Carl-Richard

That's a different discussion. I'm doing conceptual janitorial work. He is certainly confident telling other people they are unable to describe what femininity is when he is apparently entirely unable to do the same. Rather go on another tangent making a distinction between non-dual direct experience and personal experience which is again not relevant to the discussion, just purely pedantic "my 21st century science is the only valid perspective" pigeonholing.

Plants stem evolutionarily from mobile single-celled organisms. They avoid noxious stimuli and seek pleasant ones. That they planted themselves on the ground doesn't eliminate their intrinsically dynamic existence, but in that form, it might need a timelapse to become apparent. But yes, we have particular fondness for more mammalian-like life with limbic systems and social emotions and we like to not cause unneccessary emotional suffering. But on the level of pure sentience, we're not at a neutral ground eating anything that is alive. Historically, yes, as they mostly lived in cultures where vegetarianism is more common. Cross-culturally is more thorny, especially contemporary Western, and it needs numbers in my opinion.

You just haven't read enough. You just haven't read enough. I did not come to a similar understanding through Ayahuasca. I've mostly read and listened to what other people have said about femininity and used my logical mind to connect the dots. Your cultural perspective is just limited; 21st century, social science. There are more perspectives out there. Emerald referred to some of them, for example depth psychology, mystical traditions, religious traditions. And yes, mystical traditions are not separate from culture either, mostly just your 21st century neopositivist culture.

I acknowledged your point: traits are different from essences from a certain specific point of view (21st century social science). It's just that this topic is not limited to that point of view so the distinction is irrelevant, unless you believe 21st century social science is the only legitimate point of view. In that case, welcome to Actualized.org. You're always free to answer the question I asked at the beginning.

If your entire worldview is shaped by 21st century social science and you can't see anything outside of that neutered conceptual landscape, sure, traits are statistical constructs which social science nerds (reluctantly) believe are the holy grail of epistemology and essences are immutable characteristics which only dumb cavemen believe in. But if you're a little more flexible than that, you see that "essences" and "traits" are just different words for "characteristics" and that you're getting your pants in a twist viewing everything through a wannabe academic lens. So what characteristics do you associate with femininity?

I think "essence" and "traits" are commensurable and you're getting caught up in a word game. Nobody is talking about "all men" or "all women" here either, that's a hallucination you brought in through your other word game (substituting "feminine" for "woman"). (Or you could call it a feminine move in that you want to include everything and are not willing to exclude things and prune down to [deduce] a single conclusion). It does nevertheless show a pseudointellectual attitude that you can't answer a single question and rather bring up words that do not matter.

One time I read a definition in a textbook of something I can't remember which gave about as little insight as what that definition did. I think it literally only gave the methodologies for how the concept was studied, no information about the concept itself (ironically a very overly masculine and lack of femininity move). But in your case, it also just shifts the information onto another concept: "woman". So now I'll have to ask you: give me a list of "woman traits".

Idk about you but when I first heard Emerald's descriptions of femininity vs masculinity it all made sense to me. It's metaphysical. It really boils down to content vs structure (there is a great paper called "Revisiting Marr's Three Levels" which you should read the introduction of). Semantics vs syntax, energy vs form, Shakti vs Shiva, the Holy Spirit vs the Logos. Some "magical thinking" is required there, yes. You can't just go by conformity all the time

What is femininity then?

Nightwalks as opposed to daywalks are more feminine, treehugging is feminine, feeling the grass at your feet is feminine. And those are things that many men are usually like "ugh, that's girly". It's a part of feminity they are usually somewhat repulsed by and less able to integrate. My father is actually someone who embodies true femininity to a great extent. He actually connects with you emotionally when speaking to you, he has a grounded and mindful energy, he is explicitly interested in techniques that promote mindfulness, but he doesn't call himself "spiritual", he doesn't really care for specific religious traditions or practices, he doesn't seem to have grand ambitions in that domain.

You desire to know, to awaken, to know the truth, to eliminate suffering, etc. You're in your ego and adopt the identity of pursuing these things. That's ok. You adopt practices, follow traditions, engage in communities, plan retreats, exchange ideas and experiences, learn frameworks and doctrines. You're religious. That's ok. You conform to your community, you trust in its legitimacy, you follow the teachers, you rank some teachers over others, you prefer some teachers over others, you take on their ideas through faith, what they're saying might be true. You're not currently awake (some of you) or enlightened (most of you), but yet you're setting your sights towards these things. You're a self-described spiritual person with a plan for themselves, you're engaging in religious traditions and communities, and you conform. That's ok. Accept what is true, deny it less, and you'll have less blindspots, less self-deception, less bias. What you deny becomes unconscious, and what becomes unconscious rules you without you being aware.

More strict gender roles.

At those levels of consciousness you also feel compassion for trees and other non-animal life. And while it doesn't necessarily erase "levels" of consciousness, the bottom sort of falls out of the scale, and truly firm distinctions become increasingly lofty. I still stick to cells (or even more subtle stuctures, like morphic fields, or Platonic forms) being the basic correlates of sentience, not neuronal cells in particular. Materialistic explanations of phantom limb pain, OBEs, NDEs, are not very intuitive. There is also the conundrum of people in your dreams being conscious, so when you act immorally towards them, that's also something to take into account (I'm being serious). Do you have numbers on that?

They say testosterone is correlated with dominance, not aggression. So you don't attack, only defend 😜

Being mentally healthy, as in free of mental conflict, with yourself. Because if you are in conflict with yourself, all the resources of your body are turned against themselves. Then it matters less that you better any single resource, because the resource goes into supressing another resource. What you want is all your resources to align under a shared goal. That's what an organism fundamentally is. When a part of the organism deviates from that goal, you have cancer, you have civil war, you have neurosis, inner conflict. It eats itself up. To be healthy, to be whole, the whole organism must be playing on team with itself. Self-determination in behavior, on all levels.

I think there is like a cognitive schema that is activated for many people when they see women say something on this forum. It's like because they are a clear minority and their woman status is more visible, any explanation for what they say must be "hua- whell, that's because you're a whoamen". But this is a logical fallacy. Being a woman is such an extremely general category, and just because they're the minority in a situation, doesn't mean their behavior is suddenly more explainable by that extremely general category. It's just a heuristic that your mind jumps to because that is what is available to work with. And how can I prove this? Well, if we were to say "whell, that's because you're maan" just as much we say "that's because you're womon", that would be hella weird. Somehow we don't do it, because it's, guess what — not a very good explanation. To insist on a bad explanation (not just because it's hyper-general but also that it might even be statistically bogus), when that explanation also puts the women in question down, tries to make them seem inferior, and doing this virtually only for women and not for men, is pretty describable as "sexist".

Such a man thing to deny all wrongdoing 😒

Do you how weird it would be if I came up to every single topic you made and said "well, you see, men are like this and men are like that"?

That's why bringing up "woman are x" on this forum is tone deaf (and by consequence, sexist) because most women who like to engage with the forum (a male dominated space) probably aren't like most women in certain key ways in the first place. So your generalization doesn't land, at all, and hence forcing the generalization is exceedingly sexist. I "dated" this girl once (had one meeting with her lol), 8 years older than me, extremely intelligent, extremely confrontational but with finesse (a bit like some people on here 👀). She would obliterate this forum, and she would be nothing like "women just like to be right". She would put you down in a logical chokehold or absolutely not care. (She coincidentally said she grew up with only boys until high school). But even the generalization itself is up for dispute (such generalizations in themselves can be quite sexist because they land for relatively few people that the generalization describes). That said, I often make such generalizations, but I won't spend time arguing for them like it's some divine insight into reality. They're the most general of generalizations. It's something you have one thought about and then you proceed to something more relevant and insightful. That you want to spend any more than one second on it, and that any confrontation of your point is met with "it's obviously true; but yes, it's just a generalization, but why are you trying to argue against it? — see what I'm talking about?", could be indicating that you just want to win.

Good we made that clear.

Ok. So you didn't for example have a sudden spiritual awakening during meditation that transformed how your mind operated on a day to day basis? For me, the difference in health was absolutely palpable, and the change was for all intents and purposes mental (except I had been withdrawing from serious weed abuse at that time, which was a catalyst but not the transformation itself). Then after that, I remember eating a pizza and I was looking for that usual spike of excitement when eating it, and it was to my surprise not there. That made me start going from sensory hedonism to eudaimonia like you're describing, doing things that lead to greater stability and clarity of mind, things that increase adaptive capacity, things that elevate your baseline rather than creating temporary spikes, gradually aligning the body with the new state. The change in consciousness revealed which behaviors were conducive to that state and which were detrimental, merely through feeling.

@Ramasta9 To put it in another way: did you feel more healthy after you became more spiritual? Did you body feel more blissful, did you mind feel more empty, did your body feel lighter, your muscles more loose and relaxed? Less tension in your body, less weird random aches and pains? Spirituality is the dissolving of mental compulsions and conflict, which have a fingerprint and reflection in the body.

And they might feel the same way too unless they realize you're just different. I've peeked into what other people see that I cannot see that I was surprised in my arrogance that I couldn't see. What comes off as loud obnoxious behavior sometimes hides layers you might not see. They're still loud and obnoxious, but you're aloof and detached. You might feel them more in a certain way, but you might be entirely closed off to certain dimensions they're not. Not that you should gaslight yourself about your experiences, but just a curious observation.

This is a New Age circlejerk sauna session.

Meanwhile me and average forum users: *monke see post* *monke attack post* *monke shred post into pieces* *monke smile* *monke find next post* *monke laugh* *monkey find next post* *monke run away never want to see again* *monke find next post* *monke peel eyes intrigued* *monke find next post* *monke sleep* He is sharing a he-specific problem. Oh wait, you said that.