Carl-Richard

Collecting student debt.

@integral I wouldn't rule out magic.

It must have started with my first LSD trip where I learned about the truth of dukkha (suffering). I had spent so much time and attention planning everything I wanted to do during my LSD trip; fun things to experience, playing with visual effects and tactile experiences, etc.; but when I was actually tripping and I did these things, after I did them, I was left with an extreme feeling of emptiness, like a black hole in my stomach. And I remember quite clearly now an intention forming in my mind: "I need to find a solution to this". And the day after the trip, I spent a whole day sitting in the woods and smoking weed, and I felt the most expanded and mystical effects I've ever experienced: expanded vision, expanded sense of the environment, of being one with the environment and a movement upwards. Then I started "living in the now", dropping responsibilites, school, people, until that came back to bite me in the ass. I became very stressed and almost psychotic, and then I discovered Leo's video "40 signs you are being neurotic", and then is when things truly started. I believe the following week, I watched Leo's "how to meditate" video, and then I was hooked. I believe I also learned about the concept of "mindfulness" around the same time (from I believe Sam Harris), and I spent a week straight actively practicing mindfulness in everything I did (because I couldn't smoke weed at that time). And after that week, I decided to try seated meditation properly for the first time (I had tried it once before from I believe before my first LSD trip because I had heard a friend talk about it, but it was very short, on a whim and without any strong intention or really knowledge about what was possible; but I actually felt some interesting effects then, like I was slightly distancing myself from my body and my field of vision expanded a bit behind my closed eyelids, but I was also on weed at the time). On my third meditation, I awoke.

Your energy levels follow the same patterns as your sleep cycles; up for 1.5 hours, down for 1.5 hours, etc. If you delay your sleep for 2 hours after you were initially tired, you will experience an increase in energy again for the next 1 hour or so, which makes it harder to fall asleep. If you are prone to 5-MeO re-activations or other types of energy phenomena, it would be wise to carefully craft a sleep schedule that puts you to sleep and does not provoke those things.

I have Sony WH-1000XM4. Worth every penny. If I use them together with foam ear plugs, there can be a party going on downstairs and I won't really hear anything.

Ah. I've lived with such a person. He started rearranging furniture and using a saw at 03:30 am. I screamed at him so much he felt like buying a white t-shirt for me as an apology. Then he played bass and music on speakers at similar times as well and I had to keep reminding him about the 11 PM rule of the apartment which I had also made him personally agree on beforehand. So I've been clear about setting boundaries like that. But if it's noise during daytime that is the problem and it seems unreasonable to ask for boundaries, get noise-cancelling headphones, use them together with ear plugs. It would probably solve most of your problems.

But why?

Unless you feel literally no need for it, which is possible. You pretty much copy my position now

I will give you a rundown of how "New Age healing" could work: Let's say you buy a pendant from this highly charismatic, spiritually attuned and good-feeling energy person that makes you feel good in their presence. If this person has claimed to have imbued their energy into the pendant, or given it a specific healing power, here are two possibilities: Every time you wear the pendant or think about the pendant, you will be reminded of this person and their virtuous state and the state that you feel in their presence (which is one of peace, tranquility, safety, reassurance, etc.). This will have a real and direct impact on your state right now. Your mental state is directly reflected in your physical state (they are two sides of the same coin). And this could do things like reduce the rate of aging, cause increased rates of healing of physical ailments (through reduced stress, etc.). Who the fuck knows what reality is: maybe it is possible to imbue something in some way that has a special impact which differs from if you had not done that. That's the claim of places like the Dhyanalinga, or the Himalayas. People do claim this is possible, people with real "spiritual credentials" if we can call it that. Besides, reality is rampantly and in fact inherently mystical (unexplained by physical mechanisms), and we are all somewhat empathically and even telepathically attuned to each other (I believe we share information across mental space that is either poorly explained or indeed unexplained by physical mechanisms). Now, if it's possible to leave an imprint in mental space (which we all do all the time by merely thinking), like an intention that a certain object will evoke certain states in certain people who wear it, then this intention could manifest its effects on those people, simply by virtue that we all share this mental space. And certainly if you are open, willing, and "bought in" (both ideologically and economically), and also align your focus and intention with it, then you will be more open to tune into this information in mental space.

They could actually work though. Does a surgeon's scalpel not work if they don't also teach holistic health? You sound very openminded here. Placebo is amazing. It's amazing that it's possible to heal oneself in ways we can't explain physically. What's being transferred during the assisted meditation?

1. Do what you want.

You could create a Spiral Development Index, e.g. based on other indexes like the Corruption Perceptions Index or Democracy Index (and other data you might find relevant), and then you can give each country its own score (and maybe a color scale from blue to white). And you could give an info chart that maps the SD stages onto the blue-white scale, representing the country's "center of gravity", and make an option to switch the graphic between the blue-white scale and the SD center of gravity.

Maybe you’re not aware of this if you haven’t studied psychoanalysis in depth - and I say this having studied a few semesters of psychology myself, where I often debated professors who treated it as little more than a historical footnote - but late Freud and Lacan don’t believe these symptoms can be cured. They don’t disappear; they just shift forms. The best you can hope for is to become conscious of the structure of the unconscious itself - and learn to live with it. Maybe not cured, but severely handled. For example, if I start a PhD thesis in something I have zero passion for, I will become straight out depressed. That's a big difference from starting a PhD thesis in something I'm passionate about. It's certainly the case that following my passion won't "cure" negative thinking full-stop, but it's certainly a night and day difference. So that's the point about choosing the right structure for your life: you can make a big difference. As for what I'm "working on" (or what I'm passionate about), that would be to do a study that compares the effects of meditation based on spiritual/religious motivations (awakening, enlightenment, "seeking the sacred") vs. "modern", secular, non-religious motivations (e.g. stress reduction, productivity). What has always bothered me with the secularized, sterilized and scientificalized version of "mindfulness meditation", is how tame it seems in comparison to the potential that it truly has (i.e. slight reduction in negative thinking vs mystical awakenings and spiritual transformation; alleviating pathology vs literally cultivating sainthood). So the aim is to point towards this potential and slowly prod the scientific discourse in this direction. And while this is not a "new" idea at all, by doing it in this way; by comparing two groups in the same study, by looking at "motivations" in people who already practice meditation on their own accord (as opposed to recruiting complete newbies and teaching/forcing them to meditate, giving one group a "spiritual meditation" and the other a secular one), and also by using neuroscientific methods (which I can copy directly from my current study); it seems like an approach that can provide new insight and clarity into the topic, and nevertheless, again, provide attention to it. Side note: The way I approach science (and the way I think most people approach it fundamentally) is as an activist platform for the things we value and intuitively think is right and true. And we use science to clarify and quantifying those things, testing their limitations, finding out where they apply and where they do not apply. And if you want to be a good activist, you want to ernestly and honestly approach the scientific process and be objective. Or else your activism is empty. But you should also be honest that you're driven by something. And the more driven you are, the better you are. My advisor is probably the epitome of this (he loves doing studies about the benefits of music), and maybe not coincidentally, he is quite successful at what he does. That's another argument for following one's passion: you don't just feel good, but you are good.

This is what I'm spending my time on these days (click for English subtitles): Thank you to @Nilsi for planting a seed in my mind about doing paid social media ads for recruiting to my study (and the rest of the free marketing consultations). I would otherwise not have gotten the exposure needed to get journalists aware of my study. People say I did pretty well for being my first live radio appearance. However, (and now I will dump my OCD thoughts), I did have to deal with an unnecessary amount of adrenaline before going on air, because I thought I would not have time to ask an important question to my advisor before that. That must have reduced my fluid intelligence by honestly like a half (or a quarter). I also had 4 hours of sleep (not really from being nervous the day before but because of my sleep schedule), and I can get by on that, but combined with mind-numbing levels of adrenaline, it's surprising I got a single word out. (And now for peak OCD: combined with being fasted and being on the most mellow part of my workout regimen, you got to hear the most "faint" version of me ever 😶‍🌫️). Anyways, always fun to get to do stuff like this.

I really wanted to use the word "metaphysics", but I accepted the framing.

The human game, since the dawn of meta-awareness 30-50k years ago, is to become self-aware and self-interested and distance oneself from the eternal ground of being in terms of identity. The fact that people are different leads to this happening in different ways for different people. So of course people are confused and disagree about the absolute. That's virtually a given.

I'm saying most people here don't, even us who proclaim to understand. Because we don't produce these level of ideas ourselves. We mostly just download a stripped-down version and then go about our lives making simplistic observations, thinking we're being profound when in reality we're as simple as the so-called materialists we put beneath our feet. That's the pessimistic version, as there is also "upward assimilation", in that immersing yourself in symbols above your development will eventually start to lift you up. But there is no good way to prove this other than your mind actually creating something new at these levels. If everything sounds like recycled quotations, the safest bet is that you are indeed only recycling quotations. (And as a proof of concept: "downward/upward assimilation" is something I've read. I did not invent those terms).

That face is barely me, it's from 10 years ago 😆 I expected to be on camera like some of the other radio shows on that channel, but oh well, you're spared from my balding for a little longer.

Well, birds of a feather flock together, roughly speaking: would Sam and Emma be able to understand Wilber? That's exactly my point. You don't need to be very developed to spout some of Ken Wilber's ideas. That's the power of downward assimilation, of adopting cultural symbols above your level of development. Those that are really developed and that are truly able to grasp the ideas down to their bones, are able to produce similar ideas (original ideas) at a similar level. Now, if you take a look around, most people can barely construct a coherent sentence. Forget a meta-systematic or meta-paradigmatic theory.

🤣 I might make another one of those considering I've played a bit of the newly released Lost City ("2004scape") 😆

A human's job is essentially to deny absolute truth and substitute whatever fantasies they prefer. No surprises there.

Do you think Michael Brooks from the Majority Report understood Wilber? Quantitatively speaking, judging by people's actual behavior, I'm afraid not. Maybe you are in the minority. What does Bill Clinton not understand about Wilber? Consider that this is the entire job of a politician: to make their message palatable to their audience. I just think we on this forum ran into some ideas, and now because we do some self-development on the side, suddenly we think we are intellectually and cognitively superior to other people. When in reality, if you meet other people, you find the same ideas, the same thoughts, the same ways of thinking.

And how do we know you "understand" Leo? Maybe you just "read Leo", just like Bill "read Wilber". Besides, Leo just "read Wilber". That's all we really do here — read stuff. Or where are your integral daily activities? What is your integral occupation? I would hesitate to draw inferences based on what a person does in the world (e.g. as a politician) to what they "understand" about a philosopher. If you had looked at what I do on a daily basis (occupationally), and if you had heard me say "I think Wilber is brilliant", you would probably think I'm not much different from Bill. And I believe I "understand" Wilber. And why does Bill think Wilber is brilliant? What made him say that? Is it really that unlikely that he deeply resonated with his ideas the same way you do when you say Wilber is brilliant? What about Michael Brooks (RIP) from the Majority Report? Did he really "understand" Wilber, or did he just view him through his leftist lunatic lens?

The practice is intended to simply "treat" rumination. Whether somebody wants to go all the way or just become a little less bothered by negative thoughts, that's up to them. The next step for this research would be to test it on groups with diagnoses like depression, anxiety, bipolar, schizophrenia, etc., (which my advisor also advised me to look into as a potential next step). I think the point about "bypassing" is an important one, in that I think most people who struggle with these thoughts, do so because of the reality or structure of their life (the unconscious), and that it's this structure that needs to be addressed before the thoughts lift. Merely shifting your focus to something else or elevating your state temporarily through some practice is ultimately merely a temporary Band-Aid. The thoughts do actually serve a purpose as alarm systems for when things are not going the way they are supposed to, and I believe the alarm systems are in the vast majority of cases working as they should, it's just that people generally don't want or aren't aware enough to address the real problems. And the real problems are most likely in the order of importance life purpose/career/occupation, relationships/community/belonging, and health/state. If you get these things aligned with what you really want (and you don't do things that sabotage these things), your thoughts will be in service of you. And that's very individual what that looks like (except maybe physical health). It's interesting you mention that. I had a similar obsessive period of maybe a year where I literally tried to stop thinking. It made me into an insociable, dissociated rock, and I was still an anxious, awkward kid. That's quite ironically a grotesque example of what happens when you only do practices but don't work on the foundations. What practices can do however, is to build up your state, which creates a platform of resilience to stand on where you can make the necessary steps towards transformative change. And for some people who struggle with things like depression, this is exactly what they need, to get out of the rut and get the ball rolling. And that's why music (in combination with mindfulness) can be especially beneficial for them, because practicing mindfulness "on its own" (without music) often requires a baseline of resilience to begin with (because "traditional" mindfulness, staring at a wall, can be quite tough if you don't feel like even getting out of bed). So in a traditional framework of "treating illness", this approach seems, on paper, to actually fit very well.

What makes you different from Bill Clinton?