Carl-Richard

It changes your environment too, your local community, your society

Unless you want to say there are no enlightened people, these people have a brain, and their brains do look a certain way. You can test how their brain is different by performing experiments such as those presented in the video, and you'll end up with findings such as the persistent deactivation of the DMN being a neural correlate of enlightenment.

Different evolutionary niches produce different levels and types of intelligences. But also, brain size generally correlates with intelligence, even within our own species. Yeah, and how few neurons can you have before you become functionally retarded? How small can an individual neuron be before complicated things like ion channels (which certainly can't be infinitely small in order to work) take up too much space relative to other structures? What if the genes that code for small size also make you more prone to certain diseases or other unwanted things? It's not easy to play God when your creation is a super complex system.

What — you're just gonna ban insects, birds, everything that isn't human, from interacting with humans? That is probably practically impossible unless you want us to live in Matrix pods or caves underground. Besides, dominating the entire Earth this way takes more resources than whatever we got going on now, so if your concern is reducing resource expenditure or environmental disaster, maybe leave the bugs alone.

The Default Mode Network (DMN) is a known neural correlate for mystical experiences (a.k.a. "awakening"), and "enlightenment" (or persistent non-dual awareness) correlates with a persistent deactivation of the DMN when the subject is not doing anything (there is a graph in the video). The DMN is associated with the feeling of self, self-referential thinking, etc.

Shrink ourselves so that we'll get predated on by ravens, seagulls and yellow jackets ? I think if you take an existing creature and reduce its size, it will be less intelligent. But that doesn't mean you can't have a different creature of a smaller size which is more intelligent.

Yep. Awakening literally changes your brain.

It's normal religious- sorry, "spiritual" behavior.

In hindsight, I learned everything I needed to know about Tate from his appearance on The Ultimate Traveller back in 2010. Spoiler: he manipulated one of the contestants to make her believe that he had lost all his money in order to make her stop begging for a loan.

Yeah but forreal doe, what did you not understand?

What did you not understand about what I said? I can clarify.

I think this is pretty accurate. But even though you could choose to stare at a teapot until the end of time, when you're incarnated as a human being, you'll still be compelled to engage in certain different behaviors at different times. That is the nature of physical existence. So meanwhile the level of "addiction" (and side effects like boredom, discomfort, etc.) certainly diminishes, you'll always be moving. You could say spirituality is about optimizing that movement.

Heart rate and metabolism drops when meditating.

Some few things that came to mind: Emotional regulation: are you able to experience an emotion and then return to a normal level of activation by yourself over a short period of time, or are you like a baby that needs external help? Emotional awareness: are you able to identify that you're having an emotional response at all? Emotional diversity: do you experience a wide range of emotions? Many men experience something called emotional colorblindness: they only experience or express their emotions as one emotion (anger). Emotional insight: are you able to identify the influences (internal and external) behind the emotion you're experiencing and how they feed into the emotion? Emotional oversight: are you able to understand the role that different aspects of your life has on your emotions (e.g. friends, family, health, life purpose, etc.), and are you acting on that understanding?

It's more an explanation than a prescription.

People who are prone to certain illnesses tend to get the illness through some kind of stressful influence (a.k.a. the diathesis-stress model of illness), e.g. traumatic events, poor socioeconomic situation, drugs, environmental toxins, etc. Doing things that are generally healthy will build resilience to that stress and decrease the likelihood of the illness developing or worsening.

So many people come to spirituality looking for an easy way out, wanting to be "saved". Counterintuitively, it's about facing the truly hard work, taking full responsibility for what is and not looking away from it. And through that work, that is where you'll lose yourself.

I recently tried to list my top 3 favorite bands. They have to be bands I've listened to all of their songs at least once, listened to regularly over the years, and of course they have to readily pop into my mind when I think about the question. For now, it's Opeth, Cynic and Tool. If I had to pick one album from one of them to bring to a deserted island, it would probably be "Kindly Bent to Free Us" by Cynic (which is actually what my profile picture is based on now that I think about it, the album cover). I don't know if my musical experience is just extremely limited or something, but I've always found Cynic to be completely unique, especially their later albums. I can't really place it anywhere or pin it down to any specific set of influences. It's just there, as it self, speaking to me at a very deep level.

Be an example of what you want her to be, and over time, she might directly ask you what's up.

Or just practice playing the game and you'll get used to dying that way.

And I'm saying it would be foolish to think you're not fully at the mercy of the ocean and that when you're thrown into a storm that rearranges the very structure of your ship, you should think twice about your navigating ability having anything to do with it.

I completely agree, which is why I write "bad energies" in quotation marks. Whatever people call bad energies is just feeling uncomfortable with an additional layer of neuroticism about spiritual teleology ("this is bad for you spiritually!"). It's a largely counterproductive framing for the reasons you mentioned. But I still won't willfully make myself feel uncomfortable in this way merely as some masochistic exercise. I also avoid real-life videos of people getting beat up or severely hurt or scared for the same reason.

Don't worry. It's only a handheld fan gently blowing air towards them ?

Do you connect to it, does it feel meaningful, does it make sense, does it enrich your experience? If so, then you understand it. Deep understanding is when you understand something in a larger context or in relationship to more things. For example, you might understand how somebody is feeling by picking up on their emotional expressions, but you'll understand it on an even deeper level if you've experienced what they're going through yourself. Another example can be in the realm of conceptual understanding, where deeper understanding is about being aware of the conceptual richness that surrounds a given subject, for example spirituality (). Is spirituality just one thing or many possible things? Does it have different facets and manifestations? Does it overlap with different concepts? Is it dependent on things like culture or personal dispositions? Generally, how does spirituality relate to other things? Then you also have things like art, literature and music, where it's about understanding the different layers of a composition, or the different levels of meaning or interpretation of a story. Or sports, where it's about understanding the different components that go into making the best athlete, how they have to perfect their every move on and off the field, during the execution itself and during the preparation. The list goes on.