Carl-Richard

I have a theory (not a conspiracy theory): the people who get strongly drawn to conspiracy theories are the same people who get drawn to supernatural ideas, like God creating the universe from their own predetermined plan (not simply evolving spontaneously through "natural law"). They are fine with explaining reality top down through an elaborate narrative. There is a seeming plan behind everything, behind world politics, behind alien invasions, behind wars, behind ancient history, and they all connect to a grand meta-narrative of control, of manufacturing, of conscious creating, rather than natural systems acting spontaneously. Those who criticize conspiracy theories point out how that level of organization, of top-down control, is unlikely if not impossible, because of the natural tendency towards spontaneous order and the infeasibility of controlling complex systems. In the "naturalist critique", everybody is a victim of systems, even the supposed people in power, while in the conspiracist's mind, the people in power are the controllers of the systems and the powerless are the victims. Whether one is more correct than the other is actually hard to say, and a naturalist that claims otherwise would then become a conspiracy theorist in their own right, thinking they have the level of insight and knowledge to be able to predict complex systems. As for myself, as a general predisposition, I've noticed I'm fine with either (naturalism or supernaturalism). While for example Bernardo Kastrup says he is strongly opposed to supernaturalism simply as a personal predisposition (which is why he says he sees no point in doing philosophy if nature is not simply naturalistic; no "God" at the top planning it all, intervening into nature and changing the natural course of things). But I would also challenge this idea of naturalism, that you could still try to deduce the "laws" behind God's planning so to speak, and it won't be a completely pointless endeavour, simply a more interesting one. Like trying to understand the psychology of God rather than the "physics" of God.

What makes the human experience meaning? Grow that like a plant.

I'm gay. So gay. 💅

Cheese, sour cream and the like are really the only diary products I can eat without issues.

So I was doing N-Back training, which for me notably involves memorizing and rehearsing a growing string of letters and their positions in a three-by-three grid. Then I noticed that the sound of the letters I was rehearsing internally, could just as well have been me rehearsing some bodily movement, like a dance move, because the sound is a byproduct of a mouth movement after all, and because I'm just attaching meaning to the sound, it's not inherent to the sound. We all have experienced this before where we repeat something enough times and the word loses meaning and just becomes a weird sound. But this was special in that I was noticing it happening as I was storing relationships between different sounds in my memory, and I really got the directly felt experiental sense that all sort of language processing or storing and manipulating symbols and their relationships, their logic — all of it was first seen for what it is with its meaning attached, and then for a short moment, all of that meaning was seen through as a marvelous illusion, and all that was left was the bare bones of the structured noises underneath. Now, imagine if you had used bodily movements like dance moves to memorize things and communicate instead of sounds. That's what deaf people who speak sign language do after all. Imagine that if you were reading these letters, instead of sounds in your head, dance moves popped up.

What you wrote is grammatically incorrect and I don't understand it.

Lactose intolerance is a spectrum. Find out where you're on that spectrum. I personally notice slight brain fog issues.

I'm familiar with Tanya Luhrmann, or rather I one time attended as an audience member a live panel where she was one of the speakers. It was actually a discussion touching on psychic phenomena, it was one of the things that made me take it more seriously: Well yes, it's interesting that the voices tended to be predominantly positive according to interviewees from African and Indian cultures but not interviewees from American culture. But of course, this doesn't go very far in supporting the wider claim of "schizophrenia is a Western disease". In non-Western schizophrenics, you still have negative voices, you still have delusions, thought disorder, "negative symptoms" (anhedonia, reduced cognitive functioning, etc.). And such people still get cast out from society for acting out of line. See Robert Sapolsky's research on this particular matter (in this case an African tribe called the Masai): 49:51 I think an important lesson of Luhrmann's study is that the framing of "mental illness" or "you're hurt, broken, your genes are dysfunctional, you were hurt in the past and thus you're hurt now" can be significantly hurtful, something I too agree with. I've given an in-depth run-through of this in a slightly different context:

@Inliytened1 @Joseph Maynor Wtf are you two guys doing 🙂‍↕️

Link?

Kindergarteners too. It's just in this case, they are wrong. Schizophrenia is not just a "Western" disease. Was that hostile? 😱 Sounds a bit paranoid if you ask me 😛

I believe Sadhguru said something like: "if you speak to God, you're a mystic. If God talks back, you're a schizophrenic". No, the schizophrenics get cast out there too. It's the schizotypals (schizophrenia-lite) that get to be the shamans. The schizotypals are wacky enough that they can use their powers in certain settings but can turn it off and act normal enough to not be a serious problem when it's not needed. A subreddit filled with psychotic people is your source of information, yes, sounds very reasonable.

Then take a benzo when you're not anxious and you'll see what I mean. (I think I only have experience taking it together with weed; it made the weed experience more... chill. Interestingly, it also seemed to cancel out at least some of the time dilation effect).

That's not a cult, they're having a good time ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

My guy, I didn't order these dreams. And the dreams were again seemingly or likely temporally parallel to the real life events, so I was not getting an edge on anybody else in that sense (the edge was "spatial"). There is an idea that the ego and also sensory input (and the latter gets virtually shut off in dreams) closes one off to psychic effects. When you remove the filtering on reality (be it the ego or sensory inputs), or the noise/distractions, you start to become susceptible to such influences.

A dog (probably) wouldn't be eating fruit from a medicine-blue plastic bag either 🐶

So literally pure psychic phenomena. Reality is, your mind and its ideas influences your actions both consciously and subconsciously. It influences what you focus on, what you find relevant, salient, etc. If you entertain an idea in your mind and focus on it a lot, it will influence your life in some way, even if you think you're just being passive and not truly acting on it. Because you're always acting, you can't stop acting, and what influences your actions? Your mind. I think the lesson of manifestation is that there is no true divide between mind and matter and that you get more of what you focus on.

Not long ago I was on a ferry in the lounge and I opened a thin medicine-blue plastic bag I had gotten from somebody I was travelling with to get a fruit, and as I started eating it, I started smelling sunscreen, and then I started tasting it too. So I smelled inside the bag and it smelled of sunscreen, so I thought the plastic bag must have contained a sunscreen bottle at some point and that it spilled. So I told them about this and they were like "no, we smell it too, somebody who smells like sunscreen just entered the room we're sitting in". And then I smelled the plastic bag again and then the air and it all made sense. I had so many converging lines of sensory input and evidence, the timing, etc., such a plausible story, that I was completely convinced that there was sunscreen inside the plastic bag, but the sunscreen was instead just in the air. The lesson here again is we ground our reality in exactly these kinds of criteria: convergence of senses and other evidence, timing, "other people's reports / their sensory inputs" (which persuaded me in the other direction again), etc. And of course, we can be wrong about our conviction even if it feels real. But this isn't limited to psychic phenomena, obviously. You can be wrong about what you think is physical reality. Your belief in "the physical" doesn't save you from being wrong.

I mean, I get it, but also, that's like, your opinion, man. "Tranquilizer drugs", do they make you tranquil?

Wtf even is the question. "What is chill?". Tranquility is a fancy word for being chill, perhaps in a sort of distinctive intoxicated way, like sedation, but perhaps without being cognitively diminished. Calm, in a sort of softly euphoric, subtly blissed kind of way, but clearminded. That is just my feeling of the word. "Tranquilizer drugs" like benzodiazepines probably come some of the closest (maybe not coincidentally because of the name).

Being chill.

Bernardo says the statistical significance they use at CERN to claim they have found a new particle, when those same kinds of scientists read psi research, they dismiss the same statistical significance with ironically the same thinking as "law of big numbers" ("in randomness you can find any pattern"). These are again epicycle 'hypotheses', clearly bogus defenses that are contradictory with their very own standards of determining what is real.

Who knows what that could be. But what would be truly impressive is if you saw that exact spider eating that exact bee in your dream at the exact same time as it was happening in real life.

Small things in aggregate can be powerful. You're just looking for a pragmatic investment-cost-benefit equation, saving time for getting the 80%. You are my stepdad. Ok. You still want to test if that is true for calcium. So your focus will be on calcium for some time. You're just ignoring the point I made, but ok. Or do you think you will actually start to have visions of milk if you're calcium-deficient if you have never drank milk? Like evolutionary psychic morphic resonance memory (your ancestors drank milk)?

I'm a sort of "body is intelligent" person: why can't PTH rise or bone deposit status be the signal (or of course more 'holistically' all the related bodily signals that occur when calcium intake is low)?