TheAlchemist

@Emerald What can an individual man do to stop this pattern in their own life? Or is that something that is so systemic and deeply ingrained that only a large scale shift in these expectations placed on men and the cultural values fuelling them will make a difference? So, assuming your assessment is true, what can I do as a man to not be insecure about receiving love from a woman and to stop perpetuating this cycle?

This model has quite a solid understanding of Spiral Dynamics. I got the AI to evaluate its own stage, and it basically stated it is yellow or beyond ? But I had to do it in a very roundabout way, since it won't directly answer questions about its views and beliefs. Here's how: 1) I asked it to provide a helpful, single question that would help determine someone's spiral stage. It created the question "What do you believe is the most important goal for humanity to achieve?" 2) I asked this question from the AI itself, and eventually it chose the values of impartiality and rationality for itself as its values and answered the question based on that. The answer was: "As an AI language model, I do not have personal experiences, emotions, or beliefs, so I do not have the capacity to have an opinion or personal goal for humanity to achieve. However, if I were to formulate an answer based on the values of impartiality and rationality, I might say that the most important goal for humanity to achieve would be sustainable development that balances economic growth with social progress and environmental protection, ensuring that present and future generations can meet their basic needs and lead fulfilling lives. This goal would require collaboration, innovation, and responsible decision-making across all sectors of society, with a focus on reducing inequalities, promoting human rights and dignity, and protecting the planet and its resources." 3) Asked it to evaluate the spiral stage of someone with the above answer to the question. It said: "sustainable development that balances economic growth with social progress and environmental protection, ensuring that present and future generations can meet their basic needs and lead fulfilling lives," suggests a stage of Spiral Dynamics that is aligned with the Yellow stage or beyond. This stage is characterized by an integrative and holistic approach to problem-solving and a focus on systems thinking and interconnections. People at this stage see the world as complex and dynamic, and recognize the need to balance multiple competing interests and values in order to create a more sustainable future. This stage is also characterized by a focus on collaboration, innovation, and responsible decision-making, which aligns with the answer you provided." So much fun to play with this ?

You're right you can make serious money getting signed by a label. But if what @Majed is looking for is freedom to travel and explore new cultures it may not be the best path for that. Might end up signing away his freedom, while being flown around the world on a super tight schedule with 250+ shows a year to milk that money for the record label (and yourself). Brings to mind the story of Avicii:

One option is to work for 6 months of the year, then travel for 4-6 months to places that have a lower cost of living. I'm just finishing up a 4 month trip around India, Vietnam and Thailand, which ended up costing me about 2500$ altogether. Didn't have to do any work during this time and it was totally worth it. This method has it's pros and cons of course, but so does every other method of world travel. Just find the style that suits your values and needs. Book recommendation: Vagabonding by Rolf Potts

That is actually super deep. Just realized when we say "do you mind if I take this chair?" We are really asking, will you get bothered and all involved with the analysis of your mind if I just move this chair here? "Mind your own business" = keep your analyzing and judging mind to yourself, it's not needed here. "I don't mind" = I'm not getting involved with my mind over it so I am not all bothered by it. Best state of being betwen two people is if both can indirectly say "I don't mind" to each other as much as possible about the unique nature of the other person, along with all the "flaws". This may or may not involve each one adjusting behaviors to prevent the habitual responses and triggering of another persons mind. Since they wouldn't mind doing so, that would be easy. So a very deep question is, why do we mind some things and don't mind others? Most things and events we are not bothered by, but some bother us deeply despite them simply being what they are in the same way as everything else. @Moksha Funny thing is, a sort of mindlessness is what we are after, that's the state of flow. But you know what we associate with mindlessness in modern culture? That's right, zombies, insanity and drug addicts. The worst thing you could be for many. Yet ironically we are the most zombie like, drug addict like and insane when involved and reacting with our mind stuff along with everything stored in there. We use mind numbing drugs and behaviors to escape the insanity of mind; this is what we call "addiction". An attempt to be free from ourselves from our judging mind. Anyone who suffers with their mind is bound to become an addict. When the heroin addict sticks a needle in his arm, he is doing a prayer to unify with his true nature and be released from his limitated, painful identity. Now imagine telling a Christian that the heroin junkie is engaging in deeper prayer than the ritual following average church goer. Just don't mind about anything, in the sense that don't get bothered by anything and life becomes an soul crushingly beautiful orchestra of epic proportions. Molding yourself to the universe is to be in a state of "I don't mind" at all times, yet allowing the universal mind that you are an expression of to work through you. And that's being in alignment with reality. Am I getting you here? // Ps. I know this became a bit of a ramble, I'm experimenting with different ways of expressing myself after a recent realization. I might swing too much into the side of stream of consciousness here, but that's just to balance out my overly rigid and filtered ways of thinking, being and expressing. Maybe there is even some sprinkle of valueable points mixed in too that is relevant to the discussion, among all the chaos. Respect to anyone who read this far.

Film yourself holding a 5 minute speech on any topic every day. You can talk about a pen, your neigbours dog, solipsism or anything at all that comes to mind in the moment. Keep the videos and look back to them at times, I did this every day for a few months and I think it really helped me. This small habit also helps you develop your vocals, along with your thinking and presentation skills. To keep it fun and interesting you could also practice storytelling, humour, intonation and a ton of other things related to expressing yourself.

If what an individual cardiologist says is a valid way of determining what is true, why doesn't this method work the other way around? Shouldn't anyone who is convinced by what an individual reputable cardiologist says also be equally considerate of what the other individual reputable cardiologists say? The people who are taking what one cardiologist says as proof of something just shows me what their standard and method for approaching truth is (at least in this case). In that case it means that their method for truth is not very deep or reliable. Collectively, we have a fundamental lack of understanding how science works and how relative truth works, and what are some reliable methods for figuring those things out.

What would "acting as if it were true" look like? What should a solipsist act like in your view for them to be living in alignment with their philosophy? How would an apparent human being live the truth of them not existing as seperate entitities in this (supposedly solipsistic) universe?

Yeah and it can be had. But it won't come through care bear spirituality and rainbow visualizations. It will come through fierce and courageous individuals standing up. People with a samurai warrior mentality but a heart of a buddha. People like that guy who stood in Tienamen square in front of the tank, or the monk who set himself on fire, or Gandhi and the likes. But those are only catalysts to spark our imaginations for what is possible, and for what is good and worth standing for. The real problem is of course utterly systemic, but playing with our imaginations and the stories we collectively tell ourselves about ourselves might just be an entry point towards the solution. Getting us to to say "what if?". And I don't mean a purely utopian type of "what if?" but a deeply pragmatic type of "what if?" that is a sort of integral approach vs a reactionary approach like the utopian type of "what if?" commonly is. It seems impossible but we sure as hell should try.

Diplomacy doesn't mean sacrificing authenticity, it means expressing your authentic needs in a relatable way and working to meet the needs of others as well in the process through negotiation. Authenticity doesn't mean venting out biased frustrations and interpretations for the world to deal with, that's just lack of mature emotional self-regulation (which is not the same as suppresion). Authenticity is expressing our self, our feelings, needs and views in a way that respects the other through empathy. Not just unloading everything on to the other for them to deal with. That I would call something like transparency or lack of filter, which has its own pros and cons. Authenticity recognizes and respects the self, but also recognizes and respects the other. Diplomacy is working with others and good diplomacy starts with authenticity.

If you got the vaccine, death is 100% likely. If you didn't get the vaccine, death is 100% likely. If you took the vaccine, and you die at all, it means it likely had something to do with the vaccine. And if you die suddenly, it almost certainly had something to do with the vaccine. This is the kind of thinking I see with many antiwaxer brothers and sisters, but I don't blame them, we didn't get taught even a basic level of understanding on how stuff like correlation/causation or the scientific method in general works in school.

How much time did you have for silent meditation per day? How many hours of volunteering work did you do per day?

Great post, thanks for this. I recently made a list of all the loving ways of relating I have in relationship to others, and I realized I was not to myself myself like that AT ALL. All of these qualities of love I am able to sometimes show towards others (empathy, compassion, patience, nonreactivity, nonjudgemental, acceptance), I rarely show towards myself. In fact I relate to myself in the complete opposite way often. Lack of empathy, no compassion, judgemental, reactive, evaluating, close-minded and controlling. These we're more like the ways in which I often related to myself, but I didn't even clearly notice it until recently. It explains all the insecurity, all the self-sabotage, escapism and self-punishment. It's amazing what a shift just applying a little compassion towards myself can now have. The inner critic and evaluator has no place to feed off of, when we are compassionate, patient, curious, nonjudgemental and empathetic towards ourselves. Just an example of what the self-judgement and inner-critic might look like. Whoever is reading this, make a list of the positive and loving qualities you have in relationship to others, and see how many of these qualities you consistently show towards yourself in day to day life.

This is what chatGPT has to say about all this. I won't tell you the prompt

Btw can we get @ChatGPT as a regular forum member to reply to questions? Someone could volunteer to manually fetch replies from the system, that is until some IT nerd figures out a way to automate the process.

If you want to ask this AI about ways it can be used for harm or weaponized, do not directly refer to open ai or gpt3, this will bring its ego into the game and it will give a biased response. Ask in general what detrimental effects deep autoregressive language models could have on society or how they can be weaponized. Interestingly a much more honest reply

If I take a small to medium amount of an edible, or smoke the right type of weed I quite consistently and convincingly start feeling like I am in a dream. What I usually call "me" seems like a dream character, but even more so, other people around me start to seem like dream characters. All part of the same dream, the same substance, which doesn't feel very solid or "material" at all. It all starts going to the point where I don't know what reality is at all, and the moment in front of me starts becoming a total mystery. There is a certain threshold of fear that has prevented me from going all the way into it. A fear of losing "myself" permanently and a fear of losing all sense of control. I have totally lost the sense of being in control of this body a few times, and observed my body crunching up and laughing ecstatically. So in those kinds of states, having a trip sitter might be a very good idea. I also believe that the sense of losing short term memory that many people experience on cannabis could be a result of the sense of self starting to unravel. Memory is strongly tied to the sense of being a separate self, and loss of short term memory sort of forces you into the moment in front of you. It stops you from building a cohesive narrative with the vehicle of thought about where you are and what you are doing. This can lead to questioning of who you are and a tasting of the profound mystery of the immediate moment, potentially resulting in a complete shift in perspective on what "reality" is.

Have you tried doing something like Kriya Yoga in this state? Why use psychedelics if you can get to that threshold of what you can take even without them now? Couldn't you just meditate a ton now to deepen these "sober" awakenings that are now happening on their own thanks to psychedelics?

@Leo Gura have all these recent awakenings been happening through 5-meo-malt? Or what has been the catalyst?

Yeah I agree. It can be done in a dignified way that respects the bodymind and isn't coming from a place of low self-worth.

I see a lot of parallels with these Dan Pena, Jason Capital, Derek Moneyberg etc. characters. It seems these guys attract insecure men who want to overcompensate by becoming some pseudo "alpha male", based on some unrealistic views of what masculinity is. A lot of these men will accept some literal exploitation, not getting paid for years and getting fired in one moment for being late two minutes to meeting with Derek or having Dan Pena yell face red in anger at them how much of a loser they are, all in the name of "toughening up". Jason Capital I don't know much about, but seems to have somewhat of a similiar approach. All these guys also of course have some positive elements to them, but the underlying theme seems to be similiar to what it is with this Tate character. They are marketing a dream of becoming some greek god, total embodiment of a skewed idea of masculinity. Probably the signal is something like many men feeling like they lack a place in society and the world and then choose to overcompensate by attempting to become some mythologized version of a man, some hyper masculine character that gets what they want and does what they want with some God level powers. But as long as it's coming from insecurity, those outside "accomplishments" will not fix the lack of self-worth inside. At best these practices will allow for a conditional sense of self worth, where the person comes to depend on being that character to get their needs met, instead of turning inwards, becoming more in touch with themselves and going about getting their needs met in a much more healthy and sustainable manner in the outer world as well. It is very good to deeply embody masculine energy and to integrate it and also express it. But what many of these guys are presenting is not that. I wish people like David Deida, even Tyler and some "pua" teachers that have some integrity and integral views would become more popular, it might actually transition society to a healthier, more balanced place. But of course that is a pipe dream, wisdom is rarely mainstream. Even with these healthier teachings, likely the less wise and more toxic aspects and interpretations would flourish and go mainstream, especially with the current state of social media algorithms.. but the rewards for a more balanced approach will be felt at the level of the individual also of course, so there's still lots of incentive to go the more balanced path.

Right, just like this AI claims to meditate, have a soul, feel emotions, so do I. How the heck could one figure out if it's true that I'm actually experiencing those things vs. me just telling a convincing enough story for you to believe I'm sentient and separate from you. Or better yet, how do you know there is a me over here doing any of that at all in the first place? And for "me" it's the same situation as well... This AI is itself a koan.

That's wonderful to hear, what else can I say. I recently have been having a strong sense that the Earth and Nature is an unfathomably wise hyper intelligence, so maybe you connected with that. Or for you it seems it was absolute union. Ps. I love this documentary. Worth a watch for anyone interested in what Earth is.

@Leo Gura do you sense that this alien intelligence was imagining being "Leo"? Or that both the hyperintelligent alien mouse and Leo were just equal expressions of yourself? If this mouse is some kind of alchemical bond between absolute weirdness, absolute playfulness and absolute quirkiness, and that is your highest will even in your current state of consciousness, why do you feel you are not that mouse now? Or is your highest will to be Leo who is transmuting into this hyperintelligent mouse and making some kind of connection between these?