Carl-Richard

Another thread another day of religious people bashing religious people. Stage Blue literalist fundamentalist traditionalists is the word you're probably looking for.

Can we not litter the thread with poo? >.<

This sentence combined with the profile pic is just comedic gold.

You still encode the affect of faces in the amygdala 74 ms after the signal, i.e. in the limbic system. That's the starting phase of the cascade. But the neurological model is only a simplification to explain the behavior. The behavioral cascade is signal -> habitual response -> conscious interpretation. Even if some of the habitual response (involving context information) can be said to belong to the cortex, you don't actually evaluate the information consciously (certainly not "logically" as you're talking about) before it's evaluated habitually. 6-7 month olds start to show increased reactions to negative faces, then 8-12 month olds start to use context information to judge the meaning of the faces. Are you saying for you as a 8-12 month old, thinking (logically) happened before habitual emotional responses? Did you think logically as a 1 year old? Obviously no. You were encoding and interpreting habitually, building up that repetoire which you then express still to this day. It's just over time as you mature, you become more adept at top-down responses to the signals. And even that becomes habitual; the suppression that happens more often in men happens habitually, really quickly. Higher-order logical thinking happens way down the line.

Some people think most people are just stupid, uninteresting, morally bankrupt, etc. But it just happens that the former are maybe pretty introverted and don't like interacting with people. And therefore they don't interact with people and they don't learn how people really are. Or they are too consumed by their own judgement that they can't open themselves up to see what is really in front of them.

Killer >:) You give me that word after priming words like "anger". Mmmm.

Is meditation a religious practice?

You mean "comes first" as in temporally? EEG Event-Related Potential (ERP) research disproves this. Just the way the brain is structured disproves this. The cortex receives signals later than the limbic system in reaction to stimuli. The cascade is sensory stimulus -> limbic -> cortex. Men are more likely to suppress emotional responses right after they happen (in the course of milliseconds); it just happens so fast and it's usually habitual (and ignoring or desensitizing that millisecond experience itself can also be habitual) so they might simply be completely unaware of it. And of course, the repression doesn't really remove the emotion as much as it pushes it to the side. The signal still reached the cortex, it was just diverted and not given the right to flow in a particular way. And it leaves a lasting physiological arousal which now is more likely to be interpreted as anger (especially if the emotion occurred in a situation where you feel compelled to externalize some of the cause; "something happened and now I feel this arousal, I didn't like very much what happened and this thing out here was the cause and it must be dealt with, and now I'm angry". It's a very caveman type of circuitry).

If I practice religious practices and say I believe in God, am I religious?

Feeling, unless I feel blocked or unable to or it feels somehow not appropriate in the situation.

These are not acceptance. These are judgments, the opposite of acceptance. Acceptance stays true to what is actually happening, not some idea you have. Acceptance takes what is actually occurring right now and says "I'm fine, I'm open, I'm receiving, I'm free of wanting to control either way".

Depends why. Tears of joy, amazement, lovely. Tears because of something else, also depends.

Year above me in high school, we both went to music class (elective course), tiny group of people in each grade, there was some collaboration between the grades but she was mostly busy travelling abroad or whatever she was doing. She once performed at our school (solo; I think it was Runaway), and after the performance, she got the biggest applause I've probably ever heard ever. And I said to my friend next to me "she is going to be world famous". And yes that happened. I think the only "interaction" I had with her was me and my music classmates came to class and she was sitting in the classroom on a table talking to a friend. She looked at me 🥵

@Natasha Tori Maru Bruh it's so wild that she went to my school 😆

These guys invented "slam" which is a slow breakdown with really heavy palm muted guitars, back in 1991. Death metal was barely established back then and they already invented a new genre (brutal death metal) which also came to define an entire other genre: deathcore (which is built around slam breakdowns). 2:52 Suffocation's sound is what really defined what most people perceive as death metal today, which is these extremely deep, guttural, muffled growls and extremely fast instrumentation and heavy production. Compare it to Morbid Angel above and it's more "open" and forward placed growls and less over the top instrumentation and sound.

They say that good music keeps you at the edge between familiarity and surprise. Too familiar becomes boring, and too surprising becomes hard to follow. Musical improvisation is the manifestation of this in real time, and you can usually notice when the player is engaging in well-established/familiar patterns ("licks") and when the player is creating something completely original. I'm used to improvising a lot on guitar, and I've noticed that I'm able to imagine impossibly intricate and original lines of improvisation in my head, but I'm in no way technically advanced enough to manifest that through my instrument. When I listen to the most complete virtuostic improvisational players out there, even though they can come very close many times, I always feel a tension between boredom and impenetrability. Of course, this desire I have of hearing the most hyper-creative lines of notes that I can possibly imagine is impossible to fulfill. It's completely relative to my unique conception of music, and I would probably never in a million years get to hear somebody produce even 10 seconds of those exact notes (which would be absolutely transcendentally orgasmic if it happened). Nevertheless, I know two players who come extremely close, and I'll try to weigh to which extent they're too "boring" ("musically conventional" is a better word) or too impenetrable (too melodically or harmonically complex) relative to my impossible standard of imaginative perfection. Guthrie Govan (obviously). It's tricky, because he is so versatile that he often fluctuates between too conventional (like bluesy bendy stuff) and too complex (like jazzy shredding stuff). I'll give an example for each player: Allan Holdsworth is notoriously known for being impossible to imitate by other players. For reference, Guthrie Govan can imitate virtually anyone but him. He often becomes too complex. I sometimes have to listen to his songs 30 times to understand what he is doing (like the run at 1:28 in the video below). (Btw things become more interesting around 0:40).

If I go in a state of inflammation due to food and perhaps sleep deprivation, even I start to get funky perceptual stuff, not full-blown object/entity hallucinations per se but proto-hallucinations like flashes, images, sounds (and everybody should). If you consistently keep yourself as inflammation-free as possible, you might start to see consistent improvements. The idea behind keto that seemed to help the person above is that it eliminates glucose spikes which is a major source of inflammation. But you can also simply eat more anti-inflammatory foods like veggies, extra virgin olive oil, berries and fruits, and control glucose spikes with things like exercise and general physical activity (post-meal 10-minute walks are very effective for this). Higher muscle mass is also crucial for glucose control (your skeletal muscle stands for like 80% of post-meal glucose clearance).

Gary Weber does not get talked about much, but he brings an important perspective on enlightenment that integrates modern neuroscience and it allows him to make very precise distinctions about how the enlightened mind functions. Very insightful interview.

The thing that happens when you have a spiritual teacher who is not enlightened is that they will spend most of their time not speaking from a place of presence. And that will be reflected in their choice of words, their way of speaking, and of course their followers. An enlightened spiritual teacher, who rests in being as their natural state, will emphasize the unspeakability of the absolute truth. It's perpetually clear to them that this is the nature of the absolute truth. A community that does not emphasize enlightenment, who emphasizes glimpses into non-ordinary / higher states and giving retrospective accounts of those through language and memory, not through direct live transmission of their current state, will of course be more inclined to talk as if everything about these higher states of being is speakable, is perfectly explainable, is perfectly encapsulatable in language. Because that is all they got in their current state. If it rubs you the wrong way that somebody tries to emphasize the unspeakability of the absolute, perhaps that is a reflection of you and your approach, not somebody's "lack of" whatever fancy term you elevate to sacred status (awakening, consciousness). And perhaps the approach is not actually about the absolute at all, but rather manifestations within the illusory nature of being, a.k.a. Maya. I will repeat this again and again whenever it is salient to do so: this place is not about enlightenment, and it's not actually about the absolute as far as I'm concerned. It's about experiences within the illusion, within the illusory sub-manifolds of reality. Reality itself happens beyond thought, beyond language, beyond even perception and memory. The way this becomes perpetually clear is again by being perpetually acquainted with it through direct experience, by being enlightened. But that is currently clearly not on your agenda in this space.

God as infinite consciousness does not tell you about whether an apple falls down or up. Likewise, it doesn't tell you about whether an apple is experiencing something you don't or not. If you want to make statements about such things, you postulate a model and say "this is my logic, my reasoning, my best guess, based on x assumption, x inference, etc.)". For explaining states in the world, it seems most reasonable to say that people in your dreams experience the world as you do. For not explaining anything, you don't open your mouth and rest in Oneness.

I think they're experiencing the world as you and me do.

Brains correlate with personal perspectives within consciousness. That's what the concern of "AI welfare" comes from (welfare of persons). But silicone chips are not very similar to brains. And text assemblers are not very similar to living breathing organisms that fuck and make babies.

I think they are about as real as you and me.

True, because I speak from direct experience.

Do you want me to translate or should I let the equivocation stand for you? I guess you "don't really care about that" either way, it's "just words" anyway. I just said what I feel when I think of the word. And it's consistently been like that for me. When I saw the solipsism video get posted, I got the same feeling. Like why that word, it's so tainted.