Meditation has been to shown to correlate with health behaviors.
I personally think most of this effect is mediated through the immediate internal feelings that healthy behaviors produce, more so than believing in the future promises of said behaviors (e.g. decrease in morality, increased longevity, illness prevention). One benefit of the immediate nature of those feelings is that it bypasses much of the problem of delayed gratification usually associated with investing in health behaviors.
Examples of internal feelings (I'm choosing things you would want to avoid to be more illustrative) could be eating too much cake and feeling nauseous, or eating too much junk food and feeling fatigued and mentally dull, or drinking caffeine and then experiencing the crash, or cheating on your workout routine and feeling dull because you're not getting those feelgood chemicals. I'm probably going to write a thesis on this subject which you can read in year 

I remember back when I first started smoking weed, I felt that a part of me was starting to fade away; that neurotic and conscientious part of my identity that was nagging me about what to do and who to be, who and what to care about, and who cares about me, and it struck me as both freeing but also a bit eerie. "Am I just letting a part of me die like this? Who could I be if I didn't hide away from these feelings? Why are those feelings there in the first place? Am I maybe supposed to have them?"
Anyways, soon this feeling, along with pretty much any feelings about that aspect of myself, fell on the backside of my mind for years as my life was crumbling... which eventually lead me to spirituality and my first awakening. There the same thing happened. Suddenly my mind had entered this very different place; quiet, serene, but also empty and in some ways severed from an even larger aspect of myself. It was on a completely different scale than before, and this same eerie feeling caught me: what have I lost in this new change? Have I forgotten something? 
Not many days ago, I remembered back to this eerie feeling, and then I viewed it in context with my current self who is 6 years older, and then I realized: maybe I have forgotten something. This idea of self-transcendence being preceded by self-actualization, of burning karma, of uncovering the shadow, is what my mind was trying to tell me about all those years ago. What I was trying to ignore through substances, and then later meditation, was the very thing I needed to face. It's so obvious, because the same feelings are still there, only magnified and projected out into my actual surroundings: my lack of social aptness leading to less relationships, lack of direction and decisiveness leading to being years behind my peers, etc.
That change cannot be reversed either. My mind will always be different. There is no anti-weed or anti-meditation. I'm also intrinsically less inclined to address those feelings, as I've become accustomed to bypassing the entire machinery. Neither did it help all the spiritual bypassing tropes I was engaging in ("there is only now" = you don't need to work on your future; "practice is ego" = self-defense mechanism for having squandered my plans to join my friend to a year of music school, etc.). Anyways, the lesson is that the thing people call the ego, you should probably listen to it sometimes, because it does have say in your life no matter what you think about it. Then again, maybe I wouldn't be here at all if I didn't take this path. What did I actually lose??

Whatever you do to act on your desires and ultimately survive, has a structure, be it going to the fridge, going to work, or having sex. When you do these things, you feel inherently fulfilled. Merely achieving the desire is just a small part of the equation, and that experience is extremely short-lived. You won't just sit and bask in it for the rest of time. You'll always return to performing actions.
Ok, so that structure can be emulated symbolically in rituals (physically), or stories (metaphorically), or philosophy (theoretically), and merely engaging in these meaning-making behaviors is inherently healthy. It's because they're in fact the symbolic representation of health itself. Health is that which sustains you as an organism, and the structure of that, distilled to its essence, is what you experience as meaning.

Don Beck and Chris Cowan were not Turquoise lol. You can find the book in PDF format on the internet for free if you'd like (parts of it).
 
Now you're conflating Tier 1 and Tier 2. At Tier 2, it's no longer individualist vs. collectivist in the sense of "my values" vs. "our values". It's individualist vs. collectivist in the sense of "all values for me" vs. "all values for us".
It's individualist in the sense of integrating the entire spiral into oneself, and then collectivist in the sense of uniting the spiral in the real world. Yellow is the pre-ignition and Turquoise is the take-off: Bezos going to university vs. Bezos founding Amazon.

That's such a great way of distinguishing between the transpersonal Mind and the personal mind.
 
You're having thoughts, feelings and perceptions that I don't have. That is your dream. I'm dreaming a different dream in that respect. But we're also part of a larger dream; the space between the thoughts, behind the feelings and perceptions.

“It is one great dream dreamed by a single Being, but in such a way that all the
dream characters dream too.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer
Interesting quote from the German philosopher. 
Can dream characters dream too? Something I will have to contemplate. 

Epistemic — relating to knowledge or to the degree of its validation.
Naivety — innocence or unsophistication.
Pitfall — a hidden or unsuspected danger or difficulty.
Here is my rendition of the most common approaches to knowledge and their pitfalls. Usually, one leads to the next:

Naive realism
takes things at face value believes in one's conditioning lack of introspection It's the default mode for most people and is the most naive framework. It tries to label the world accurately, but it fails to become aware of its own constructions. These people think that their view of the world is like looking through a clear glass window, and that people who disagree with their view is either stupid or insane.
When you see through the naivety of naive realism, you will usually move on to skepticism, where some of the pitfalls can be described as naive skepticism:

Naive skepticism
skeptical of most claims to knowledge extremely self-critical hyper-exclusive relativism The naive skeptic is skeptical of all labelling of reality and is pulled down by cynicism and unconstructive behavior. They discard everything that isn't patently self-evident. An example is a person who goes into a philosophy seminar and asks "how do you know that?" until they get kicked out.
Seeing through naive skepticism will usually lead you to pragmatism, where some of the pitfalls can be described as naive pragmatism:

Naive pragmatism
"everything goes" lack of criticism hyper-inclusive relativism There is an openness to all views, but there is a lack of structure or hierarchy, and it therefore struggles to prioritize different claims to knowledge. For example, it will easily place an equal sign between pseudoscience and science (e.g. "astrology = physics").
Seeing through naive pragmatism will usually lead you to metatheorism, where some of the pitfalls can be described as naive metatheorism:

Naive metatheorism
takes a wide perspective has a systematic approach to knowledge becomes lost in its own grand theories subtle realism The naive metatheorist is open, critical and also realistic, and tries to synthesize a coherent system which integrates many types of knowledge.
The pitfall happens when one becomes a bit too optimistic about the universality of one's theories. You start believing that because a theory is "meta" and is able to zoom out across large perspectives (cross-paradigmatic, cross-cultural etc.), it somehow escapes or transcends the limitations of your own cultural and paradigmatic conditioning (i.e. the things that made you arrive at those conclusions in the first place). An example is believing Spiral Dynamics to be the infallible word of God.
That is of course a bit naive, and the way out is to counter that impulse with the earlier lessons of skepticism, and remind yourself that the better the model, the easier it is to get lost in one's own constructions.
 
Who is not naive in any way?
One who has experienced all of these pitfalls first-hand, but who doesn't let that fact curb their ever-expanding thirst for knowledge, and who doesn't pretend that naivety is something one can ever transcend.
 
Did anything I just wrote sound familiar to you? Be honest

@Cthulu It's not just about IQ or even structural changes in the brain. The cognitive-emotional and behavioral aspects are the most important. It's not just weed: any and all habituation to a hyper-normal reward stimulus that requires sub-normal to no work, is inherently anti-hormetic (it lowers resilience and systemic integrity).
In other words, regularly pumping your brain full of reward chemicals without coupling it to any meaningful action, teaches you that meaningful actions are in fact not meaningful. It hijacks the most fundamental psycho-physiological mechanisms that sustains you as an organism.
To think that this does not have severe side effects for your mind or body is absurd. The only reason it has become so accepted in society is because it has become OK to amputate your potential and do just enough to get by. In fact, dissociating yourself from meaning at this level has become a way to cope with the meaning crisis in our current society.
We have to re-discover the inner divine strength of spirituality and the sacred collective practices of religion, so that we can have a truly sustainable opiate of both the individual and the masses.

Note: this is not a developmental model, nor is it about determining which framework is better or worse.

 
What does it do?
It shows how these different metaphysical frameworks differ in terms of the trade-off between comprehensiveness and specificity, which realms they're mainly operating under (hyper-dimensional vs. three-dimensional reality), and which explanatory constraints they're operating under (mysticism vs. naturalism vs. myth).
 
Explaining the different explanatory constraints
Mysticism
- deals with methods, metaphors, anecdotes and stories that aim to facilitate the direct phenomenological experience of God/reality, and these explanations of reality are seen as a means rather than an end. There are no general guidelines for these types of explanations, only that they aim to encapsulate the nature of God.
Naturalism
- deals with analytic philosophy, the scientific method and scientific theories. The goal is to explain a phenomena by reducing it to some other known phenomena that is compatible with the naturalistic paradigm, e.g. explaining rivers by referring to the structural-functional properties of water. The general guidelines for a naturalistic metaphysics is coherence, internal logical consistency, conceptual parsimony, empirical adequacy, and explanatory power.
Myth
- deals with metaphors, anecdotes and stories in order to explain the nature of reality. For example, God created Eve from one of Adam's ribs, which explains the origin of man vs. woman. The general guidelines are specific to each tradition.
 
General -> specific, and hyper-dimensional vs. 3D human realm
The first distinction is a hierarchical one: the closer something is to the top, the more general, comprehensive, holistic, all-encompassing, and big-picture it is, and conversely, the closer something is to the bottom, the more specific and concrete it is. There is an inherent trade-off between these levels, meaning you can only have so much of one or the other, but the different levels also don't have to necessarily contradict each other (although sometimes they do):

For instance, the statement or metaphor "you are imagining everything" of psychedelic mysticism is able to encompass the experiences you encounter in the hyper-dimensional realm ("my couch just talked to me") as well as those in the 3D human realm ("my friend just talked to me"), but it seems to lack more specific explanatory power for the 3D realm. The same applies to nondual mysticism: "there is no separation" doesn't really explain the apparent illusion of separation (or at least the particularities of it, e.g. "why am I able to pick up a cat and not a car?").

On the other hand, the naturalistic frameworks are tied to conventional scientific investigation and analytical standards of reasoning, and these are more able to account for specific things in the 3D realm, like the weight of cats vs. cars, technological innovation and subsequent questions like "is AI sentient?" But these again lose some comprehensiveness, in that some things are either hard or impossible to explain:

One such example is the "Hard problem of consciousness", which has remained unsolved under physicalism (but is solved in analytic idealism, but conversely, it faces the "Decombination problem" which is solved under physicalism). However, analytic idealism seems to have a plausible solution for the Decombination problem (i.e. "dissociation"), but the research around that is still in its infancy. Mysticism has none of these problems, because again, it simply relies on metaphors, anecdotes and fuzzy concepts, not analytic philosophy and science.
 
Specific -> Pseudo-specific
On a less important note, with respect to the two "Myth" frameworks on the bottom, I denoted the tendency towards "pseudo-specific" in the sense that they're both less specific and incredibly specific compared to the naturalistic frameworks. For example, while physicalism can point to things like particles, forces and phase states to explain things like rain and fire, an animist explanation would for example be a "rain spirit" or "fire spirit" for each phenomena. Merely denoting these phenomena as "spirit" doesn't tell you much about their specific properties compared to say their chemical structure, but each explanation is in another sense incredibly specific to the phenomena.
 
Why did I make this?
Because I often see what I consider a harmful tendency towards "naive skepticism", i.e. to dismiss or deny especially analytically rigorous styles of investigation (philosophy & science). I think carefully spelling out these different levels of investigation and seeing the pros and cons in a visual way can help with that. The most important point in this respect is the naturalism vs. mysticism distinction, and that in any sort of inquiry, be it spiritual, self-help or intellectual, one should acknowledge the constraints of each framework and avoid blindly choosing one over the other.

Looking at the empirical evidence (which is tainted by WEIRD bias; "Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic"), SD has doubtful intercultural validity, certainly not cross-cultural. At least it has some empirical evidence though ?, considering it lines up with world history in broad strokes and correlates with other WEIRD stage theories (Piaget, Kohlberg, Loevinger, Kegan etc.).
However, it's practically impossible to create a perfectly universal theory of human development (independent of contextual factors, i.e. culture, socioeconomics etc.) that isn't almost only descriptive (like Sameroff's transactional theory). Predictive models have to be specific on some level, and specificity is a trade-off for generalizability.

After having had to deal with reports from the journaling section for about a year now and having tried repeatedly to find adequate solutions to these problems, I've come to a few conclusions: 
 
1. Moderating personal feuds in the journaling section is nearly impossible to do from an unbiased point of view, both from a technical standpoint and a purely practical standpoint.
1.1 Technical
It involves the same people over and over again; long-term and recurring interpersonal feuds with no definite starting point. This is a known phenomena, and there is no simple solution. Communication theory teaches you this. 
1.2 Practical
It involves scanning through pages upon pages of walls of text in multiple journals, often many hours, days or weeks back in time, and frequently changing between tabs and cross-referencing statements, all while holding two or more conversations in PMs.
 
2. Moderating, as in giving out warning points, should ideally only be done when there is a definite cause of blame.
With complex issues such as these (as stated in 1.1), this is generally not possible. Often, the only valid course of action is manually talking to people, trying to de-escalate tensions, and finally making said people leave each other alone. This is of course ultimately futile when said people like reading other people's journals, and sooner or later, the cycle continues.
 
3. Personal feuds in the journaling section generally happen in a grey area with respect to the guidelines.
These feuds are often fought using covert, subtle and ambiguous language which is not in direct violation of the guidelines. The intended meaning of such language is also hard to decode for a moderator who is not immersed in the same context as the people involved, which goes back to the technical and practical problems in 1.1 and 1.2.
 
Summary and solution:
Personal feuds in the journaling section should therefore be regarded as generally not a moderating issue. That said, moderators are still able to take actions against you the way they see fit, the same way they always have (you're not granted some special protection because you were posting in the journaling section). 
You should only use the report function if there has been a concrete violation of the guidelines, or if you deem it absolutely necessary to do so. It's up to the individuals themselves to decide whether they want to start using the block function, stop reading other people's journals, or leave their emotions aside. Blocking other people keeps you from reading their journals and posts in general, which is the safest option.
Please voice your opinions below.

That further weakens the reasoning behind calling it personality types, because it starts to look more like a quantitative difference than a qualitative difference. I would be perfectly fine with treating cognitive functions as traits that all people have to varying degrees, and then go by a case-by-case basis, instead of subjecting yourself to the myriad of cognitive biases that are naturally associated with working with neatly defined categories such as "types".
I just watched Jordan Peterson's quite embarrasing conversation (for him) with Richard Dawkins, but he made a good point in there: when looking at a large data set, there exists a huge amount of possible correlations and interpretations. The conundrum is: by which mechanism do you pick out the data you want to work with? That is a genuine problem for even the most statistically rigorous types of science.
Now, to me, MBTI typing is when you take a virtually infinitely large and ambigiously defined data set (whatever behavior of the subject you're able to perceive), and while using no structured methodology whatsoever (self-admittedly), you project whatever intuitively derived conclusion you think is relevant for your running hypothesis for a particular type (prone to selection/confirmation bias), all while under the completely unconstrained influence of your egoic drives and the general flaws of the human mind (emotional states and attachments, faulty memories and reasoning, cognitive biases etc.).
I'm immensely turned off by this process, and the times you will catch me engaging in it is because it's frankly addicting. You can avoid a large chunk of these problems by just abolishing the typology structure all together and let each cognitive function (maybe pair) stand on their own in principle, but even then, without any statistical methods, it's still just kind of a hobby. 
Anyways, I think I've said this a couple of times already, and it's not going to change anything, so I think I'll stop criticizing MBTI for a while. Just know that all this harsh critique is just me externalizing how I criticize myself when I'm trying to type somebody, and that when I see somebody like yourself who is apparently taking a more carefree approach, it triggers that process within me

You basically know most of it already, but Jordan Peterson has it the other way around; that meaning creates narrative. I'll try to show how it works: 
"Sentience" (perceiving/feeling), which is the prerequisite to "sapience" (thinking), is a survival trait. In other words, we evolved the ability to feel things like motivation (e.g. to food and mates) and aversion (e.g. to poisons and predators) in order to catalyze "meaningful" movement through the environment; meaningful in the sense that it's ordered (not random) and goal-oriented (aimed at survival). Not coincidentally, what we commonly call sentient beings are highly mobile animals. How exactly "goal-oriented movement" represents meaning gets a little clearer as we move on further down my narrative structure :
A perception, or a feeling, is an internal/cognitive representation of an external sensation (also includes intrasomatic sensations; inside of one's own body). Likewise, a thought is an internal representation, but of what?: of a narrative structure, derived from perceptions.
To derive a narrative from perceptions, you first need to go from concrete experiences to abstraction; from images to icon, from sensation to symbols. You do this by taking a set of perceptions and abstracting out a symbolic representation, effectively producing indeed a symbol (e.g. "cat" or "flower"). 
To then get a narrative, you need to arrange a collection symbols linearly (over time) across a contextual frame (a situation). Then you end up with a story: "the cat walked past the flower." Not coincidentally, symbols, times and situations are baked into language itself, and humans are the only animal with a complex language, indeed because we're the only species with "sapience", or an internal narrative structure.
Meaningful stories either confer a direct survival advantage or serve as accurate representations of goal-oriented movement, which can apply to everything from religious stories to scientific models. When you feel moved by a story (either emotionally or rationally), it's because it touches something deep within you, just like when you're moved by a emotion or perception (again, notice how being "moved" is all about "movement").
In other words, meaning has a thorough line from the lowest to the highest aspects of survival, and it shapes the very way our being is constructed, from the level of sensations and perceptions to the level of thoughts and stories.

(Note: Do not rely on medical advice from online forums. Always consult a doctor before making any medical decisions.)
 
When it comes to weed culture, there is one super-strong meme that is based on a blatant misunderstanding of health: "weed is not physically addictive, only mentally addictive." It's wrong on so many levels: it conflates dependence and addiction, it misunderstands what fundamentally drives addiction, and it wrongly assumes that mental side effects are somehow less important than physical side effects.
 
Dependence and withdrawal

Dependence (and subsequent withdrawal) is very predictable and is something that everybody goes through after discontinuing drug use. It's essentially the process of re-calibrating back to the type of homeostasis that existed before initiating drug use. This process produces side effects that are qualitatively speaking the opposite effects of the drug. So if the drug produces physical side effects (e.g. constipation), you'll experience the opposite during withdrawal (diarrhea). If the mental effect is euphoria, then the withdrawal effect is dysphoria.
 
Addiction and cravings
On the other hand, addiction as an overarching phenomena is not reducible to such symptoms. It rather has to do with a drastic change in behavior, psychology and overall life conditions. When it comes to drug cravings (arguably the driving force of drug addiction), the main factor is positive reinforcement, particularly evident in drugs that trigger the reward circuitry in various dopamine pathways (which cannabis does). Positive reinforcement is what makes you crave the specific drugs you've had experiences taking.

Now, when you look at the symptoms of drug cravings, it's strictly speaking mental in nature. Cravings depend on thoughts, which are tied to previous drug experiences, and these thoughts (when unfulfilled) create feelings of mental distress. Therefore, the idea that "weed is only mentally addictive" is firstly, nonsensical, and secondly, an attempt to downplay weed addiction. All drug cravings, whether it's for opiates, amphetamines, cannabinoids or eating your sofa, are mental in nature. Saying "it's all mental" is not a way to downplay the problem.
 
So what is the deal about physical withdrawals?

Physical withdrawals are actually not the worst parts of quitting a drug. It's the cravings. Some people liken the physical side of heroin withdrawal to a weak cold. Of course, some physical withdrawal symptoms can be deadly, which is why it's perceived as a serious thing. Physical withdrawals from cannabis do exist, and I've experienced them myself (diarrhea, nausea, unable to eat food, stiff muscles, aches and pains). Stimulants like cocaine have very few physical withdrawal symptoms, yet they're still perceived as being highly addictive.

There is of course overlap between all these things, but it's the most accurate way (that I know about) of talking about these things. One example is that cravings can be classified as a mental withdrawal symptom (as they tend to happen more frequently during withdrawal), but you also don't have to be in withdrawal to have cravings. You can for example take a hit of cocaine, feel the rush, and then want to take even more. Also, having cravings doesn't automatically mean you're addicted. It's only if the cravings (along with other factors) are strong enough to cause a detrimental impact on your life.
 
Summary & tl;dr: 

The reason I'm writing this is because I see this misunderstanding everywhere, and it creates a harmful mentality around certain drugs and their addiction potential. The mental-physical dichotomy that most people hold in their minds is very inaccurate and is based on an intuitive understanding rather than a scientific understanding of the topic.
The most important point is to distinguish between 1. withdrawal symptoms and 2. cravings. 
1. Withdrawal symptoms are related to dependence, which can be physical or mental.
2. Cravings are related to addiction, which is fundamentally mental.
There is of course overlap, but I think it's the most accurate way of talking about these things. Withdrawal symptoms seem to cause an increase in cravings, but they're also not fully dependent on each other, which means you can think of it like this:                                                     
Withdrawal symptoms  => Cravings => Addiction <= Cravings <= no withdrawal symptoms.

Because you highlighted just one side of the coin. Competition and cooperation happens simultaneously at all levels. Molecules go together to build cells, giving up some of their freedom in the process, but establishing a higher level of complexity. Cells go together to make multicellular life, giving up some freedom but gaining complexity. Multicellular organisms go together to make social structures, giving up freedom for complexity. The more inclusive the social structures become, the easier it becomes to spot the cooperative aspects in them, like the transition from ethnocentric to worldcentric, but this is just because of our human biases. We're more used to identifying cooperation at that level of analysis, but it has always been there, just at a lower level. So that never changed, only the level of complexity did.

4 years ago, back when I was addicted to weed, I went for a week without smoking. The result was the most intense dream I've ever had. I still remember everything to this day:

I was in a space ship with three other friends, circling a dark planet with earth-like conditions. Everything was going fine, but suddenly we experienced technical problems. We had no idea what to do as we slowly breached the atmosphere while the ship was shaking violently and speeding up.

As we were hurdling towards the surface while engulfed in a ball of fire, struggling to make a controlled landing and thinking we were all going to die, we somehow survived the crash. Now, for what felt like at least 300 years of being alive, we were stuck in a Hunger Games type of situation where we had to fight to survive by creating tools, hunting animals and building better and better shelter on this completely alien and night-ridden planet.

After a while, our tools became very advanced, and we discovered new types of technology, effectively creating a new civilization with divine standards of living. As this new world was flourishing and I had time to relax, I decided to sit down and just marvel at the beauty of it all, and then I was struck by this incredible insight:

Everything that had happened up to that point was just one part of an infinite series of simulated realities made by aliens for the purpose of creating new types of technology, by essentially exploiting the creative potential of the human mind. As this all dawned on me, I woke up in my bed (still inside the dream), and I started scribbling down notes about what happened, even drawing the insides of the space ship that had crashed. Then I actually woke up for real, and all I could say was: "....What... the... fuck...."
It was so intense that I actually struggled to accept that my waking life was my real life for a moment. I've never tried Salvia, but the feeling after waking up certainly reminded me of those types of descriptions (of having lived an entire lifetime in an alternate reality).

I just wanted to write this down somewhere after all this time

Intrinsic Health is the desire to pursue health primarily for its own sake or its immediate benefits, rather than for some alternative outcome (like increased lifespan, disease prevention etc.). This desire is something that has to be developed, and some of it can be worked on, and some of it is more up to chance (biology, happenstance). This development is something I've discovered within myself and which is a culmination of all my deepest values and intuitions about life. If all of this seems too unrealistic or utopian for you to accept, I'm telling you that it's possible.
 
I will present two main factors that I think contribute to Intrinsic Health (IH) and how implementing both (to the degree that is possible) will lead to highly synergistic effects:
1. Being (foundational factors; the mystical experience).
2. Meaning (practical factors; cognitive, emotional and behavioral patterns).
 

 
First, what is the alternative to Intrinsic Health? I like to think of Intrinsic Health as in many ways the opposite of hedonism. Your sense of pleasure is derived from your most natural baseline state of existence, not some fluctuating level of extreme activation or excitation. The benefit to Intrinsic Health is therefore that it's extremely stable and self-sustaining. It works with its natural bodily functions (homeostasis) rather than against them, and I'll also claim that it is not only beneficial for optimizing functioning, but that it's the very basis for a high-functioning existence.
 
Being
Being is something that is arguably the most crucial aspect to this (at least in my experience), as it lays the foundation for how the immediate benefits of health is experienced on a purely phenomenological level. The ability to investigate your direct experience through feeling, both on an intuitive level and a more bodily level, prior to thought, will allow you to tap into the organic feelings that is produced by healthy food and physical exercise, and it allows you to more readily identify the mechanism of craving unhealthy foods and other behaviors, namely thought itself. In other words, Being both establishes the connection to Intrinsic Health and actively maintains it. However, when it comes to the more practical aspect of maintaining this connection, there are certain so-called vital patterns of cognition, emotion and behavior that are highly beneficial, if not required (some of which can also induce the mystical experience, e.g. a meditation habit), and this is directly tied to the concept of meaning.
 
Meaning
Meaning is at the most fundamental level an expression of goal-oriented behavior. Whether you're an amoeba looking for food, or a monkey displaying aggression, or a human reading a book, it's all fundamentally about the same thing: engaging in behavior that benefits survival. The amoeba's movement through the environment, the monkey's direction of emotional energy towards a target, and the human orienting him or herself through a narrative, are all expressions of meaning, and the definition of a healthy organism is one that is able to engage in this type of meaningful behavior in a successful manner. 
 
An amoeba that isn't able to move in just the right way to accurately locate food will have its health compromised and eventually die. A monkey that is not able to express its emotions in an appropriate manner will likewise have its health and survival compromised, and a human that is not able to ground their life in a higher-order framework of meaning (based on symbolic thought, language and narrative) will also have their health and survival compromised.
 
Cognitive emotion regulation
Like monkeys, humans need adequate cognitive emotion regulation patterns, and you can roughly divide this into two main styles: externalizing and internalizing style. The externalizing style most accurately represents the evolutionary function of emotions, and generally speaking it's therefore the most vital/healthy style (the exception is when it happens at the level of pathology, for example some personality disorders, e.g. parts of Cluster B). Emotions exist to serve a purpose, and it's to direct attention and energy towards some task in the environment (in a meaningful way). Therefore, if you experience an emotion like say anger, what you're supposed to do from a natural standpoint is to act on that emotion, which could be telling somebody that what they did is not OK, or expressing some disagreement, or establishing boundaries.
 
When this is done correctly, the emotion subsides rather quickly and the physiological activation and associated stress and thoughts about the situation will disappear. On the other hand, if you don't do this and instead repress the emotion and pull the energy inwards (internalizing style), you will create endless cycles of mental anguish and physical unwellness, which is generally not healthy. I say "generally" because there are times where internalizing an emotion is socially appropriate. It's rather when it's done compulsively and not in a skillful way, or in a way that is not meaningful, that you will severely compromise your health. Therefore, learning to externalize emotions when that is the appropriate thing to do (and internalizing when that is appropriate) is crucial for establishing a connection to Intrinsic Health. I severely underestimated the importance of this in my life even many years after discovering meditation, and it held me back in so many ways that I can't even begin to tell you about. I therefore cannot stress enough how important this is.
 
Higher-order meaning
The emotional aspect is also tied to navigating higher-order frameworks of meaning, namely daily habits, work ethic, and life purpose. Just like the most basic aspects of life, this aspect needs to have a certain streamlined and less cyclical nature to it for it to have any true effect on your health.
 
When it comes to daily habits, the most foundational, simplest and maybe obvious one is to take notes or make a schedule. Whenever your mind starts bothering you about something you have to do, that is meaning knocking on your door: it has an emotional component that tries to direct attention and energy towards a task, and it even has informational content with instructions on how to do it (the content of the thought itself). This is an amazing technology that you were given by evolution, and the only mistake is to ignore it. The only reason you ignore it is because you don't have a good strategy to deal with it in the moment. Now, I'm saying that the best thing you can do is to write it down. You don't even have to specify "when" or "how" you'll do it (although that is also good): simply by writing it down with the intention that you will do the thing, the job is essentially done. Your mind stops worrying about it. You've eliminated the cyclical patterns of meaningless mental noise, and this is again crucial to maintaining Intrinsic Health. Make notes about whatever your mind thinks is worth spending time reminding you about. It can be anything from shopping ideas, plans for the week, work assignments, creative ideas, life purpose etc.
 
This streamlined thinking should also be applied to your work ethic. If you've decided that you're going to follow a work schedule, your only job is to stick to that schedule. If you don't, your mind will start telling you that you should, and this leads to cyclical mental anguish, which again severs ties to optimal health. If you value your mental clarity, if your value your goals, and if you value your physical well-being, you will avoid cheating on your work ethic at all costs. Same with life purpose. If you don't find a life purpose and your mind keeps bothering you about the fact that your life has no meaning and that you're not moving towards any higher-order goal, then you better start listening to what your mind is telling you. Your mind is really smart and you should listen to it more often. I'm not saying finding a life purpose is easy, but never ever pretend like it's not important for your health. Lack of higher-order meaning is one of the biggest problems that you have to solve if you value your mental and physical health and well-being.
 
Summary and synthesis
To tie this back to Being, having a daily habit like a meditation habit, outsourcing mental activity by writing notes, not terrorizing yourself by cheating on your work schedule, and figuring out a trajectory for your life, directly feeds back into your ability to feel alive, to enjoy having a functioning body that is not aching, to enjoy having a mind that is not cluttered with useless noise and that is able to think amazing things. All of this is intricately tied together into one holistic mesh, which is why your approach to achieving Intrinsic Health should be holistic as well, meaning you will not ignore anything that your conscience tells you to do. Your conscience is the divine spirit that tries to guide you towards ever higher levels of love. Meaning is the way you manifest your conscience in your daily life, and Being is how you experience the fruits of all that.

It's even more astounding when you realize that you can believe yourself to be a silent bystander who doesn't take anything seriously but in reality you're absorbing every belief by osmosis. Beliefs aren't chosen; they're planted at night when nobody can see it.

You can call it a type of intuitive, meta-cognitive, post-rational or holistic ability. It might be why women tend to be a bit more conscientious, because they're also more intuitive, verbally complex and emotionally attuned. After all, language, symbolic thought, human social bonds and nurturing capacity mainly evolved around the mother-child relationship. The voice of conscience is often felt like your mother telling you what you should do.

Monism
- reality consists of fundamentally one substance.
 
Ontological Idealism
- this substance is mental, not physical.
- reality is experience, and everything you experience is fundamentally that; experience.
 
Pantheism
- this one substance is God.
- God is not separate from the world or yourself.
 
Mysticism
- you can experience God directly, independent of beliefs.
- you can experience what Jesus experienced, what Buddha experienced, Muhammad PBUH, Hindu mystics, Christian mystics etc.

Here is my re-telling of Daniel Schmachtenberger explanation of some of the factors that lead to the transition from "the First Game" to "Game A" (don't remember which video):
 

Meditation is the gradual unwinding of cyclical cognitive and emotional patterns (attachments), which over time leads to a change in state. Psychedelics induce a radical state change similar to a meditative state, but it's not an organic state (i.e. it's dependent of non-essential external regulators), which is why it's often more transient in nature. That doesn't mean you can't gain any lasting effects from taking psychedelics, but psychedelics don't force you to engage in the same type of structured observation of arising and passing of thought/sensation as meditation.

Is there a common thread that unites self-actualization, emotional mastery, physical health and spirituality? What is the basis of integrity? Which mechanisms underlie healthy emotion regulation? What is the opposite of being dependent or addicted? What is the goal of all therapy, all psychedelic drugs and all meditation? One answer to that is vitality and resilience.
 
At the most basic level, vitality is the ability to exert force, and resilience is the ability to withstand stress. To be vital is to be full of life, energy and strength, and to be resilient is to be able to tackle various challenges that life throws at you. They're two sides of the same coin, and you can refer to both as "internal regulatory capacity": the ability to control your internal and external environment. I will probably make multiple threads on this topic and how it relates to everything from cognition, emotions, neuropharmacology, addiction, therapy, psychedelics and meditation, but as an introduction, I will start with emotions.
 
Firstly, why are these concepts useful? In psychology, vitality and resilience are part of an overarching approach in psychology called "salutogenesis", which essentially tries to answer the question "what causes health?" This contrasts with the more common approach of "pathogenesis": "what causes illness?" This might initially seem like a weird distinction to make. "Isn't the mechanisms of health simply to eliminate the mechanisms of illness?" Here is the central point: the way you define a problem (epistemology) dictates the way you solve it (methodology).
 
This creates crucial differences between the two approaches: salutogenesis tends to be holistic and bottom-up (multiple, organic solutions), while pathogenesis tends to be reductionistic and top-down (singular solutions, symptomatic relief). Pathogenesis tries to assess and correct negative symptomatic deviations from the norm while salutogenesis tries to identify and facilitate the underlying principles and basic requirements for health. For those interested in self-help and optimizing one's life, especially those without chronic illnesses, salutogenesis is in many ways a project description.
 
Now, on to the main point: how does one maximize vitality and resilience with respect to emotions? The concepts of vitality and resilience are taken directly from the multi-disciplinary paradigm of "Attention Control and Cognitive Emotion Regulation", and therefore I'll simply give a presentation of that here:
 
 
Attention Control and Cognitive Emotion Regulation

This paradigm unites aspects of developmental psychology, clinical practice and neuroscience research on emotions and cognition. It's primarily used in clinical work with children, but it's nevertheless a crucial framework for understanding basic emotional and cognitive functioning.
 
In this paradigm, emotions are understood from a functionalistic perspective, in the sense that emotions exist to serve a purpose, generally a survival function, but more specifically as a means to direct attention and exert force towards a challenge in the external environment. The emotion creates a level of physiological activation (sympathetic nervous system; power) and initiates a set of appropriate behavioral patterns (e.g. direction of attention towards a threat), which when performed, eventually reduces the physiological activation, and the emotional state subsides.
 
Self-regulation is not an ability that is built-in from birth and is strongly dependent on age-specific conditioning, which is why early childhood neglect is so extremely damaging. Young children notoriously rely on the care and comfort of their parents to reduce their physiological activation. As the child grows up, it internalizes the external regulation patterns of the parents and gets increasingly more able to self-regulate its emotional state. Even as the child becomes an adult, it may utilize various non-vital coping strategies that rely on the external environment, and these may overshadow some underlying issues that the child needs to address. The different factors of external emotional dependence can be described as "non-essential external regulators", e.g. cyclical behavior of drug-taking, over-eating or social neediness, which can potentially lead to addiction.
 
Development and coping strategies aside, the core of emotion regulation has to do with how emotions are actually processed and expressed (the "dynamics" of emotional energy), and we can view this through a general dichotomy of expression vs. repression:
 
Vital emotion regulation

The dynamics of a vital/healthy emotion regulation pattern is one where the person engages in so-called expressing/externalizing patterns (again, not to be confused with coping strategies), i.e. focusing the power of the emotion outwards towards the environment in a structured and goal-oriented manner. Let's say somebody insults you and you start to feel angry at this person. The key here is "at this person", because what the emotion wants you to do is to deal with this person somehow, and an appropriate response could be to confront them and tell them how you would like to be treated (with respect). If this doesn't somehow lead to an escalation of the situation, the emotion will quickly reside and you'll regain a state of relaxation: the emotion served its purpose as you were able to express the physiological energy in the type of meaningful and goal-oriented manner that the emotion intended.
 
Non-vital emotion regulation

A less vital dynamic pattern is where the person favors an internalizing style, i.e. one of repression and rumination (shying away and retreating into your own head). Instead of focusing the attention and energy out towards the environment, the focus goes inward, into the mind and towards the subjective feelings caused by the physiological activation, which remains unresolved. Circular patterns of thought arise (fear; what-if scenarios, feelings of inadequacy, insecurity), which in turn causes the physiological activation to be reignited, which results in a state classically referred to as anxiety.
 
Internalizing people tend to use various non-vital coping strategies to reduce activation, most commonly avoidance of said anxiety-provoking situations (as well as drugs, over-eating and social neediness), which can lead to social isolation, loneliness and other cascading emotional effects (depression, pent up anger and violent outbursts etc.). All in all, there is an obvious lack of vitality and resilience here, and to simply become aware of these patterns within your own life (excessive internalizing and subsequent non-vital coping strategies) can start to unwind various neuroses and evil spirals. The goal would be to maximize the ability to externalize emotions and facilitate a meaningful pattern of activation and relaxation.
 
With that said, there are situations where an internalizing style is preferable with respect to various social and cultural norms. For example, it's probably not such a good idea to openly express anger during a church sermon. It's probably a better idea to wait until later before you potentially confront the person about it. Here is where the cognition aspect of emotion regulation becomes more pronounced, because merely externalizing an emotion when you feel like it is a rather intuitive and straightforward process, but on the other hand, to be able to know when it's socially appropriate to externalize vs. internalize requires more cognitive finesse and is nevertheless an important part of healthy emotion regulation. There are also other positive cognitive patterns like reappraisal and refocusing that contrast with generally non-vital cognitive patterns like rumination (CERS = Cognitive Emotional Regulation Strategy):

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Figure-The-hypothesized-model-CERS-cognitive-emotion-regulation-strategies_fig1_299415064
 
I touched briefly on how problems with emotional regulation can make you dependent on so-called "non-essential external regulators". When (or if) I'm writing more on vitality and resilience in the future, it will probably be about how the reliance on hedonic drugs is a reflection of underlying problems with one's general internal regulation capacity, and also how things like therapy, psychedelic drugs and meditation all go about addressing this in their own way. Until then, I'll leave you with a prescription: try to become aware of the ways in which you deal with emotions in your daily life and maybe consider changing some of them. Do you carry a lot of emotional baggage from moment to moment? Do you mainly express/externalize or repress/internalize your emotions? (or vice versa) etc. Things like that

This might have nothing to do with what you're referring to, but I think you can use it as a way to refer to different types of perception, cognition or consciousness that is also somewhat consistent with a physical understanding of dimensions. In our normal everyday reality, we tend to live moment to moment in 3 dimensions. The structure of moving from one moment of 3-dimensional experience to the next can be represented as a movement through the 4th dimension (time). 
Now, what the heck could the 5th or any higher dimension usefully represent? I think one example is psychic phenomena like precognition. Precognition is when you gather information from one part of 4th dimensional space to the next (from one moment to another) in a sort of discontinuous leap (a movement "outside" of ordinary 4-dimensional movement). This type of movement of information could be represented as a 5th dimensional movement. Why? Because it's is not a linear movement like the moment to moment 4th dimensional movement, but something else, something of a higher-order complexity.
For example, to try to explain why you had that exact precognition at that exact moment is not as straightforward as for example trying to explain why you had the idea to go to the store when you saw that the fridge was empty, because the latter explanation is linear and local ("this caused this" etc.). On the other hand, why the hell did I dream about being chased by tornadoes during one of the biggest tornado outbreaks in history on the other side of the world? (this actually happened).
When you feel the need to ask yourself "where did that information come from and why is it in my head?", it's a sign you're dealing with some higher dimensional phenomena (5th etc.). You can say that ordinary everyday thoughts tend to operate within the 3rd and 4th dimension, while discontinuous leaps (like insight, intuition, precognition) could be said to be of a higher dimensional quality. 
In summary, ordinary cognition is local and linear, and extraordinary cognition like intuition, precognition and other psychic phenomena tends to be global, non-local and non-linear. A closely related dichotomy is rationality vs. trans-rationality (and personal vs. trans-personal domains).
I have a topic about some of my experiences of precognition (dreaming about future real-events) if you're interested:
Now, what exactly is the structure of 5-dimensional movement? Why is it at a higher order of complexity than 4-dimensional movement? Well, people with psychic abilities (or people who self-report having regular experiences of psychic phenomena) tend to report that it's not "their" insight or "their" ability or even their "will". It's as if their ability is a part of a larger plan, something ultimately outside of their control (you can call it "God's plan" or "Love").
You also see this with artists who enter a state of flow, where suddenly they feel like they're channeling some higher intelligence that is not their own, and that they're simply a witness to it all. You can say that the post-4-dimensional complexity taps into the infinite intelligence of God at some level (in a sense that it defies explanation).
After all, God's infinite being is an infinitely complex structure, and it transcends our ordinary, linear explanatory models (which after all are limited by our survival and evolutionary history; they're not at all capable of giving a comprehensive account of reality as a whole). So what is it exactly (the 5th dimension)? Well, it's simply the trans-personal and trans-rational levels of intelligence and complexity.

To expand on my previous response, being sober is something that can be refined and mastered, in the sense that the benefits you get from it puts you off wanting to take any mind-altering substances.
This idea goes hand-in-hand with physical health, emotional mastery and spiritual growth. The overarching concepts that unites these three realms are "vitality" and "resilience", or "internal regulatory capacity": your ability to tackle stress and control your internal and external environment. This is the goal of all therapy, all psychedelic drugs, all meditation.
Hedonic drugs are external regulators, and once you get dependent on them, you ride the hedonic-adaptive slide all the way to the bottom until you discontinue use either voluntarily or by force, either intermittently ("tolerance break") or permanently (when you overdose on heroin at 27). How severe this process is depends on your internal regulatory capacity, which is controlled by the amount of trauma you have, your genes, your cognitive-emotional style etc. To maximize regulatory capacity means to heal trauma, recognize your genetic predispositions and learning healthy cognitive-emotional regulative patterns, i.e. physical health, emotional mastery and spiritual growth.
Once your vitality and resilience is maximized, you're turned off by any type of non-essential external regulators, because your internal state allows for a much more refined state of consciousness (more meaningful, more resourceful, more blissful). Hedonic bliss is not the same as existential bliss, at least not in the long run. One is self-contained, self-improving and organic, the other is dependent, degenerative and synthetic.