Ismael

Holism & Holistic Thinking - Part 1 "When we try to pick out anything by itself we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe." --John Muir What is holism? "The theory that parts of a whole are in intimate interconnection, such that they cannot exist independently of the whole, or cannot be understood without reference to the whole, which is thus regarded as greater than the sum of its parts." --Oxford Dictionary Key: Irreducibility. What really matters is the relationships between the objects and not the objects themselves. Holism is the opposite of reductionism or atomism. (Treating nature as just a collection of discrete individual objects.) Reductionism is an implicit part of the materialistic paradigm. (The idea that the universe is real, material, objective, external, and doesn't depend upon the mind. Boiling everything down to something like atoms, so to understand a frog we take it out of its territory and study its blended-up parts under a microscope.) This is not how to understand reality, because so much is missed, this unholistic way of thinking leads to many dysfunctions and pathologies. If you believe you can, it's an implicit part of your epistemology and metaphysics you're sneaking in without validation or proof. Episode: Deconstructing The Myth Of Science - Part 1, 2, 3 The frog will behave differently in the lab than in its natural habitat. Scientists underestimate the entanglement problem between the scientist and what is being studied. Your understanding of what the frog is really is in your mind and not existing out there. There are different gradations of science. Lower and higher quality science. It's easier and cheaper to study a frog in a lab compared to going to its territory. School, academia, science, business, healthcare, government all have a bias towards analysis and division. Your mind can be very divisive or it can be used in a more unitive fashion, synthesizing and unifying things. This is deemphasized in our institutions. Often we're using analysis to achieve a certain survival result. This leads to a lot of narrow specialists in the world with lots of technical expertise. High technical expertise but very little wisdom. One of the features of wisdom is that it's holistic. Key lesson: Start to see how important holism is and how little it is stressed in most institutions and areas within society. Why is holism so important? Examples: Pharmaceutical companies thinking unholistically while trying to find medicines for curing one disease and not paying attention to all the possible side effects on the body and mind because the CEO says it's all about driving up the stock prices of the company and that it's not his concern but the therapists. Compartmentalizing the problem, treating it as though it's not your problem. Also, the way we market and push the drug so hard through TV ads so that people who don't even need the drug end up getting prescribed it, get addicted, depressed, and shoots up the school of the daughter of the CEO. In a sense, everything is your problem. Holistic thinking requires much more taking much more responsibility for all of your actions and all of the secondary and tertiary consequences. Disney buying Star Wars from Lukas just to make money from it and no nice overarching vision or conclusions. Why? Because they didn't have a holistic approach to this problem. The visionary brings to a project this overarching holistic sense of direction, of what they're doing, of vision. Notice how various forms of entertainment have fallen prey to this. The people who take over reducing the whole thing down by slapping some things together and hoping it will just work out. By reducing Star Wars like that you're reducing something that's greater than the sum of its parts. Chess. In a sense chess is a battle for the most holistic understanding and intuition. The most beautiful chess games are those where some great sacrifice is made to come back later for the win. People who are unholistic paint themselves into a corner easily. In chess it's called a fool's mate, you think you're going to win, but it was just a lure and you lacked the holistic understanding. Master equations that explain all of life: (34:55) Contemplate these two for years, it'll keep paying off. Holism = wholeness = health = healing = Unity = Oneness = infinity = harmony, balance = Goodness = Love = God = Selflessness = wisdom = Beauty = holy = heaven = bliss = peace = happiness Lack of holism = division = fragmentation = partiality = brokenness = lack of harmony, imbalance = limitation = finite = selfishness = ugly = evil = hell = suffering Consciousness can have various levels of holism to it. From infinitely unholistic, fragmented, and divided to infinitely unified and everything in between. And depending on where you are on this scale is going to be the quality of your life and how beautiful and holy life seems to you as an individual. Collectively, as a species, the more unified we are, the more holistic we are the more beautiful our societies will be. The more beautiful our cities will be, the less war we'll have, the more peace we'll have. Peace through unification. "Unification needs to happen at all holons, higher and higher, until we reach an infinite unity. This is what human history has been about for the last 10.000 years." First as tribes, then as city-states, then as nations, now we're starting to unify as the globe, which is meeting a lot of resistance. "The reality is that anything short of infinite unity is going to lead to suffering, ugliness, and limitation. The whole point of spiritual work is to let go of all your partialities, all of your divisions, which means becoming more selfless, the most difficult thing to do, and when you become completely selfless then you realize that you're God. (Infinitely selfless consciousness) And the reason you don't realize you're God right now is because you're in a divided, highly fragmented, highly partial sense of consciousness. You think you're a little human, that's separate from the universe, humans, animals, planets, and solar systems. ...This is how to heal the world and how to heal yourself." Your ego is not fully unified, it's fragmented. One day you're all gung ho about meditating, self-actualizing, eating healthy, and going to the gym. The next day you're lazy, you don't go to the gym, and eat a bucket of ice cream, and don't want to self-actualize. (Ego-backlash) "Harmonize the situation instead of shaming and guilting yourself, further fragmenting." How do you fix this? With love. Love is that which can understand, and recognize and accept, integrate through acceptance, through a higher understanding. How To Forgive Anyone Who Hurt You (56:20) The essence of shadow work: "Recognizing parts of reality that you've disowned by expanding your consciousness, a more holistic understanding of that situation, and then incorporating it, integrating it, loving it, accepting it, unifying it until there's no shadow." God is that which has no shadow because it's infinitely conscious of itself. No more warring with yourself and warring with others. You recognize it's the same thing. The higher your consciousness goes, the more unity you experience, the more blissful your life will be, the more loving you will be with others in your life and with yourself, the more you will accept yourself the happier you will be. And if you take this far enough your consciousness becomes infinitely unified you will experience heaven, paradise. What is hell? The absence of love. "Unholistic thinking creates duality and division, that's the problem." Examples: "Facts don't care about your feelings." -Ben Shapiro Your facts are very much influenced by your feelings. It's like severing your head from your heart. A lot of who you are is in your body, not just in your head. A lot of emotions and trauma are carried in the body. It's usually your emotions and wounds that drive you deeply subconsciously. And then you don't take care of those issues in your body, it creates pathology. It's part of the materialistic paradigm and our education system. Techniques: Yogic practices, Shamanic Breathing, Bioenergetics. Popular duality in politics is "the globalist elite vs the ordinary little people". There's not that much difference psychologically between elites and regular folk. Most elites are more educated, have more consciousness, and are more developed and loving people than regular folk. There are definitely deep corruptions within the elites themselves. But no matter how much corruption you see in the elites, the corruption in the lower classes is way worse than in the elites. That's the key mistake that many Trumpists, and supporters of Trump and right-wing populism make. This is analogous to the problem that happened with Hitler. His whole spiel was that we wanted to take over Germany from the globalist elites on behalf of the regular folk, that was his whole appeal. Trump is better than Hitler, but there are deep analogies. And there's a lot of foolishness to go around on both sides the right-wing and the left-wing. Criminals vs the good guys, the upstanding. Demonizing and hating criminals and not treating them humanely creates a shadow. This increases recidivism rates and makes them become more criminal, especially in the US- In Scandinavian Nordic countries they get much better results. Much more humane prison systems. Rehabilitation rather than punishment. To want to rehabilitate them you have to see the criminal as not separate from you. If we're holistic and even-minded in the way we see things most of us are criminals in one way or another. The criminal elements of society are literally just parts of your own psyche as God. Duality between science and spirituality. In our universities, anything spiritual is seen as anti-scientific and it's really not allowed within them. Treated as a joke, unscientific, lack of rigor, lack of truthfulness. And conversely, in many spiritual circles rationality, thinking, and testing own theories is ignored. Both camps suffer for that. For science to fully flourish and to really understand reality at the deepest level it needs spiritual insight, from meditation, yoga, etc. It needs to consider deep metaphysical issues which are at the heart of science, which spirituality can shed a powerful light on. The mind-body problem can be resolved through spirituality but cannot be resolved through materialistic science. And spirituality needs a lot more science behind it. Through rigorous research into psychedelics, yoga, and meditation techniques. "Unholistic thinking creates conflict, fights, violence, war, racism, genocide, slavery, exploitation and even civilizational collapse can occur from this. Whereas holism interconnects everything and tells you what is important and what is meaningful in life." "One of the consequences of this materialistic, reductionistic attitude or paradigm that has been adopted by our culture in the West over the last hundred years especially, through the 20th century and still through today, is that it has tried to demystify nature too much. And in so doing it has stripped life of its meaning or its spirit." This makes you lose sight of the highest most important thing which is holism, unity, and love. Your spiritual connection to life, not just through your head, but also through your body, and through your emotional system, intuition, and your feminine side. We've had this schism between the masculine and the feminine. You're not a whole person this way." The essence of wisdom is that keen discernment and prioritizing the higher over the lower. The foolishness of our current society is that we've actually prioritized the lower over the higher. Technology, materialism, money, and pleasure and hedonism and raw data, and facts, and information above everything else. Example: You'll get dismissed going into a university saying that love is the most important thing to study. To do good science you actually have to be able to feel into reality with great sensitivity and mindfulness. The solution is not to go back to religion but to find the next level of synthesis and holism which start to integrate the best from religion and the best from science, a higher synthesis of those two. Without holism your life becomes petty, mechanical, utilitarian, demystified, and dysfunctional, you lose your connection to life, hence the epidemics of depression, suicide, and opioid addiction. When you rob people of their spiritual connection they just become zombies and robots and then they kill themselves if they're not able to get the sort of success they see people getting on TV. You literally feel disconnected and alienated from people, society, nature, animals, Spirit, Goodness, the Self, Love, and God. What you want most of all is you want to feel infinitely connected to everything. That's Love. "Everything we seek in any domain of life is wholeness and unity." In religion, we'll have to do the counterintuitive of being selfless and surrendering our attachments and beliefs in for example Christ as being the one true savior or Mohammed being the last prophet. To then create the true religion that loves all the other religions. That would heal the world at the plain of religion. In business, every business seeks to be a monopoly. To achieve a healthier unity within business we'd have to recognize that it's healthy for us to have business competition, and to have different sectors controlled by different companies and that we shouldn't be buying up and using various kinds of anti-trust method to collude and then to squeeze our competitors out of the marketplace. We want a healthy economy which has many different companies of different sizes, that creates more innovation, that will actually help to create a better economy for more people, better wages, more inventions and it'll benefit everybody this way. To do that you'd have to think more holistically. Every family seeks wholeness and unity which requires more holism. Science is trying to achieve unity and wholeness. Science wants to understand everything, a theory of everything, but it thinks that it can do that through the methods of science without realizing that it can't because science is not everything. It's self-defeating. Similarly, in Mathematics, mathematicians want to try to understand reality only as numbers. Without realizing that they're just projecting numbers onto reality. You can understand a lot about nature through math, it's been very effective, but it only gets you so far. Science deeply suffers from this, because current science and academia don't consider a thing true unless it can be quantified and put into an equation which is called formalization. This is extremely unholistic, reductionistic, myopic, and leaves out the most important aspects of reality. For example, you can't quantify Love and Infinity, which is what reality is. You can only quantify the finite not the infinite. Infinity is not a math thing, it's all of reality, of which math is just one subset. In Geopolitics people seek wholeness and unity. Less healthy way: Seeking unity by dominating other countries or by exterminating other countries and races and people. Healthy Geopolitics: Unity through peace, alliances, and mutual agreements. By respecting each other's boundaries and differences and we don't try to dominate everybody else, trying to create a global empire, and trying to put our own country above all the other countries. This is part of the pathology of the Trump policy of America first. It ends up boomeranging and creating the opposite effect. Americans are only one-tenth of the whole planet. The other nine-tenths will just organize themselves into a more selfless alliance that will ultimately be stronger than America which will then wither away. That's what America first would get you effectively if it would have continued for 50 more years. This is the short-sightedness of selfishness. Unity is sought in relationships. As well as in health. Language seeks unity. There's a unification force within currency as well. This is evolution and life. Unity and division in an infinite fractal all the way up and down the different levels of the holoarchy. Episodes: Division vs Unity & Understanding Duality 1, 2 & especially 3 Reductionism is easily exploited by devils. It's very easy to be selfish by deliberately limiting the scope of your holistic understanding to something very small and narrow. A classic strategy. Using our minds to carve up reality into tiny parts makes it easy for nobody to take responsibility for all the parts. This leads to pathologies in science creating a fractured view of nature. Spirituality expands that little circle of concern until it becomes infinite and then everything is your problem and responsibility. Many people vote on a single issue that they're been fearmongered about. (abortion, guns, etc) To have a well-functioning democracy we need citizens that are so holistic that they care about the well-being and health of the entire country and even the entire world. Immune against manipulation by devils on single narrow issues. A single issue is not as important as all the issues. This requires more empathy, an expanding circle of concern as well as becoming more selfless. The devil, any deeply selfish organism, creates a very narrow circle of concern within infinite consciousness and then defends that to death. Most humans create these gross externalities without being conscious of, taking responsibility for, the collateral damage they cause creating a toxic commons for everybody to swim in. Leadership is nothing other than selflessness, it's one of the most important factors. Bad leadership is extreme selfishness and narcissism a la Hitler or Trump. Self-bias privileges one part of the universe at the expense of another. Episode: Self-bias "Recognize that your mind carves up reality not arbitrarily and not in accordance with the truth but in whichever way serves your ego best. This is the antithesis of holism. The reason most people aren't holistic is simply because they're too selfish." Understanding recontextualization Another problem with lack of holism is that narrow expertise is vulnerable to recontextualization. A set of facts without its context doesn't mean very much and when you have an unholistic perspective on the universe whatever facts you have are always vulnerable to a radical recontextualization. Science grossly underestimates this problem. A robust and solid science needs to be immune to radical recontextualization. And then the only way to be immune is by expanding your context until it's infinite. This means your field has to be the entirety of the universe as a whole. The more big picture you have the less detail you have and the more detail you have the less big picture understanding. Like zooming in or out of the Earth. Holism is zooming out. The power of the ultimate holism is that you zoom out so far that you grasp the whole thing even though you don't understand all the details. In a sense that's omniscience. There are two ways to use your thoughts: to divide reality or unity reality. We in our education and culture are biased towards divisive type of thinking. Which kind of thought do you use most of the time? Which type of thinking leads to more peace and which leads to more conflict and war? Which one do you want? All thought is fundamentally dualistic and incomplete, even unitive thinking. You can't use the part to grasp the whole and yet still there are degrees of quality to thought, not all thought is equally good. Incrementally increase the quality of your thinking, making it more holistic, integrative, and unitive, without surrendering your ability to do analysis. And then eventually your holism gets so high that you recognize that even thought itself is too limited and too unholistic to transcend thought itself. The highest holism doesn't occur within thought it occurs within consciousness. The highest holism is infinite consciousness which is beyond thinking. But thinking is still important! The more holistic your understanding the better you can manipulate systems towards health and the highest good without them boomeranging on you. We can't create a healthy society without thinking and holistic understanding of the systems we're dealing with. Holistic thinking can foresee the counter-intuitive twists and turns that reality takes. Libertarians don't understand that their cry for absolute freedom boomerangs on itself. Freedom, as humans desire it, has to be delicately balanced and harmonized with restrictions and regulations to ensure that your freedom doesn't turn into enslavement. Complex problems require holistic solutions. Holism generates more robust solutions than otherwise. Why is the highest intelligence holistic? Intelligence can be thought of as holistic pattern recognition leading to insight. It's intuition, the ability to interconnect dots and to see the whole picture of a situation. Inherent features of the highest intelligence: Ability to deeply see the context. Ability to go meta and to transcend. Ability to self-reflect. Ability to take on multiple perspectives and higher perspectives. Ability to be unbiased and selfless. Equal concern for all levels of the holarchy. As you contemplate for yourself what intelligence is and as you're experiencing higher levels of intelligence contemplate: "Why are these things the case & why are they important to the highest intelligence"? Psychedelics are awesome because they change the neurotransmitters, upgrade them, to ones that offer more interconnections. Interconnecting together more of your mind. To the point where ultimately the interconnections become infinitely dense. Every corner of the universe interconnects with itself infinitely such that this circle becomes a completely solid, glowing, white orb of pure interconnectedness. = God = Love = Intelligence = Beauty = Infinity = Eternity = the Self, your true highest Self. At this level of interconnectedness and holism the boundaries and physical divisions of everything in the universe collapse. All is equally you without any bias or partiality or favoritism. That's the godhead, infinite consciousness, complete awakening to yourself as God. And this complete interconnectedness goes on forever, it's an infinite well of Love that you keep falling deeper and deeper into and it becomes more and more interconnected forever. Why is holism so rare? Costs to holism: You can't break holism down into bite-sized chunks very easily, it requires putting a lot of pieces together and holding them in your mind at once. Actualized episodes are long because they're trying to bring them all together. This is mentally overwhelming. As a devil, you make life easier by not taking responsibility. It requires selflessness. As a selfish needy person, it's hard to be concerned about anything very far beyond yourself. Holism requires a transcendence of one's survival, one's biases. Because at the highest holism you are completely unbiased, consciousness is completely unbiased. No difference between you getting raped, tortured, or getting a birthday cake. Understandably very threatening to the ego. Holism requires surrendering yourself until ultimately you surrender yourself so deeply that there's nothing left to surrender. That would be going all the way. But even increasing your holism still requires surrendering something. This would be the selfless life, surrendering everything else important in your life, the money, sex, drugs, business, career, house, and children. The only thing that matters to you being to be completely unbiased in how you see yourself. That would be true selflessness and it would lead to the ultimate Love. The reason you can't love everybody and everything is that you're so partial, always judging everything good or bad because your self needs to survive as that little thing that it is. "And as you surrender more of yourself, the distortions that obscure your vision of yourself and reality, fall away, the fog clears, the clouds clear, and what you see is you approach closer and closer to Truth. And at that moment when you completely surrender every single bias you have and every single personal preference for good and evil, and you completely surrender yourself, at that moment you die, and you become the truth. And Truth is complete selflessness, Love, God. That's God-realization. The cost is all of your selfishness." You don't select to be selfless because it's going to do something good for you, you select to be selfless because you want to be selfless and that is its own reward. That is the highest wisdom, to see that. It's the most counter-intuitive thing about the universe, the decision to become selfless. Because everything in your body and mind is screaming for you to become more selfish.

Holism & Holistic Thinking - Part 2 "Aberrations of the human mind are to a large extent due to the obsessional pursuit of some part-truth, treated as if it were the whole truth." -- Arthur Koestler Essence: The higher elevation perspective helps melt away problems since new solutions arise which weren’t available before. Many of your problems stem from a lack of holism and often you don’t see it. Goal: Experience the shift and start to see how important and serious holism is. It’s a massive tree trunk and people just dismiss it as a hippy idea of alternative medicine. You can’t just compartmentalize science from nutrition, diet from psychological well-being, well-being from relationships, etc. They’re not separate things. Collective problems: Environment & ecology Littering and introducing new animals in foreign territory. When you don’t see all the interconnections of systems you overlook a lot and things spiral out of control. Western medicine The lack of holism is almost criminal, and, in the future, you’ll be able to sue a doctor for behaving this way. They’ll only look at a very narrow band of problems that you have. If it matches their little list of symptoms, they might help you. If it doesn’t, they don’t even think it’s a serious problem. Holism = health Nutrition Consider nutrition as a whole. Nutrition is not limited to any one of those things. That which causes you to lose fat does not necessarily mean it’s healthy for you long term. And being a vegetarian or vegan for ethical reasons also doesn’t mean it’s healthy for you long term. You can be a vegan and eat garbage food. (Fake sausage & cheese, potato chips, sugar) People get stuck debating the minutiae of these various diets, get tribal about it, missing the big picture. Fad diets will reduce nutrition down to either calories, carbs, protein, or fat. There are many different variations of all these. There's much more data to be listed on the back of products and in restaurants. Capitalism and business The way business is conducted today ignores so many important and huge domains and aspects of human life. Art, spirituality, the environment, health, social well-being and cohesiveness, the health of the society, and ignores the health of humanity at large. It also ignores the impact that this has on your epistemology and on your worldview. It's just looking to extract money from these things and isn't participating for the sake of it. Marketing Extremely unhealthy & toxic right now. Ignores societal well-being, the psychological ecosystem of human minds that it infects and corrupts with the mind viruses that it feeds. One of the greatest scandals of the last 50 years is the toxic effect that marketing has had on human minds. A scandal that nobody even talks or thinks about or understands at all. Zoomers are using technology even earlier than past generations and it keeps getting worse. All of that combined together leads to everyone shitting in the pool and soon enough we're all swimming in a pool of shit. It's subtle because marketing is not a tangible thing like a war happening. "Especially when we're talking about the health of society as a whole, we need to be extremely holistic and take all of these factors into account and find the proper balances." Geopolitics A lack of holism in geopolitics leads to something like the Iraq war. War is a lack of holism. Science Science ignores metaphysics and epistemology and dismissed these as unnecessary to the work of science. This is extremely ignorant and unholistic. The scientist assumes we can keep doing science as we've always been doing it all without questioning the deepest assumptions. But the scientific method itself hinges upon an implicit metaphysics and epistemology that you have. Materialism for most scientists and it's taken as truth, the default position. Our education system doesn't train them any better. And with that attitude, we keep on doing materialistic and reductionistic science staying confused as to why it isn't progressing, and certain problems can't be resolved. Those who've gone beyond scientific materialism have resolved the mind-body problem, but to academic scientists, it's still very mysterious and thorny. Science ignores consciousness and spirituality dismissing them as unscientific and unworthy of scientific study or unexplainable by science. They think that matter is one thing and consciousness is something else. Many of the best epistemic and metaphysical lessons discovered 100 years ago in quantum mechanics are not generalized out to other domains enough. Entanglement, subject-object duality, superposition, etc. Mathematics Gödel's incompleteness theorem. Episode: The Metaphysical Implications of Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem Generalizing it out to other domains requires holism. Scientists, mathematicians, and logicians are very locked into their own little bubble. This conservativism makes them not care about anything beyond their formalized logic or formalized subdomain. Psychology It ignores spirituality, nonduality, philosophy, and the importance of metaphysical, epistemic, and existential considerations when treating patients. That's why therapists doing psychoanalysis and talk therapy tend to have very poor results with curing patients. Usually, the patients have a deeper problem at the spiritual/existential level, at the epistemic/metaphysical level. Most psychologists are not trained for that and might even consider those things to be nonsense and not real medicine. They understand human psychology and behavior at a surface level because you can't without deep spiritual work on yourself personally. You can't be psychologically healthy without understanding the ego and the above. Logic Logicism during the early 1900s by Frege, Russel, Whitehead, Hilbert. The idea that mathematics was nothing more than the logic behind it and the shuffling of logical symbols in a formalized way. Tried to reduce all of mathematical truth to that, miserably failing at it. Gödel's IT and Russel's Paradox put the nail in the coffin after 30 years of that. He didn't consider the paradoxical nature of consciousness and of symbolic understanding. Logical Positivism All of science can simply be boiled down to simple true or false statements about the nature of reality. Is the sky blue? True or false? Is the sun hot? True or false? It's ridiculously reductionistic and ultimately self-contradictory and false. But at some point, some of the greatest philosophers in the world believed in this. "This is the history of Western intellectual tradition and how deeply reductionistic it used to be and how badly that failed because reductionism fails. That's the problem with reductionism, is that it keeps failing. And the reason it keeps failing is because reality is a Unity! And if it is a Unity you can only understand it as a whole, not as bits and pieces." Science ignoring psychedelics Treating it as though it's an unscientific thing. "The real breakthrough will be when serious scientists start taking psychedelics themselves and using them to see the limitations of science, that'd be true holism right there, but we're a long way from that." Technology A lot of ethics are ignored. A lot of technologies are just invented for the sake of inventing them for business purposes because technology and business are closely related. It's much harder to do business holistically than unholistically. Einstein's Relativity First developed special relativity, a very narrow application of relativity to just velocity in one direction, a very special case. Einstein wasn't fully happy with that. What about accelerations, rotational forces, and intuited that relativity needs to apply to those things as well. Came up with general relativity, expanding the narrow discovery to something much larger. Space-time and that really gravity was just the mass exerting a distortion within space-time, four-dimensional space. But we can't stop there… If he was truly holistic in his thinking, he'd generalize relativity, even more, applying the concept of relativity to everything in the universe. Including the human mind, science, religion, different cultures, the actual physical existence of objects, and the physical existence of the universe. Absolute Relativity = Awakening He stayed stuck within the little domain of physics and didn't break through that. Episode: Understanding Relativism Education Perhaps the biggest source of social problems. Ignores personal development, EQ, Love, epistemology, metaphysics, spirituality, nutrition, health. Leading you to believe, after 12 years of ignoring these, that 'they don't even exist or if they did they would have taught me!' Really the education system should be Actualized.org curriculum. Actualized.org spawned rather organically from Leo's holistic orientation and interest in researching and finding the deepest lessons that one can learn in life. Scientific studies in general They're extremely narrow and unholistically designed leading to very narrow results which can easily be recontextualized in the future by other data and studies. Individual problems: Living a hedonistic lifestyle & eating junk food You're not thinking about how this affects your longevity, health, how this contributes to your ability to do your work and fulfill your life purpose, to love and have sex, to raise children. Same thing with when you're not exercising. Staying at a job that pays very well but doesn't satisfy you It doesn't satisfy you because it doesn't align with your life purpose and highest values. This is the bigger problem that needs to be addressed. Workaholic lifestyle Seems nice at first thinking in terms of the next year or two but thinking about your career and business and your productive output over the span of your entire lifetime these things are laughably stupid. Not considering how their work connects with their relationships, marriage, sex life, health, children, friends, family. You need all those things to be in balance to have a happy life. Avoiding going to the doctor Starting a work project but then losing track of the ultimate goal of what the project is about It's very easy to get stuck in one thing. Being cheap when hiring employees This requires a long-term holistic approach. Lying in relationships A long-term honest relationship can't be built on lies. An unholistic person is not thinking about how to sustain the health of the relationship. Not just from your selfish personal needs. The third holon is the relationship itself which requires a lot of selflessness. Pickup community Ridiculously unholistic. All about the male perspective, as though the female perspective isn't even important. Gamers can get laid effectively, but when it comes to having deep fulfilling relationships with women, these pickup guys are so far away from being able to do that. In fact, pickup makes it even worse because it trains you with a very unholistic, deeply self-biased attitude towards sex, dating, and relationships. Episode: A rant against the pickup community Staying married for the sake of children Ripping off your customers when doing business Not going to work out long-term. Dismissing the importance of theory Your practice will be very limited. Theory shows you new ways to practice and allows you to introspect deeply about your practice and that maybe it's useless. How do you know the practice you're doing is the best one? Only through theory. An unholistic duality. Episode: Theory vs practice balance Loans and credit Super unholistic economical idea both collectively and individually. Not doing spiritual work Can't just skate by without any existential consideration. You'll suffer deeply because of this especially when getting older and facing death. The last few years or decades will be one of your most miserable years. The duality between the individual and collective level is itself brokenness and fragmentation in consciousness. Think of them as the two strands of the DNA helix. Contemplate: How many problems in the world are the result of unholistic thinking? How many of your personal problems, or the problems of people you know, are the result of unholistic thinking? Beware of teachings, endeavors, or projects which are not holistic: Success-based, materialistic, self-help teachings or business of that same nature. Western medicine, physics, mathematics, philosophical schools, religions, or even spiritual schools, cults, and political ideologies. Buying into any of these things too much and taking them as the ultimate truth is going to lead to problems; disease, suffering, and brokenness. Why is what's being said in this episode so important? Lack of holism = paradigm lock. What's defined as "evil" is defined by whatever paradigm you've locked yourself into. The most powerful tool for breaking out of these paradigms is holism. This ultimately leads to jailbreaking the mind, infinite holism. The mind jails you by getting you comfortable in a less than infinitely holistic way of thinking about reality. Corruption Corruption = a lack of holistic intelligence. Episode: How Corruption Works Catch-22 of holism: "Thinking holistically requires appreciating the value of holism. But, to see and appreciate the value of holism requires that you're seeing holistically." Hence all the examples of how problematic it is to not be infinitely holistic in your understanding of reality. It directly leads to suffering for you and for all of mankind. It's a hedonic treadmill, the path to hell. The holistic path leads to the opposite, not easy, requires wisdom, but deeply rewarding. Many aspects of life and reality cannot be understood without significant holism: Sexual dynamics between men and women within relationships. Conflict and war. Trauma, evil, corruption. How to create a healthy society. ...etc If you value understanding you have to be holistic. Components of holistic thinking: Taking all levels of being into account, the higher and the lower. Taking responsibility for everything, which makes it so challenging. Awareness of your effect on the whole. Internalizing externalities. Accounts for systemic emergent properties. (Example) Accounts for backfiring mechanisms, counter-intuitiveness, and non-linearity of reality. Sees how the part fits into the whole valuing both the whole and the parts. Sees how all dualities must ultimately all reunite. Requires a long-time horizon, vision-logic. Requires considering relevance, priority, context, and balance. Requires considering the greatest good for all without selfish needs. Do you genuinely care about the whole? Are you willing to be selfless for the sake of the whole? The highest leverage to becoming holistic is first and foremost to solve your survival challenges permanently in a healthy way. Different degrees of holism: Politics Politics is about fighting off those evil other guys. Politics is about money, sex, power, and domination. Politics is about creating a better and fairer society; it's about reducing suffering. Politics is about elevating the consciousness of mankind and increasing collective love. "Our politics is so fucked up because virtually nobody understands this." Politics is about the Universe becoming ever more self-conscious, self-aware, and interconnected with itself, ultimately leading to infinite Love. Science Science is about manipulating reality. Science is about measuring things. Science is about understanding nature and all of its different phenomena. Science is about expanding our understanding of the physical universe. Science is about expanding our understanding of life and consciousness. Science is the Universe becoming conscious of itself as God and Love. Science is identical to spirituality. "Science is God exploring itself because it's curious about itself because it's in love with itself." … everything is done at different levels and tiers of holism -- filmmaking, game design, writing, sex, etc. How to develop holistic thinking? Ask higher quality questions. Episodes: The power of asking questions, Contemplation, 64 most fascinating questions. Psychedelics, awakening, God-realization, spiritual practice. Psychedelics are especially powerful at increasing your holism. Developing your intuition. Episode: How to harness your intuition Don't sell for one-dimensional, linear, reductionistic, dualistic answers. Keep questioning, keep wanting higher answers, this will push you to explore new perspectives and read. Study many perspectives. As many perspectives as possible. It'll expand your appreciation for the diversity of perspectives. Deconstruct the materialistic/mechanical paradigm. It's straight jacketing your holistic thinking ability. Study systems thinking. Episode: Intro to systems thinking. Start to consider externalities and collateral damage. Learn from Ken Wilber, Fritjof Capra, David Bohm, Einstein, Buckminster Fuller, etc. Step outside of your survival concerns The highest leverage to becoming holistic is first and foremost to solve your survival challenges permanently in a healthy way. Study your own self-biases Episodes: Self-bias, Developing introspection. Develop a long-time horizon Look for top-down, bottom-up, and sideways causal forces Eliminate judging and criticizing as much as possible Nothing will hurt your holistic thinking ability more than judging and criticizing. Adopt Ken Wilber's attitude of "everyone is right." In partial ways and in different degrees. Questions to help you think holistically: How are X and Y interconnected? What is the big picture here? What is the larger context of this? What is the ultimate point of all this? Why am I doing this at all? How is this a part of something larger? And what is that larger thing? How does this part serve the larger whole? How is this part of a duality? How will this boomerang? What is best for the health of the whole? How should the parts be rebalanced for the good of the whole? Which parts are out of balance leaching selfishly from the whole? How is this fragmented? How can it be unified and healed? How am I drawing the boundary of the system? How can I redraw the boundary to expand the boundary? How am I involved in the situation? How would God see this situation? God's thinking about a thing is unbiased, selfless, unattached, fearless, benevolent, all-loving, all-understanding, non-judgmental, self-accepting, and seeking exquisite balance for the good of all. This question is especially powerful because this is the power that created the entire universe. How can I better serve the greatest whole? Align your life with that question to ace life. Warnings: Studying the whole for personal gain is not holism, it's devilry. You can't separate holism from selflessness. Distinguish holism from Holism. holism = as the polar opposite of reductionism, creating a duality. Holism = incorporating reductionism into it and the unholistic people and things going on everywhere. Holism is so high that it even integrates evil. holism still thinks that there is a good and a bad, which isn't truly Holistic. Holism requires surrendering a lot. All the robbing, scamming, hurting, attacking, killing, enslaving, and exploiting is just an aspect of Yourself, the Universe. Different manifestations of Love at various densities. This would be true Holism. The ultimate form of Holism isn't thinking at all, but pure infinite Consciousness. Your state of consciousness determines how holistic you are more than anything that you think. It's still important, but there's trans-rationality. The changing of your state of consciousness is actually the highest lever you can pull to become more holistic. This is why psychedelics feel so holistic. In conclusion: A fragmented mind creates a fragmented world. To heal the world, we must unify our minds. The only question is: Do you want to heal the world? Or are you going to say 'not my problem?' Every problem has both holistic and unholistic solutions. Be careful not to get suckered into unholistic solutions, kicking the can down the road, multiplying the problem. "If you encounter a problem in your life that you feel is impossible to solve, most likely it's simply because your approach to that problem was not holistic enough." How is my thinking not sufficiently holistic enough to crack this problem? Division, fragmentation, and reductionism are not bad, it's only so in the relative sense. Nothing is bad, everything is Good. Highest Good = highest Holism. "He or she who is most holistic wins the game of life."

Pre-rational spirituality/PD.

Exactly. Especially when it happens during a meditation session or trip. The synchronicity or coming full circle is just beautiful.

What Are Holons Summary.docx

Minecraft Acid Interstate

Thanks for sharing your experience with this shadow work technique! ? This really resonated. The circumstances and pattern described sound very familiar. The quote by Carl J. is awesome too. Such an eye-opener!

Hello Forum ?? First post, I hope it’s readable. ? I’m currently reading “Who Am I? Meditation” by Ramaji, and the book introduced me to what Ramana Maharshi called the “Heart on the right”. He said that the “Heart” is where the I-thought will die and that this is done by dropping the I- thought back down into the Heart each time it escapes home. After I’ve been doing the following practices on a consistent basis since December last year; • Mindfulness meditation with labeling + concentration practice, • Neti Neti Meditation, • and Kriya Yoga preparatory exercises, first small improvements to my ability to rest in this thoughtless state have been noticeable. As well as stimulating my third eye for the first time and experiencing some tingling on top of the head. Anyways. For three days now, I’ve been experiencing some sort of pain on the right side of my chest. I’m physically active and eat healthy and would be very surprised if it was caused by a physical condition. That’s why I’m posting on this part of the forum. I was wondering if anyone could help me figure out if what I’m experiencing is what Ramana Maharshi called the “Heart”. I would love to hear about your experiences with the “Heart”. I’m quite confused. ?

This might very well be it! I'll stop Kriya Yoga until after the doctor gives a green light. Many thanks

@Eph75 The pain gets accentuated when I bend my thorax downwards. ? I overthink quite a lot. Especially before posting something. ? I’ve been practicing being honest and vulnerable lately and purged some old unfinished business by telling people what I felt for/ about them. Maybe this is the physical sign of opening the heart. I’ve been experiencing some strong backlashes in the past weeks as well. Maybe this is a physical symptom of working on self-love and opening up. @Visionary I could definitely see that. Ramaji mentioned this in the book as well. He says to make sure to work on the breath, body and heart as well. „Whatever approach you take, be sure to include the physical body in it.“

Thanks for the quick response @LfcCharlie4 ?? That’ll definitely help me lift my confusion. ??

Have you seen this video of Teal yet? I found this to be very insightful. Maybe you could use the questions suggested in the video to evaluate how you’re using your practice.

Wow. This is beautiful. ♥️

I think the trap that I most often fall into is blindly believing without actually deriving the answers for myself. That’s why I want to start doing contemplation. Then I’ll stop blindly believing all the answers and start having the insights for myself. Thus I’d want to take action naturally. Also the learning = behavior change video was quite a wakeup call to me.

@Michael Paul Thank you for posting this. So firstly, I never practiced yoga, but when I do the strong determination sitting technique I sometimes experience these moments of pure joy where I seem to enter a trance of pure bliss for a little bit. I’ve done two littIe solo retreats this year where I did 4x 1h of SDS a day. And especially during the last sit I would experience this pure bliss and laughter towards the end of the hour. Could this be a little taste of it? And secondly, ever since starting a regular meditation practice, I’ve experienced a big shift in my value and a sort of ever growing rift started to manifest itself between me and my old life. It’s become increasingly harder to relate to people. The superficialities kind of turn me off in a way. And make me wonder if I’ll ever come back from this sense of apathy towards doing what is considered normal.

A couple of very important and basic things you could experiment with are: Squat Hanging Spinal Waves I'd recommend you try all of them to see where you're at with these. Can't know if this will do anything for the specific issue, but I felt like sharing these, because getting good in any of those three basic movements listed above will always be a good start. Explanations: