Carl-Richard

Norwegian Symphonic Black Metal has an atmosphere and darkness that is entirely unique in its magnitude and depth. I will never forget when I discovered Emperor. There is an artistic vision and visual and imaginative quality that comes with the entire sound that is so elaborate and well-conceived.

I mean, the self-aware self in humans arose as far as we can tell only between 30-70k years ago. There weren't even any anatomical changes attributed to the change. It's quite mysterious how it happened. So if there were no salient anatomical differences between pre-self-aware humans and self-aware humans, do you think pre-self-aware humans had emotions or not? Imagine talking to (I guess they didn't have complex language yet) or meeting such a human. Do you think they would show signs of anger, fear, disgust, happiness, sadness? How do you know a person is angry? They will show it to you. Look at any animal, perhaps mammals are the best examples, e.g. a cat or a tiger. Are you going to tell me you've never seen an angry cat? "But antropomorphizing". Really? What about a growling bear, or a growling chimpanzee, or a growling... human. "Lol, calm down bro".

How strict? Give us your definition. What about scholars? Things started collapsing as soon the implication that the cause of the energy had to be removed from the Earth somehow had been made. The moderation practices occurred up to that point. After that point, I'm not sure any moderation practices occurred in any structured degree. It was sort of like the rug was pulled from beneath the picnic party and people's bare asses landed in the dirt and the ants started crawling and people started fleeing.

It was a quite structured practice of readers (like moderators) ensuring a minimum level of quality of the members. I'm giving the position that gives credence to the common crowd of people who make such videos as above and also the scholars (the majority) who say the same thing. If you want to somehow make it more strict for some credence of, I guess simply being strict, or perhaps downplaying the different things that may occur in a "weak definition" of a cult, then that's your prerogative. But if you ask me, I don't think defining the Discord described above or the forum described as similar to it as "weakly defined" changes the fact that they may have various dynamics which may warrant some caution and perhaps a label (if not the label "cult" as is).

Leave / take a break (until you get a clear reading, that was a practice as far as I can remember). A bit like if you post while drunk, you get moderated. A bit like if you break the guidelines, you get moderated. A bit like if you get moderated enough times, you get kicked out. Replace "Discord" with "forum" and "harmful energies" with "non-duality" and "one of the most advanced members" with Nahm and you have the ousting of Nahm and other events (Leo's 30-day 5-MeO experiment, Leo's "mean phase"/"psychosis", the fractioning into an accused faction who left to establish a different community and the rest who stayed, Leo's eventual apology for being mean). The difference is that here, the leader and members are still active. If you feel compelled to call what I described a cult, then you might sympathize with the person in the video above calling this place a cult. It essentially boils down to "look at these weird people with these weird beliefs" (which is essentially what most scholars define cults as anyway: social groups with deviant beliefs compared to society, often with a religious nature).

Once upon a time, there was a Discord server lead by a charismatic spiritual person. People talked together about spiritual stuff, had group meditations, things were going great. Then the leader had a series of psychedelic experiences that radically shifted their perspective. Then they started to believe that harmful energies were pervading the server and that they had to find a way to eliminate them. They started screening people for their energy (through readings) and if you had what was considered bad energy, you had to leave or take a break (you certainly couldn't join as a new member). The energy problems worsened over time according to the leader, until they "realized" that one of the higher-ups and most advanced members were purportedly the cause of the energy. Not only that, the leader said that if the energy would not be stopped, it would eventually spread to the entire world and that would be the end of the world as we know it. And when asked how the energy could be stopped, he answered "you know how..." in a somber tone. After that, the Discord fractured and some went with the accused faction, others stayed with the leader, and eventually it all fizzled out (as far as the official server was concerned; who knows which offshoots still exist, and mercy be on their soul) and the leader later re-surfaced in a YouTube video saying they were sorry for the pain they had caused and that they had entered a psychosis at that moment in time. Everybody was free to leave, nobody had to pay anything, nobody was sexually abused (as far as we know; it was an online Discord community). The leader could be challenged, the leader was always open to discussion (as a default, perhaps it deterioated a bit at the end). Was it a cult?

It makes a higher amount of angry expressions in response to a failed/blocked goal compared to a fulfilled goal is what they found in that 2006 study. You're maybe underestimating the complexity of 4-month-old cognition (they can orient their attention, move, grab things) and also that evolutionarily speaking, the self occurred later (way later, millions of years) than emotions. This tracks with the evolution of the cortex "out from" what we today consider the limbic structures. I've argued that cells could have behavioral modes that resemble anger (energy that faciliates breaking through a blockade or boundary), but that would of course not be mediated by a limbic system as in humans. But I guess the question you can ask is are most animals capable of anger? What humans do with their self-reflective ability is they reflect and magnify and echo and reverberate emotional states, such that emotional states can trigger other emotional states through interaction with thought and interpretation. That doesn't mean the emotions are necessarily always born from the reflective capacity. They just often tend to occur in conjuction with them.

I don't know about the nuances here. Anger is frustration on speed dial.

The way causality is claimed for a statistical relationship is when you can determine the timing of the cause and the effect (the cause must precede the effect) and you have a plausible causal mechanism that rules out other potential causal mechanisms. The problem with medicine is that the latter is rarely achieved. You usually at best get competing causal mechanisms. I'm not reducing it to a "scientific lens". But what's a statistic? If I say "ADHD has been especially linked to 32 types of events", or "it's been shown that young boys have a 31% probability to be diagnosed with ADHD in school", what's that called?

Bodily movement that involves coordination is goal-oriented. Most 4-month-olds can hold objects. Closing your fist around an object and holding it involves coordination. The goal is to hold the object. If the 4-month-old fails in that goal, that could be a source of anger.

Regarding behavior that repeats: what about novel events like Michael Jackson being born? But isn't every birth also novel? Every cycle, every repetition? It's just a change in the particular configuration of the entire universe. Also, I don't see how you could separate behavior from the conditions. Like if an elephant spawned 40 ft up in the air in front of your front porch, how would you know whether that wasn't supposed to happen? "Laws" are just best guesses best on previous observations: per Hume, you can't say for sure whether you have found "the conditions" that produces the behavior. So not sure where we are going with this. The NDE point I made that you're referencing was essentially this (and it's a bit more specific than "NDE events"): If we find out we can see in a way that is not requiring sensory organs built through millions of years of evolution, then it makes you think that maybe other things we previously thought required evolution (e.g. higher thinking, planning, deliberation, intention) could also exist prior to evolution, and maybe that applies to God itself. So it's not just thoughts and intentions floating around in the ether perhaps as non-physical formed etherial beings but they are at the foundation of the workings of the entire reality. It may seem like a big jump, but it makes you think in that direction. As for assigning a probability to this suggestion, I have virtually no idea. But it seems like it opens you mind towards thinking in that direction. The alternative would be that you would not discover the way of seeing without biological sense organs and then the thought wouldn't even arise. Then you're certainly further from thinking about concluding in that direction. Now, I deliberately avoided addressing the following issues for sake of clarity: I spoke about two types of naturalism in that thread, and in the response above, I talked about naturalism in the limited sense of biological evolution and other mainstream contemporary ideas being the "physical laws". While in the other sense of the word, I talked about it as being essentially compatible with what we now like to call "supernaturalism": i.e., if we were to deduce the laws governing the mind of God were the mind of God be agential and capable of planning and other higher thinking functions, then we have capitulated naturalism while still conceding to supernaturalism. So when you ask me how do I square naturalism and supernaturalism (or how do I move towards either and away from the other), we have to make clear what idea of naturalism we're using. By the way, sorry for "dodging" the few last times, sometimes I just forget to respond (but I actually didn't forget this time, I just had to wait for the right time).

You don't prove a causal relationship by finding a correlation. That requires a bit more. You're simply pointing out the difference between a causal relationship and a spurious correlation. They can even disagree on metaphysics, like "is the world physical or mental?". Pretty on point.

Anger can be pre-egoic (if the ego is a self-aware identity). The way anger decreases as "consciousness" increases is that you identify with whatever is happening so that becomes your goal (or you perceive the circumstances with such fidelity that everything is expected and understood as part of the process to the goal) and therefore anger doesn't actually arise when so called "bad things" happen. Everything is supposed to happen. And you can also have anger arise and have the awareness to deal with it in the way you like (re-interpreting it, not reacting to it, or externalizing it the way the emotion is intended). People who have anger issues typically have a lack of control mechanisms, lack of awareness, of their internal state and outside affairs. They simply perceive everything as an obstacle to their goals, or they have such narrow goals or narrow perception of their goals that everything stands in opposition to those goals, so anger arises frequently, and they lack the control mechanisms to deal with the anger so they express it intuitively/compulsively without thinking about it, so they externalize anger frequently in an unfiltered and unthinking way. The jump from Tier 1 to Tier 2 is marked by a marked decrease in anger. You understand more, you see how it's a part of the larger picture, you identify more with all kinds of people, their anger, their lack of awareness, their goals are accommodated with your goals, their anger and lack of awareness is ultimately not seen as an obstacle to your goals (because you see them as a part of the process to the higher goals).

Along with the "proper definition created by cult researcher and cult deprogramming expert Steven Hassan".

May I politely offer an Earth-sized facepalm for me and the rest of the thread sir. You can disagree about what scholars think cults mean without throwing all of scholars (but one, conveniently) under the bus regarding all of epistemology.

That definition seems to fall under the definition of "destructive cult". Yeah yeah, I don't understand understand anything, only your perspective is right, not a cult.

No, that's your cult definition of a cult. But I will agree the word "cult" is garbage, it's mostly used to sling poo at people you disagree with, and not all cults are super destructive and exploitative. And I'm not co-signing the garbage video above either.

I think nobody here has even read the Wikipedia page on cults and are just having an emotional freakout to being called a cult. When I learned about cults in uni, it was defined in contrast to sects in that sects create their own version of (and claim to be the "true version" of) some existing mainstream religious denomination, while cults essentially create their own kind of religion. Their beliefs are not tied to just one single religious denomination. They may synthesize many of them or simply create "their own beliefs" (if that's possible), often through the personal machinations of the leader. And as a result, they end up being at odds with the surrounding society in some way. And that increases group cohesion, and especially when the leader is very charismatic and has self-proclaimed superiority over not just the members but perhaps the rest of the surrounding culture and society, that is where the psychological and group dynamics commonly associated with cults start to take form. And before your mind goes to "but Actualized.org is not a religion", feel free to read the Wikipedia page on that too.

"To call us a cult, you must join". 🤔

Phuack wymyn - Norwegian Institute of Public Health (and the literature they're basing it on 🧐).

@TruthFreedom What about sharing love just because you're that loving?

My stepdad gets so angry when I start talking about environmental toxins in fish and he's like "I simply follow the recommendations from the institute of public health and they say we can eat fish; instead of doing my own research, I just trust the 1000s of scientists who have already done the research and have done it better than I could ever do on my own". (It's not that simple by the way; he has probably not read any of the more specific recommendations that deal with contamination of e.g. self-caught fish and fish organ meats, avoiding certain species of fish during pregnancy). Meanwhile I'm like "hey, I just use it as a hypothesis for why I feel tired after eating cod and not salmon, and the institute of public health doesn't have a specific answer for that, so then I have to do my own research". He's like computing me talking about contaminants in the food he likes as "do not eat fish". He is really sharp and quick in a certain way, but he lacks any and all finesse and nuance sometimes. Businessman, super concerned about being pragmatic and forward-moving, getting results, not so much about getting to the bottom of things. It's like a complete clash, my entire being threatens his entire existence lol. Also, the way the institutes settle on a recommendation depends on cut-off values for what they consider to be safe, and those rely mostly on studies on developmental deficits (neurological and behavioral) in children (and sperm quality lol). There is probably no way they would capture the issues I'm concerned about like acute post-meal effects on cognition and performance and general energy levels (in adults, let alone children). Yeah ok, if you don't eat more than two portions of fatty fish per week, you won't be "brain damaged" per the definition of the institute, but what about say a 10%-30% acute drop in working memory performance?

There is like a spectrum of the alleged authority of the leader: At the very top-end, nobody is like the leader and nobody will ever be like them. That's like the peak Heaven's Gate type cult (not sure how accurate this is, but you get the point). Then under that you have where nobody is like the leader currently but that may change or is promised as a possibility. That's where Actualized is at. Then you have where the leader does not treat themselves as supreme and there are other examples of the same level of realization or teachings (but they still claim to be pointing to an Absolute truth). That would be perhaps some contemporary non-duality communities (maybe Sadhguru, Spira, Tolle). Then you simply have leaders or communities that claim special knowledge that is not necessarily absolute (or the leader is just charismatic) and they draw people in and exist on the margins of society. Perhaps Charles Manson's cult (I'm actually not sure of that example either, but again, you get the point). Regardless of this, the point is that the more power is given to the leader, deliberately or not, the more cultish the dynamics become. The siloing from the larger society and the various psychological dynamics become stronger. And it doesn't matter that the concrete teachings are about independence of thought or becoming aware of self-bias or whatever clever and virtuous teachings that make the members feel like they're in control. The fact that the leader proclaims to be in that position of power, creates conflict with such teachings, and it will play on the members' psyches in pernicious ways. And such teachings will be used to protect the teacher. "You're just not openminded enough". "Be aware of your projections and biases". "You're too attached to your survival story". You can watch the Bentinho testimonies for all this. Cult dynamics are notoriously tricky and shifty and may play in large part under the surface in line with ego defense mechanisms of the members (suppress, deny, accommodate) and systemic effects across members (scapegoating, keeping the peace, maintaining group harmony, etc.). And again, the concrete teachings can create a false sense of security and even perpetuate the very cult dynamics they are purported to prevent.

One of the funniest videos on YouTube. Absolutely unhinged genius comedy.

Who said perfect?