. It's in a sense easy to play the saint if you really try hard at it. But you'll just feel horrible and after while you will crumble in some way and lash out or have a breakdown. That's the story of many cults. Definitely, sainthood is better than simply being calm or blissed out when in the company of your own mind or silence. But also definitely, the former is a big step towards the latter. The speed with which you become a saint while in a blissed/calm state is arguably uncomparable to any other thing, outside superb grace.