Carl-Richard

I don't see how you can condemn something in a non-moral way in this situation. Morality is essentially about what you think should or should not exist, and that dovetails nicely with what you said about condemnation in your first post directed at me.

Exactly, because you care about the implied moral weight of the statement, not whether or not it is preceded by another statement. @Princess Arabia makes it seem like a judgement is just when you make a second description about a thing after making an initial description. I don't think that is the real criterion she uses to call something a judgement.

Seeing something you call "fat" is just a description, but seeing something that you call "disgusting" is also just a description. In that case, your definition of judgement seems to depend on whether the two descriptions is presented in some kind of arbitrary temporal order. Likewise, "he said something inappropriate" is a description, and "he is an asshole" is also a description. "Disgusting" and "asshole" do seem to carry some implied moral weight though. The real reason I think you distinguish the two descriptions is not their temporal order but their implied moral weight. For example, if I see something I call "fat" and then follow it with "and that means they carry a lot of weight", I doubt you would feel inclined to call that a judgement, but they do fit your definition of judgement based on temporal order. Conversely, if I were to only make one statement "they're a disgusting asshole" without any preceding or following statement, I think you would be inclined to call that a judgement. You also mention "condescending remarks" as a qualifying criterion, which holds some implied moral weight too (the implication is that you should not be condescending).

So your definition is similar to @Princess Arabia in that it has to do with asserting normativity or a "moral condemnation" (a more charged way of putting it). I personally am more flexible with how these words are used: you can make a descriptive judgement, a moral judgement, a judicial judgement, a logical judgement, an intuitive judgement, etc.

So according to you, judgement involves an assertion of normativity (of how you should act; e.g. if it's wrong or bad, you shouldn't do it). In that case, saying that someone being fat probably means they lack self-control (the initial claim of the OP) is actually not a judgement. It's just a descriptive statement. You could say there is an implied normative statement in there, as the OP probably believes that a lack of self control is generally something you should avoid, but still, based on what he wrote in the first post, he was actually not judging according to you. I believe viewing judgement in the way you understand it as something to generally avoid is a wrong or at least an inaccurate way to frame it. It's framed as a quantitative question: less is better. I believe you should strive to judge appropriately, i.e. a qualitative question: better is better. How exactly you go about that is up to you. I believe judgement in the way you've defined it is something we do all the time (like right now), and again, it's not something to avoid, but rather something to do right.

Weed. Don't let anybody tell you it's not addictive. I also did other substances in combination for certain periods, but weed was the mainstage. Weed was very attractive to me because of how it affected my creativity. I remember one time trying to combine it with a large dose of alcohol (like 5-6 beers), and I noticed that it removed that creative edge, or at least the speed of the thoughts, which I believe is why I never became an alcoholic. My main method of escape was through immersion in a fantasy world of conceptual thinking. Alcohol on the other hand seemed to numb out all forms of thinking, which I didn't like.

People think God can imagine an infinite amount of infinite universes in infinite dimensions but can't imagine multiple separate minds. Funny.

@Javfly33 I've always thought that my addiction story turning out the way it did was based on an entourage of many lucky events coming together. One thing I rarely mention is that the time I really took my first "voluntary" break, I had been given an ultimatum by my mom that I would either quit or move out (she had found out many times by then). At the same time, maybe only a week or two before, the spiritual Discord server I was in (which infamously devolved into a cult) had concluded that all psychedelics (including weed) could be a source of negative energies and that we had to abstain from them if we wanted to stay on the server. Also, the belief that negative energies was a bad thing had started to affect me. All in all, a confluence of two big factors occured for me to finally take the first voluntary step towards sobriety: social and financial threats from my mom, and a change in belief system as well social pressure from the Discord server. Also, I believed I could replace my weed with meditation (that was a huge one), so in reality it was three big factors. I had effectively started to believe that continuing my weed habit was no longer sustainable and that there were other alternatives for me to feel good (and feel alive). The problem in enacting these insights in practice for somebody else is that it's hard to artificially induce social pressure from someone whom their opinion is something you care about. Also, you do not choose your beliefs. Artificially inducing a situation where your beliefs change in a direction conducive to sobriety is probably even harder than the former. That said, every addiction story is different. Maybe you're less deep in the trouble that I was in and that these things are not needed. Still, if nothing seems to end up working for you, these are things to consider.

And I don't use "personalities" for no reason. These are people inside your mind that are giving convincing and in-depth arguments for why you should continue taking the drug, and they're just as smart as you, if not smarter (because they're highly motivated). I've sometimes described it as demonic possession, in the sense that the devil is smarter than you, stronger than you, and of course knows how to deceive and manipulate you. It has a finger on the button of your emotions, it knows the ins and outs of your conscious and subconscious mind, and it essentially has the combined intellect of a debate panel of several PhD-level experts in multiple fields. Most importantly, it lies (or at least fails to keep promises) — oh, so much. "I'll start tomorrow...". It might seem like I'm catastrophizing, but I believe it's a realistic and useful attitude for viewing the phenomenon. Every time you have a craving, you should remind yourself what you're up against, not as a reason to give up because it all seems too futile, but because it gives you the strength and tools to understand and deal with your cravings. It also helped me a lot to view every painful encounter with a craving (painful because of not acting on it) as a sign of growth. In a way, it tricks your brain to associate the rewiring process with something positive. Every painful experience is re-contextualized as a reward. It's quite genius if you ask me. It's still very hard, and you should use every inch of your meditation experience to your favor: be vigorously self-aware and present with what is going on in your mind at all times. Be conscious of every decision that your mind makes.

Natural things like grieving the death of a loved one, which is truly unavoidable, can only be dealt with by not being afraid to feel the grief, and to go where your mind wants to go, and accepting that. Then over time, given authenticity, given emotional openness, it works itself out. But this assumes that your life has a fundamental level of stability to begin with (that you have some sources of resilience, e.g. a community, a family, a social network). If there is a fundamental unstability in your life that is truly unsolvable, then the only "way out" is "up" (self-transcendence), i.e. spirituality. But there is a Catch-22, because you cannot engage in spirituality without at least some fundamental sense of stability, albeit relatively less in this case. And there are solutions there (for example joining a monastery). Also, on the flip side, a relative level of instability can serve as a powerful catalyst for spirituality. I can speak from my own experience, as I found spirituality while my life was spiraling out of control in a more individual psychological sense, all the while I still had a strong support network around me. Nevertheless, spirituality radically changed me as a person: my mind went from an endless circular neurotic mess into the streamlined goal-oriented tool that it's supposed to be. It will forever remain my life purpose to share my experiences in some form or another.

Why?

Lol

So the (healthy) vegans had about a 6% reduction of cardiovascular disease risk compared to the healthy omnivores (in that time frame). Hmm... I guess it's not nothing (?) Now, imagine the difference between the standard american diet and the healthy omnivore diet Dew it! If you had to guess, how large do you think the differences would be?

Cool. Now replicate it Is there anything to note from the variance between subjects? This idea that what is a healthy diet (or healthy behavior in general) might be an individual thing keeps entering my mind (thank you, Bryan Johnson). It's obvious, but even if the results (which is based on data from multiple individuals) skew clearly in one direction, that doesn't mean that you as a single individual couldn't deviate from that data. It would be interesting to have some clear quantitative studies on that too ("how much do people differ?", "which types of people respond better to which interventions?", etc.). Quantitative science is so focused on presenting general results that it might forget that people are indeed different.

What is a judgement and when does it become bad?

I felt like writing out a detailed description of one of my toughest weed withdrawal episodes (I'll leave it here if you don't mind). In a funny way, the level of detail I'll be able to provide will in itself be evidence for how severe my withdrawals were, because one interesting side effect from the withdrawals is a marked increase in the encoding of episodic memories (i.e. you suddenly remember a lot of things from those events). For some context, this happened while I was in Rome with my family for a week when I was 19. I can't really recall the exact order of all the events, but I'll try to recall some of the experiences that stood out and try to describe the symptoms in detail. Also, have in mind that this was a vacation where things are supposed to be cushy and carefree (and it was, at least on the outside). The same symptoms in a different context could make for a different level of struggle. But maybe this is a good thing, as this specific context can help to see the symptoms as they are for themselves, isolated from other struggles. Having trouble finishing food at restaurant At the peak of the withdrawals, I ordered a lasagna at a restaurant, and I only ate half of it before I had to stop. It was a relatively tiny meal, and I'm not somebody who usually struggles to eat (in fact, the exact opposite). The entire experience of eating the lasagna was sooo slow, it felt like it took forever. Cutting the lasagna and putting the fork in my mouth felt like a chore, like hard work, and it honestly smelled, looked and tasted a bit disgusting (which I somehow knew was all in my head). Even one of the waiters saw that I didn't finish my food, and he was like "ah cmon, you can eat that!", so I forced myself to eat maybe half of what was left. The worst thing was that my stomach was telling me I was hungry, but my desire for the food was zero. In summary, an intense lack of enjoyment of food. Trying to think but being unable to connect trains of thought One of my favorite activities while being high was to think hundreds of wild thoughts each minute, one building on another; just an endless frenzy of creative brainstorming. During weed withdrawals, of course the complete opposite of this happened, and to quite a surprising extent. I would catch myself starting to form an interesting line of thought, like "Aha! Let's see where this one leads!", and then I would simply lose the trail almost before it started. It was like my mind was confined to these short chunks of boring, uninteresting and uncreative thoughts, and man, that was like taking away my only superpower. I had really no other way to entertain myself, because everything else that was happening of outside my mind was equally as bland and boring, which I'll get to next. In summary, a marked anti-psychotic effect, lack of creativity and mental connectivity, like injecting normie MBTI sensor serum. Being unable to enjoy a segway ride through the city We took a segway ride, which was fun in one way because I had never tried it before, but I was constantly filled with this sense of dread and physical unease. It was like a horrible mix of anxiety, depression and existential despair, all while feeling like having the body of a 80 year old: muscles and tendons aching, a constant sense of tightness, pain and a weird kind of hotness overlaying my tactile sensory field. My senses were dull, nothing looked or felt interesting. Everything was put on low volume, and it was as if a grey hue was overlaying my vision. And it all felt very stupid: I had no external reason to feel the way I was feeling, but still, I was feeling like a bag of sand trying very hard to be human. In summary, anhedonia, dysphoria, mental anguish, pain. Speaking louder and more than usual Something which is probably related to the general blunting of sensory activity was that I started speaking really loudly, like socially disruptive kind of loud. I was sitting at a restaurant, and it was probably a little later in the withdrawal episode because I don't remember having problems eating. After having like 1-2 beers, I could notice that other people in the restaurant would look weirdly at my when I would laugh. Speaking was kind of a weird experience generally, because my ability to speak didn't require any real mechanical effort. It was as if the words just fell out of my mouth in a blunt way. Likewise, my threshold for speaking was lowered, meaning I would speak much more often than I usually would. It was like the internal mental diarrhea you get from weed was converted to external verbal diarrhea, of course without the creativity and conceptual finesse that weed gives you. And you can certainly notice this when smoking weed that your voice gets much lower and more feminine, and that you also get more easily stuck inside your own mental world and are therefore less likely to speak. So of course the opposite would be expected to happen during weed withdrawals. It was just surprising how intense that effect showed itself. In summary, I became a mix of a loud-mouthed brute and a social butterfly. Trouble sleeping, sweating, tossing and turning The title describes itself. The ability to sleep is just zapped, you just lie there staring into blackness. And there is really nothing you can do about it, because get this: you're unable to masturbate. Anhedonia and sleeplessness is just the worst combination of symptoms. In summary, little sleep, a lot of sweat, a lot of movement. Those were the main events that came to mind, but there are also similar memories that echo the same symptoms (for example, when I was in the Sistine Chapel and was unable to truly enjoy it). But again, the positive thing is that I get to remember a lot of it There are probably some other symptoms that I left out, for example irritability (which I think I had some level of), but I'm also an exceptionally non-irritable person In a weird way, maybe this can inspire you to undertake the physical symptoms, knowing that other people have done it before, even though they're not identical symptoms (even so, I would suggest that the strength of symptoms is more important than the type). Then again, it's not the physical symptoms that are the main challenge. It's the thousands of micro-personalities you've built up that act on cravings and that you have to rewrite.

This suggests the mental part is what is hard, not the physical symptoms. And this agrees with my general knowledge about opioid withdrawals, as well as my personal experience of having overcome an intense daily weed habit (they're actually not too dissimilar). The physical symptoms of opioid withdrawals I've heard been described as no worse than a cold. Weed also has physical symptoms that can be pretty debilitating (inability to eat, sleep, feel pleasure; restlessness, irritability, chronic aches), but in my experience, these are not the main drivers of you taking the drug. Overcoming an addiction requires experiencing all the cycles where a craving tends to arise and then abstaining from the drug (by "cycle", I mean a situation that you associate with drug-taking and which tends to repeat itself). You'll pass through the majority of these cycles within 1 full year, as there will be different occasions depending on the seasons that you'll associate with drug-taking (for example Christmas time, New Years, spring break, etc.). But even after 1 full year, there are still larger cycles that can trigger you, so the saying "once an addict, always an addict" is true to some extent. It's at least a good mindset to have, because you always have to be on guard, and it's always a work in progress. It's been over 3 years since I last smoked weed, and literally yesterday, my mind thought back to when I used to smoke weed and how "safe" I felt in that habit. I'm a bit lucky in the sense that I literally cannot smoke weed without going into a full-blown ego death and subsequent panic attack, so my mind also has a strong aversion to such thoughts. That's another thing that can help: having a really negative experience that makes you never want to take it again, or at least that makes your brain associate the drug with a really bad experience. In fact, naltrexone therapy works in this way, but it instead involves repeated smaller negative experiences rather than one big one. I don't know the process for initiating such a therapy, but it's something to have in mind.

Practice.

Futile outside its field of relevance.

Unironically the truest post that has been written on this forum.

I don't know about anything "scientific" in this regard, but you could always go alternative (energy healing, meditation, etc.). "But what effect could there possibly be from that?". Well, the placebo effect is a real effect, and it's actually surprisingly powerful. For example, SSRIs have been consistently shown to be only 2% more effective than placebo pills. "But that is more mental. What about physical ailments?". For example, there have been done placebo studies on knee surgeries where one group was given a fake surgery and the other a real surgery, and both groups experienced an identical improvement in knee pain. You might think that the improvement was merely pain-related and not an improvement of function, but surely, the patients who had knee pain also had problems with walking (function), but after the fake surgery, their ability to walk improved. Of course, that isn't proof that their knee function was actually improved on a physical level, although that could certainly be the case (you should probably look into the specific studies on that if you want to find out). Regardless, there is certainly hope for you. On a more extraordinary note, Sadhguru has claimed that he broke his ankle once and magically healed it during meditation. Of course, you don't have to believe that, but at least it serves as a sign that a change in function is possible.

@UnbornTao Is this when I post a video of Peter Ralston (Brendan's guru) speaking positively about methods? Most of these apparent disagreements is about a difference in emphasis or language, and the emphasis might vary depending on the context and who is being talked to. Somebody who is very far along the path and who has tried many methods but doesn't seem to get anywhere, might benefit from being pointed to "directness", while somebody who can't even sit still for 2 seconds without getting lost in a neurotic storm of thoughts, might benefit from learning how to follow their breath. Yet somebody else who is both naturally contemplative and extremely adept at sitting in silence, might need very little direction or practice. Spirituality is generally not a one-size-fits-all enterprise.

When I'm writing a post that requires some kind of conceptual thinking, my mind sometimes goes to a specific place in my episodic memory. For example, in my last post, I was writing about the concept of being smart (IQ, etc.), and for some reason, my mind is stuck on this one entrance of a convenience store near my apartment. When I think about experimental designs in psychology, my mind goes to this specific sports field from my younger days. I could probably think about more examples, but you get the point. Am I the only one who does this? Why does this happen?

Based on the two examples that came to mind, the episodic scenery doesn't seem to be obviously relevant to the concepts. For example, that specific convenience store doesn't seem to have anything to do with the concept of being smart.

Well-established memories get integrated across the cortex, so there could simply be a spatial overlap of the areas coding for the episodic memory and other semantic memories. That would explain the arbitrary nature of the episodic memories that are activated. But as you say, there can also be more explicit associations. For example, one possible explanation for why my mind goes to this one sports field from my youth when thinking about experimental designs in psychology might be because in that place, I've often engaged in similar abstract tasks, for example learning the rules of a sports game. Learning a sports game seems quite conceptually similar to learning an experimental design in psychology: you have to imagine different people performing different sequential actions according to some specified constraints.