Carl-Richard

Solipsism, Advaita or Ajata never entered my mind when I first took the step into non-duality. But after I took that step, I started to see those aforementioned constructs for what they are: constructs. But sure, there are degrees of construct awareness within the realm of constructs. It's just that stepping outside all constructs is the only true step towards non-duality. If non-duality is approached in any other way, it's just another construct.

If your endpoint is true non-duality, I wouldn't say solipsism is the first step. It's more like a step backwards. It's not actually a deconstruction. It's a construction; a fantasy, a dead end. Any conceptual idea is a step backward, even ultimate skepticism, the seemingly most bare-boned position there is ("I can't know anything"). Because it's still just a conceptual idea. With respect to non-duality, Actuality itself is the only step forward. Now, if you want to stay within the conceptual realm, these would be my steps (more epistemological than ontological): realism -> skepticism -> pragmatism -> meta-theory. I wrote a thread about it some years ago (and the various pitfalls associated with them): Here, you can notice that each step becomes less restrictive and more expansive, as a result of each step countering or "deconstructing" the former. But each step can make the mistake of naivety, of essentially clinging to it like a dogma and creating a contracted and inflexible version of it, and that the mature perspective requires developing a nuanced grasp of it. Only adopting a conceptual idea of non-duality is similar: you don't have the right grasp of it but instead you cling to it like a baby on a tit.

😂

https://digitalcommons.chapman.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1033&context=e-Research (It's an undergraduate article, but at least this passage is well-written). I think this makes a lot of sense. If you're talking to someone who comes off as unreasonably rude, who doesn't seem to care about your opinion, who scoffs at your arguments, who says you're stupid, etc., then it's probably not just that they don't care about your feelings, but it's likely that they're actually not able to put themselves in your shoes. Hence, they don't just lack empathy, but also openmindedness. Again, I think this makes a lot of sense. What do you think? () Here is some other research on the topic: "Similar Personality Patterns Are Associated with Empathy in Four Different Countries" "Associations between Medical Student Empathy and Personality: A Multi-Institutional Study" "Empathy and big five personality model in medical students and its relationship to gender and specialty preference: a cross-sectional study" "Relationship between empathy and the big five personality traits in a sample of Spanish adolescents" "Associations between empathy and big five personality traits among Chinese undergraduate medical students"

When you say "well-designed", then of course we're no longer talking about the 50% statistic, but I think a similar thing could be said for psychology and social science: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis That said, in general, I will agree that psychology is probably more prone to replication issues than medicine. But let's not forget that it can get pretty bad in medicine too : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis

And medicine. Once you throw humans into the picture, it seems to reliably screw things up.

Imagine if you did nofap back then. You would create two mutually orbiting black holes in your balls.

Most actualized forum member 😆 🤓 😂😘

The "you" we're referring to (mind with a small "m") is created by predetermined stuff, which is "You" (Mind with a big "M"). So "you" is created by "You", and "you" has ultimately no say in what "You" is creating. In order words, the person and their apparent choices are ultimately created by the transpersonal. From this perspective, the notion of the person making choices is mostly a pragmatic psychosocial convention, a bit like money.

You wouldn't believe me if I told you.

Or just the mind beyond concepts.

@Razard86 I can make choices, but I can't choose which choices present themselves to me. I'm a compatibilist, so I say that Sapolsky is right in the sense that the choices that present themselves to us are determined by forces outside of our control (biology, environment, upbringing, etc.), but we can still talk about making choices, because we're doing that all the time (in a pragmatic socio-linguistic sense). I can say that I chose between eating rice vs. eating pasta today, because that is how I tend to describe what I just experienced: I was confronted with a situation where I felt like I had to pick either making rice or making pasta for dinner, and I ended up picking one of them, hence I made a choice. But that doesn't change the fact that I did not choose which choices presented themselves to me (pasta vs. rice).

Any compatibilists in the house?

You might benefit from looking into the pernicious dynamics of psychosomatic disorders, or more generally the two-way street between psychology and physiology (e.g. the placebo study that found that sham knee operations produced the same subjective and functional improvement as real operations, or the finding that anti-depressants are only 2% more effective than placebo pills). (I highly recommend the video). You seem to fall into the group that would be affected by that (just like me), already just based on the very detailed and oddly specific description you gave, but also based on a study I read which showed that higher education (basically Big 5 openness) and higher proneness to modern health worries (basically Big 5 neuroticism) increased self-certified sick leave and subjective health complaints (basically psychosomatic disorders). I'm saying we're both open and neurotic people 😂

Haha, no it's something you learned. No creature is born unmotivated, unless they're some gene-modified synthetic abomination produced in Michael Levin's lab (or the natural equivalent).

Micro-awakening. Psychedelics put you in the same ballpark as spiritual awakening. Everything has to do with brain chemistry (in this discussion at least 😆). It could be residual 5-HT2A agonism causing you to feel drained (it feeds into the stress response, although it has complex effects). Or you might have traumatic baggage coming to the surface (not uncommon when you're new to it). I didn't have these problems when I used to microdose as far as I can remember, although I was already pretty unmotivated for some things, but less others (hence the post I referenced about awakening). But yeah, brain chemistry affects behavior, and behavior affects brain chemistry.

We're not talking about that though, are we? ;P

Empathy is by definition a state of expanding your experience to include someone else's experience, so yes, it's openmindedness in that sense. But like I concluded above with neuroticism, openmindedness can have many definitions. People who like to investigate many different ideas can be openminded in that sense but also be emotionally or socially stunted in various ways. There are many ways the mind can dissociate itself into these intricately contracted niches. That's simply survival.

There are many ways to talk about neuroticism. You can talk about it in a Freudian sense (psychic conflict), in a Big 5 personality sense (emotional instability, negative emotion), or maybe in your sense. Maybe most relevant to your sense, in the Big 5 sense, neurotics tend to analyze things in a way that skews heavily towards catastrophizing or worst-case scenario thinking, whether it's about what is going to happen in the future, or about something that happened in the past, or their self-image, etc. Basically, a lot of negative thinking. They also tend to experience a lot of hesitation and struggle with uncertainty, exactly because they tend to fixate on the potential negative outcomes of decisions involving uncertainty and paralyze themselves ("Should I do this or should I do that? I'm not sure! This decision is so hard, there is so much at stake!"), which also ties into the Freudian sense of the word (inner conflict). Also, inherent to emotional instability (or "lability") is the tendency for the mind to rapidly change its state and therefore also thoughts, which in itself could increase the potential for conflict (more thoughts = more potential for inner conflict). And when the thoughts tend to be negative, then you can easily see how that could create a lot of inner conflict. So while you can define the word in different ways, you can also find places where the definitions overlap. Definitions are only ever starting points to any investigation. Where you end up is usually much greater than where you start.

There might be some overlap with this (which Leo touched on):

Did you notice growing up that many people in your life were telling you what is important and what you should do and that it sometimes felt like a lot of pressure and that it made you confused about what to do because you maybe didn't feel deep inside that you agreed or that it resonated? Awakening makes you very aware of why that was the case. If something is merely imposed on you from the outside, you recognize a conflict between your internal feelings (which is based on your awareness of your internal capacities) and what is being imposed on you. Then, if you truly tap into what you authentically feel deep inside, whatever that is, that is what you're meant to be doing. So motivation doesn't disappear with awakening: it's true motivation that awakens.

You can just respond to one point and we can take it from there, or you can take your time like I did. It took a while for me to find the time to write a long response like that (who would've thought the day would come where I don't have unlimited time for the forum), and it also helped to think about it for a while without responding immediately.

The reality is that most people's idea of mind is quite contracted. Psychology can definitely be made to include psychic phenomena. You just have to drop some materialist blockages. On the other hand, spirituality can be said more so to be about going beyond the mind (and into Mind).

I think that's your answer.

It's what you're looking for if you're looking for that.