zurew

Thats just the beginning. After you do it for 40 years , you gonna look something like this

What a surprise that someone needs to lay down basic communication norms almost every single time when a new thread is started. Like you need to walk through fucking 95% of the actualized.org users how semantics works before you can begin to have a discussion about anything.

Master Roshi being the biggest coomer , still has all the energy for a kamehameha.

Stay hard

I dont think goggins seeks to transcend suffering. He seeks to realize his potential by confronting the fears he has. If the realization of his full potential involves a fuck load of suffering, then he will choose that road. He doesnt seek escape, he seeks the moment and the vision where he goes up to heaven and god pulls up the list of things goggins supposed to become and say "This is all the things you supposed to become, but Im not gonna lie, im all-knowing and you still fucking managed to somehow overdo your list. I had to add new lines to your list as you were living your life". He created a tyrannical super soldier super-ego (Goggins) that does not let him (the vulnerable David) to chill. I dont think he has much choice about it, in the sense that that super-ego will fuck him up psychologically if he doesnt do what it tells him to do.

I think the inferences you made are a bit loose, and I dont think that you need to have a clear answer to your question. So lets just grant that most of those hardcore monks are not enlightened, from that doesnt follow that the practice doesnt help in any way at all to get enlightened. (similar argument can be made for any other practice or for psychedelics) The other thing is that , you probably have other goals (other than just enlightenment - like having a peace of mind, elevating your concentration ability that are all practical and useful and cool in other domains), so what do you really have to lose with doing the practice? If it is the case, that it doesnt help with enlightenment in any way at all, then still ,you gained a lot from it, and if it helps with enlightenment ,then you have enlightenment + other bonuses. If your view is that psychedelics lead to enlightenment - then do psychedelics, but that doesnt prevent you from doing these practices. If your view is that no practice is needed for enlightenment , and that it is avalaible in all mental states, then doing the practices wont prevent you from grasping the truth. No matter which line we go down, neither one provides an argument against doing the practices.

Any thoughts on doing hatha yoga before kriya yoga? Some people say that hatha yoga is good for a foundation (not sure what they mean by that) and also claim that it will make kriya yoga more effective.

https://consilienceproject.org/technology-is-not-values-neutral-ending-the-reign-of-nihilistic-design-2/

@Leo Gura Do you still practice yoga?

I grant that it wouldnt get an A, maybe not even a C. But what we have here is even worse. What we have is people introspectively giving explanations which is even worse. This shit would be a disaster even if it would be done on any non-controversial thing like smell. People having a sense of smell give them no authority or credibility to speak on how smell works. They would cook up and come up with crazy and trash theories. But at the same time, I also understand the other side of the story. Using Plato's cave analogy - it would be like endlessly studying the shadows and thinking that that will help you to make good inferences about the items that created the shadows or thinking that the shadow "caused" the items.

Something just causing seems wrong ,but the "just will yourself" also seems wrong to me. The "no gurantee" resonates with me, thats why I would probably use phrases like participation or voluntary necessity (ie being a seeker , like you need to want it, but its not sufficient to just want it) rather than just "will yourself there" or "something caused you to get enlightened completely outside your efforts and will" ). But regardless, the way to do this in a more rigorous way is to take a sample of enlightened people that we agree on for the sake of the argument and then collect variables and then run studies on them. The obvious issue is that the sample size will be small and even there we wont agree on all the people and the number of hypotheses that can be created is also incredibly large and there is no way to check who got enlightened.

I think its useful to make that distinction to avoid some language games, but its nowhere near sufficient to have an answer. If we dont make that dinstinction, then I dont know frankly what we are doing here - because all of us are already enlightened then. But the question is - Is it random, can certain things have an effect on it, and or can certain things actually cause it?

I also think that a good chunk of the confusion comes from not being clear about certain things. So for example, there is a difference between what Reality's nature is and between the realization of that nature. Realization/recognition is time related, nature isn't and both of these can be true at the same time. It can be true that reality's nature has always been the case(in an eternal - non time dependent way,) but it can also be true that the recognition of said nature is time related.

Im arguing about this exact thing with @UnbornTao and im still confused on his view. The honest answer is that I have no clue, but my assumption is that things can have an effect on it, but they dont cause it. The entailment of nothing having any effect on it seem to lead us to conclusions that I dont think any zen/neo-advaita duder would wanna bite. Cause then they give me a good reason to not let them to just freely hit me with the zen stick - let me conceptualize as much as I want, since conceptualizing has as much chance leading me there as anything else.

He actually takes the view that nothing has an effect on enlightenment, not just that nothing can cause it ,so under that view - he could literally video himself throwing spaghetti loops at the wall and have as much expectation of anyone getting enlightened as if he would do 10 enlightenment workshops.

Just use the zen stick and beat people into enlightenment.

Btw, if anyone is interested - it seems that there are some videos uploaded on Ralston's Vimeo channel that arent uploaded on his youtube. https://vimeo.com/peterralsto

My dude is destroying Ralston's business by leaking paywalled videos just to win an internet argument against Leo. When Ralston told you to empty your cup, he didnt meant to empty his wallet

What does that mean in practice? Do you pray and go into a meditative state and listen for answers and guidance?

What if the Holy Spirit is guiding you to success though (by making for example certain goals more salient and more desiring for you)? The response you gave only make sense when you talk about ultimate guiding principles, because under your Christian view - you should let the Holy Spirit to be the ultimate guide / organizing principle for you, but there is no contradiciton with it guiding you to success. The Holy Spirit is telling you to grasp Ralston's cup.

And for clarity - logical impossibility is not the same as your inability to doubt things. Your doubting ability can be limited by a bunch of things, but that doesnt mean that what you cant doubt must be true. Thats an implicit unjustified premise. Something can be logically possible and you can be inable to doubt that thing; and on the other hand, something can be logically impossible and you can concieve of that thing being true.

I agree that we dont need to think this way, thats why I said from the beggining to OP that "you dont need this level of certainty". The only reason why I brought this up because Leo appealed to this level of certainty and now Im holding him to it.

See that I agree with, and I agree that we should care about rationality as an epistemic norm, but rationality and reasonableness is a much more narrower set than logical possibility. I would have 0 issue with you saying something like "you are being irrational/unreasonable when you deny the validity of and or possibility of awakening", I have issue with you implying that awakening being false is logically impossible/it is a logical necessity that awakening is true.

Nope, none of that has to do with what Im saying. The framework doesnt pressupose/reliant on any specific metaphysics. You interpret the term "world" as something physical, but again thats not what it means there. The term 'world' just means a set of true/false statements where there isn't any contradiction.

And the fact is that in the vast majority of cases (when we take a particular claim to be true) - there arent just a 1000 possible compatible worlds - there are much more than trillions of possible worlds that it is compatible with. Often the number of possible worlds a claim is compatible with cant even be cognized, because the number it too big.