Carl-Richard

Yes, yes there is.

When you're in heightened states of consciousness, mundane things like repeating numbers might take on more significance or salience. That doesn't necessarily mean you're unravelling some grand plan that God has built around your life. Something being salient doesn't necessarily mean it's particularly meaningful in the grander scheme of things. Pain is highly salient, but it doesn't really have a higher meaning behind it just for that reason. If something is truly meaningful, the meaning pops out at you. If you have to go to great lengths to maybe find some possible meaning, it's less likely to be actually meaningful.

I'm going to do a lot of sprints leading up to this Christmas. I'm going to become a superhuman, trust me >:) I'll try your incline walking if it doesn't work out

It's true that you can't know what psychedelics are before you have tried them. But does that mean you should recommend them? Two different questions.

Ugh, I worded myself wrong. I meant you can't possibly meet people from all cultures in your country.

I stumbled across this clip after a long session of reading neuroscience, and it felt like I had entered a different dimension. Literal Stone Age individuals.

If you're in college, befriend international college students, or even just talk to your professors if they're from different cultures. There is a difference between learning facts about a culture and actually interacting with someone from that culture. There are subtle nuances about how people communicate, react to things, tolerate things, etc., that you can only get by interacting with them. Of course, you can't possibly meet people from all cultures in your country, but if you want to choose depth over breadth, that's the way (if not visiting the cultures yourself).

Lift some heavy ass weight. And I mean really heavy (within reason; safety first).

It sounds dismissive, but all of this sounds like (mostly) a psychosomatic thing to me. That is just my feeling, but it's also because you're spinning these very charged narratives about very normal things like eating meat or fapping (which I used to do myself by the way, particularly with meat consumption and the effects of fapping). When you get very obsessed about tiny changes in your mood or bodily sensations, and if you're prone to neurotic thinking, you can magnify the "problems" 10x. That said, I'm not saying you should stop doing whatever you think is best for yourself. It's just something to become aware of.

Gotta make your mind breathe sometimes

For example meditation, hanging around spiritual teachers, reading spiritual texts, etc. Many things appear sudden when looked in isolation from a larger context, but by closer inspection, it all looks highly interconnected. Just because something is complex doesn't mean that nothing is correlated with anything. The problem with pinpointing the exact causes of enlightenment is more a problem of determining exactly when it happens than what causes it. For example, you don't exactly know when a burning building is going to collapse, but given enough time, it becomes increasingly likely that it will collapse. And when it collapses, you can be pretty sure that it was the fire that caused it to collapse. There are many ways to stoke the fire of enlightenment, and even though the realization might appear sudden, there are many things that likely feed into it. I don't think it's the person that awakens, so I don't see what is so holy or sacred about the person. Individualistic spirituality is a highly deceptive Westernized notion of spirituality (deceptive in the sense that it's easy to conflate the realization itself with the means of realization). Just because the realization is beyond "people" quite generally, doesn't mean that the methods should be. The realization is also beyond the person, not just people. No method is sacred, only the sacred is.

You are not separate from other people. And I'm not being facetious by referring to non-duality again. I mean in a systems theory kind of sense (e.g., your mind is very much a product of your environment). Also, it's not the person that is supposed to grasp anything (maybe you're using "person" in a broader sense). Grasping will happen irrespective of a person or people. Still, there are external indicators of whether grasping is likely to occur or not, and that can be related to the person or people surrounding that person. But then again, there is nothing special about the person (singular) in this case. On the contrary (and I'll make the point again): external indicators are much more likely to occur in a place with many people. And that is why spiritual people gravitate towards other spiritual people. You can't help but unite with other people in the search for existential union.

Take a break for 10 days. Highly recommend it.

Let me be ironically extremely non-dual with you: I don't believe in the distinction between personal work and collective work when it comes to spirituality. In the end, it's all just spiritual development. You can be just as stuck in your spiritual development "going it alone" as when you are in a group. In fact, I believe it's even more likely that you get stuck doing it alone. Consider why virtually every super-genius in history received aristocratic tutoring from an early age. Consider why the people who "go it alone" have already been heavily acculturated in some spiritual worldview prior to "doing the real work". Consider why you're here and not in a cave somewhere. The only people who didn't receive any external influences that seem to be relevant to their awakening are one-in-a-hundred-million saints who were born awake. Even Sadhguru, a supposed "spontaneous awakening" person, was taught how to meditate at an extremely early age. The direct experience didn't come "despite" that. Him being taught meditation wasn't for nothing.

@AerisVahnEphelia

What is a spiritual meaning of something?

Trendy New Age lingo for "wake up!" with some eschatological undertones. It's what happens when the cool people at school get into "spirituality".

Ask cultures that have lived in the cold for millennia.

Nah.

Show me the heaviest music you know about.

Ideally, they help facilitate communication between different worldviews. The problem with this conversation was that there was a language barrier, so the two camps couldn't meet each other properly. Wouldn't it be good to have people who can translate well across the different worldviews? That is the purpose of people like Bernardo Kastrup, John Vervaeke (and hopefully me some day): tying together the knots of spirituality and science. Again, truly good translators are not mainstream, so current attempts look futile, but at least attempts are being made. (You could argue more promising attempts at translation have been made by people like Jon Kabat-Zinn, the creator of "Mindfulness-Based Stress Therapy", but these were highly reductionistic, spiritually sanitized and culturally appropriated versions).

Well, the way he puts it resonates for me, as somebody who feels that indeed there are things that I'm attached to that keeps me from relaxing into Being. It's not that I'm not capable of relaxing into Being either. It happens quite spontaneously on its own. But when that happens, I'm quickly reminded of why I don't want that to happen (yet).

Having a PhD essentially just means you know a lot of theories and facts, and that you know how to structure your thoughts and use precise language. And of course there is value to that, and seeing it synergize with a spiritual understanding is quite interesting.

A conversation between a spiritually illiterate person and an academically illiterate person 😆 That is unfortunately the best the mainstream can come up with at the moment. It's a start, but it's a quite clumsy clash of worldviews rather than an insightful dialogue. If you want the latter, you need more fringe people like John Vervaeke, Bernardo Kastrup. They can use words that Pinker brings up like "phenomenal vs. access consciousness" (and beyond) while also not beating around the bush when it comes to mysticism.

I have an energetic radar for these things, and he certain has something going on I don't think the "good vs bad thought" thing was recommended as a sort of practice of actively parsing out good vs. bad thoughts. It's simply an insight about the nature of thoughts: some thoughts are self-referential while some aren't, and it's just the self-referential thoughts that will go away, not all thoughts. Some people hear "no thoughts" and fear that they will become a dysfunctional rock, and he is dispelling that notion. You'll only lose thoughts that constantly tell you stories about yourself, as a consequence of doing proper spiritual practice. Yet when you investigate this root (in meditation), the branches may pop up as thoughts ("here I am!") and seem to obscure your path towards the root. If you then remember that the branches are just in the way and you need to keep digging, in a sense you have to "drop" each attachment, or not be discouraged by their emotional salience (that is, if you're consciously confronted with them, which is probably not always the case). In other words, the thoughts that pop up in meditation will have the ability to distract you from finding the root, and you just have to let those thoughts go if you want to find the root.