Carl-Richard

Yes, it's probably possible to survive and "thrive" as a retarded non-verbal savage. I can concede that my first statement has extreme edge-cases where it doesn't necessarily apply. But if you ask most people, they would probably want to avoid anything that moves them closer to such a state of being. Humans don't really "need" anything. They can be hooked up to a machine and fed IV and kept in an artifical coma. But again, most people probably wouldn't want that. And the reality is most people, even the most isolated and lonely people, have been social for most of their life and still are somewhat social, but they're currently just half-assing it and slowly degenerating. Ramana Maharshi, who's writings culminated in a famous book with the foreword written by Carl Jung, is retarded? Sadhguru, who runs one of the largest voluntary organizations on the planet, is retarded? Ok.

And those children are being brought up in a warm, prosocial home with loving parents that feed them and teach them how to speak, walk, etc. But they will be retarded. Show me a retarded yogi.

Try putting a baby out in the forest by themselves and see if they become yogi. Sure, if we assume some baseline level of healthy prosocial upbringing without brain-crushing levels of trauma and neglect, you could at some point discover the path, awaken and legitimately transcend many types of psychological and even physiological types of lack and maintain a very healthy level of functioning despite them. But, again, getting yourself to that point, and also getting there sincerely without the "I want to be something I never was" Puer Aeternus spirituality, will definitely require some level of prosocial engagement.

It's only a modern psychotic delusion that you can survive and thrive without being social. Your brain and body is literally wired for being social. If you find any holistic psychological/health model worth their salt, they will include a social aspect in them in some way or another.

When I bought my new phone last Christmas, I gave my old phone essentially the type of attention and respect that you would give at a funeral, before I slowly laid it down in my bedroom drawer and pushed the drawer shut. So no, you're not the only one You develop emotional attachments to anything you assign emotional significance to. It doesn't matter if it's a piece of lint in your room or a warm fleshy human being.

Shit, or rather "short". I've been spending the last month working until like 7-9 PM, eating "dinner" at 8-10 PM, then working out, then eating again, and then it's like 3-4 AM before I'm in bed and I'm up at 7-9 AM. But that's what I gotta do to get 90 participants for my study when my advisor hasn't yet given me bachelor students to work for me (And it's not like spamming surveys on internet forums like I did for my bachelor's; it's running ads, updating them, scheduling meetings, doing the meetings, giving the participants surveys, screening them based on the surveys, measuring their brains pre and post study, emails, etc.).

Either decide beforehand that you will 100% have a trip, or do one retreat without a trip and one with a trip. Your mind might want to treat it like an escape if you leave it as an option that you can take based on some impulse, and then you'll possibly avoid facing some really deep problem. I generally recommend in spiritual practice to choose one practice at a time and focus all your attention on it for a while. When you leave your mind with too many options, too much uncertainty and complexity, your mind will take over and make it a game. Keep it simple, commit, stick with it and then maybe try something different later. It's also just inefficient to switch between tasks too often. There is an analogy to government bodies (in democratic systems). An efficient government has a chief executive that makes decisions based on established laws approved by the legislature. If the laws are constantly questioned or re-written, you'll experience bureaucratic malaise and little gets done. An efficient government divides the activities into separate bodies, allowing each body to focus on their own activity and limiting task-switching (task-switching from a simple cognitive standpoint is an inherently costly activity). So separating your activities into different clear-defined chunks and focusing on them separately will reduce task-switching and increase efficiency.

I just ran across an old meta-systematic observation I've had: What climate vs weather is to meteorology is what phylogenetics vs ontogenetics is to biology. Climate type = species, weather type = individual phenotypes within that species. This also gives new meaning to the idea of "weather gods". And if for example tornado weather is a phenotype, then an individual tornado is an individual organism. And like biological organisms, tornadoes are self-organizing structures ("spontaneous order"), but they are not autopoetic (they don't eat and metabolize food in order to build and conserve their structure).

So I was reading some of Hanzi Freinacht's The Listening Society some while ago. He went into how disillusioned he felt when observing the everyday interactions of otherwise quite brilliant people in his life and how cognitively not-complex they were, mostly situated around Level 10-11 Abstract-Formal in the Model of Hierarchical Complexity (MHC). Level 10-11 is essentially the cognitive equivalent of high-Blue to low-Orange in SD. In his book, he makes the distinction between cognitive complexity and symbolic code, and also presents the concept of downward assimilation. To put it as an example: it's possible for a cognitively Blue person to engage with ideas way above Blue (maybe even Yellow), because they have installed the language (symbolic code) of the higher stages, but they are engaging with it in a simplified way which is consistent with their cognitive complexity, "assimilating it downwards". So there is a big potential to fool oneself that one is more complex than one actually is. Now, most everyday interactions don't need to be that complex, and that's fine. You might talk about a concept or two (10 Abstract), or you might string some of them together in a formal relationship (11 Formal), but rarely, if ever, do you need to construct an entire new system of thought (12 Systematic), certainly not a new concept that connects different systems together (13 Meta-systematic). However, it would be good to know what you're actually capable of, and a good estimate of this is proposed by Freinacht: do you regularly produce original ideas at a given level? So I decided to test this on myself by reading through some of my own forum posts and seeing what is the most complex original idea I could find. At the moment, I've landed on this: Before I get my hopes up, while on the surface it looks pretty "meta" and big picture, if we are going to be strict, this is at most 12 Systematic, i.e. cognitively high-Orange. It presents a variety of different concepts with a variety of different relationships, i.e. a system. And it's not just a few isolated relationships presented separately (11 Formal), but rather the relationships are quite interconnected, and often structured and layered, like categories or levels, and often circular in some way. For example, a relatively simple system is a feedback loop (you have inputs and outputs and outputs that become their own inputs). Now, you can doubt that it's even original, but then I'll ask: have you ever seen that map before? While the concepts in the system are not original (e.g. being, meaning, virtue), the way they are being connected to each other seems original, or at least I don't remember ever consulting anyone for how to structure that map. It was something that came to me as an insight. Based on this, it should be classifiable as 12 Systematic thinking. So if that was just 12 Systematic thinking, then what is 13 Meta-systematic (cognitively Green-Yellow) thinking? Again, it's when you come up with an original concept that connects different systems together, extracting a common theme from the different systems. Now, you could argue that the different concepts in my map are by themselves their own systems (e.g. Being is based in Eastern spiritual thought, Meaning is Western spiritual thought, etc.), and that I could therefore be using 13 Meta-systematic concepts to connect the systems together. However, in that case, the only possible candidate for such a concept is "hierarchy" (from "most abstract", to "less abstract", to "more concrete"). I didn't invent the concept of "hierarchy" or "level of abstraction". I learned those from somewhere else. So no, I did not come up with my own concept that connects different systems, which means it's not 13 Meta-systematic thinking. But what would be a meta-systematic concept like "hierarchy", "level of abstraction" or "downward assimilation" that I have created? I actually can't think of a single one. Now, I think creating such concepts, regularly, on the fly, is ridiculous. Somebody who comes to mind is Eric Weinstein. I swear he has like his own wikipedia (theportal.wiki) where he offloads all of his meta-systematic neologism. Maybe that is why I think he sounds ridiculous sometimes when he speaks 😂 (I think it's also a stylistic issue, but anyways). But he also has his own Theory of Everything in physics, which is way beyond that, into 14-15 Paradigmatic–Cross-paradigmatic, so it's maybe not so surprising. Suffice to say, regularly operating at these levels of complexity is probably reserved to geniuses. But I'll keep digging for any meta-systematic concepts of my own. What do you think is your level of cognitive complexity? What do you usually operate at and what is your peak? Keep in mind the distinction between cognitive complexity and symbolic code. Have you ever created an original meta-systematic concept before? By the way, I think me and most people here operate at 10-11 Abstract-Formal most of the time, mainly because we don't need to do anything else to live decently well.

Please provide counters to this claim and I will see if answers arise that defend it. The only rule is no LLM assistance, at least for your first post. Only human thinking is allowed for your first post 🤓

"Sound justification" is the thing you like. If you drop that thing and all you have left is the things you don't like, then you will likely skew towards calling them a madman rather than genius.

Essentially what I'm saying.

If I drink orange juice, that alters my brain chemistry. Does that mean orange juice "isn't true"? You have to clarify your distinctions. What people generally regard to be "not true" (not real) is simply what is commonly agreed upon to be not real; any thing that is not "normal experience". If I hear voices that tell me to do criminal acts and 99.9% of people don't, then that is the reason they're called not real: virtually nobody else hears those kinds of voices. However, if you ask someone "are your thoughts real?", "are your emotions real?", "are your sensations and perceptions real?", they would probably be inclined to answer "yes", even though nobody else experiences their exact thoughts, emotions, sensations, etc. What they will think is not real is that which radically deviates from their own experiences.

I'm saying whatever distinction you make, and whatever you attribute to the genius as opposed to the madman, will be things you like. Sound justification, clarity and having at least a basic understanding, are things you like.

Because the truth (which is beyond words) has to be put into words and practice, and there are many seemingly conflicting ways to do this, e.g. cataphatic vs apophatic descriptions ("God is x" vs "God is not x"), restriction (e.g. ascetism, monkhood) vs indulgence (e.g. "aghori", tantra), sensory deprivation vs sensory stimulation, devotional vs focused practices, various ethical codes of conduct. Throw into that variation based on geographical location and local cultural history and the co-opting of religion for various survival needs, and you have an answer. And how to solve these apparent contradictions ("what should I do?"), if you are an intellectually awakened and pluralistically aware New Ager, is simply to try out different things and see what works best for you. Different people may respond differently to different things, simply because they are different, but also because they may be on different parts of the path. What may be appropriate for a newbie with 0 hours of meditation experience vs an experienced meditator with 1000 hours of experience and multiple awakening experiences can be quite "contradicting".

What do you have problems with in the RationalWiki article?

Many years ago, I had an intuition about a way to explain psychosis, which essentially goes like "more attachment = higher predisposition to psychosis". However, back then, I didn't have much of a theoretical or analytical rationale for the theory. It was really just an intuition. But now, I think the pieces are starting to fall together. I started thinking about the distinction between "rumination" and "reflection", which was essentially coined to resolve the apparent paradox that thinking obsessively (deeply and repetitively) about oneself is both associated with increased quality of life (through things like increased self-insight, intellectual depth, problem-solving, etc.; "reflection") and a decreased quality of life (through things like depressive brooding, mulling over past mistakes, or worrying about future events; "rumination"). While I haven't specifically looked at the literature yet, an "intuition" I had about this is that rumination concerns primarily unresolved goal-discrepancies (things not going the way you want or believe is right) with accompanying strong negative emotional reactions, and while reflection may also involve unresolved goal-discrepancies, it will not have the same strong negative emotional reactions (it will generally have a more positive, lighter or detached tone). Now, rumination predisposes one to a reduction of quality of life and mental illnesses, where psychosis is one possibilty (and arguably a logical conclusion or extreme end-point of mental illness; a disintegration of the normal functioning of the psyche). Also, in a paper on spontaneous thought (which rumination is a sub-category of), they speculated that the "funneling effect" associated with rumination where you focus obsessively on the self, could also be present in mania in bipolar disorder (where intense excitement and obsessive focus on quite particular topics produce thoughts at a rapid pace), which of course at its extremes lead to psychosis. Now, what could this "funneling effect" (obsessive focus or self-focus) and strong emotional reactions to things not going the way you want or believe is right, also be described as? Attachment. Now, during this insight about reflection vs. rumination, I also saw the connection to self-determination theory, in that self-determination is when your behavior is determined by what you want, or think is right or enjoyable, which is of course associated with positive and lighter emotions and motivation. So when reflecting about something deep about yourself, about something you want to do, or when reflecting is itself something you want to do, that will of course be associated with more positive and lighter emotions. Conversely, rumination focuses much more on things that you "don't" want (resistance), and even the process itself might be something you don't want (because it involves strong negative emotions). So self-focus + resistance creates stronger emotional reactions and stronger attachments. Conversely, when your emotions are lighter, you are more "detached", less emotionally reactive, more meta-cognitively aware; generally higher cognitive functioning. Two related concepts, "cognitive flexibility" and "psychological flexibility", more generally describe the ability to problem-solve in ways that are more cognitively functional in these ways, and for the latter, "acceptance" (the opposite of resistance) is listed as a sub-category. So reflection could be a generally more self-determined form of introspection while rumination could be generally less self-determined. Rumination is also specifically associated with decreased meta-cognitive awareness (awareness of thinking or that you are thinking), so the thinking is more outside one's sense of control and you might not even notice that it's happening before a long time. This is another way it becomes less self-determined. So in short: obsessive thoughts about things that don't happen the way you want or believe is right + strong negative emotional reaction = attachment -> reduction of quality of life -> mental illness -> psychosis.

What is it that makes you think you are wasting your life? What is the alternative? What are the values you are striving towards?

No, that's just people who live on Actualized.org

But why? 😆 Do you have any ideas why that is or are you completely clueless?

Sure, let's derail this ancient thread with a debate on telepathy: 1. Telepathy does not have to "cheat evolution" but it could be limited in its scope and occurence just like any other sense or cognitive faculty. 2. Why do you think telepathy isn't already everywhere? Why do you think other species don't have telepathy?

And before you know it, your life that you thought was amazing was fragile like a house of cards. The supremacy of ignorance, unpredictability, impermanence and change.

Theories are meant to categorize, so that cannot be the sole critique of stage theory in particular. A valid critique of stage theory and SD in particular is that the categories are less applicable or less justified in some situations than others. Particularly, stage theories and their many historical examples, according to my knowledge, exclusively skew in favor of describing Western society. I can't think of one example of a known stage theory as a whole that applies either equally or more to non-Western societies.

I think the dream I had last night which I wrote about above came as if you had ordered it 😆 Talk about psychically communicating with the universe 😆 But yes, I've had a decent amount of personal experiences that, even if most aren't "100% proof", if I grant psychic phenomena to be possible, they just become so much easier to explain.

I once made a thread about some prophetic or rather spatially non-local but temporally parallel dreams I had. I think I just had another one, and this one is probably one of the weaker ones, but it's still interesting so I'll share it: Firstly, all these dreams are nightmares which end with me suddenly waking up. I seldom have such nightmares, and I can't remember the last one I've had. And all of them seem to happen temporally parallell to the real-life event (so while I'm dreaming, the event is happening). So in the dream, me and two people I know are in a garage. One of them is standing on what looks like a skateboard, but instead of a wooden board, it's this thin, red, carbon-fiber-like but also spandex-like fabric that is stretched out really thin, and it has a tiny hole in it, maybe two centimeters in diameter, near one of the corners. They are very inexperienced with skating and are barely able to keep balance. They slowly skate over to this low (probably 30 centimeters tall) non-mortar brick wall consisting of decently sized natural rocks. Then they lose balance and fall ontop of this wall of rather pointy, sharp and unwelcoming rocks. They really hurt themselves and lie there screaming. Me and the other person walk over to see if the person is alright. The person starts shouting really fast and desperately while in intense pain, saying "Call 911 now! Call 911 now! Call 911 now! Call 911 now! Call 911 now! Call 911 now!" etc., and they just keep going. And the other person starts supporting one of their legs which seems totally broken, almost missing parts of it. In general, their legs were really badly broken. As their voice becomes more and more desperate, I wake up from the dream. It also turns out I had overslept (the time was 1 PM and I had to rush to get to a meeting). Anyways, I found out later that day, as I was asleep and starting at 12:30 PM, there was a school shooting in Sweden, the worst they have ever experienced. This reminds me of one of my earlier dreams that occured during one of the worst disasters that particular area had ever experienced. Now, the overlap here with the dream and the real-life event is obviously people getting hurt, lying on the ground, probably some of them screaming for help, possibly somebody screaming to call 911, and possibly somebody having their legs severely broken and not being able to get up. But then as I'm writing this, I just thought about something else: why was the skateboard made out of red fabric? Why was there a tiny hole in it? I feel like I'm really stretching it here, but you simply cannot not ask the question: is it a bullet hole? Is it red because it has something to do with blood? Or danger? That last detail is not really the main attraction that drives it home for me, but it makes you think.