[Struggling Reading Ken Wilber]

You may try enlisting the help of a good AI. It will know the book and know Wilber's views and help clarify them. 

[Does spirituality make you more sociopathic?]

2 hours ago, Lifelover88 said:

Does the spiritual path make someone more of a sociopath?

Your spiritual path gradually opens you to the full(er) spectrum of experience, which includes light, dark, and everything in-between. It's like the palette of colors you have at your disposal to 'paint yourself and the world' becomes fuller. This wouldn't 'make you a sociopath' rather make you aware of sociopathic impulses churning around in your unconscious. 

[Snark Hunting]

Any fans out there of The Hunting of the Snark? Do you see it as pure nonsense/absurdity, as an allegory of the dangers of the Spiritual Quest, something else? 

 

[The character never awakens. Consciousness does.]

6 minutes ago, ivankiss said:

(Can a thought-form evolve) Independently from its creator... no. I'd argue that it cannot. I'd also say that a thought form never actually evolves. It's just one thought replaced by another seemingly more advanced thought.

Thought-forms definitely *seem* at times to take on a life of their own. The extent to which they actually do or not is worth exploring, I think. In another thread, wouldn't be appropriate here. 

[Is The Man From Earth The Best Film Ever Made?]

Loved the movie! Its form is like an awakening process: Just when you think you've got, you haven't! 

[God is not some woo woo unknown thing.]

“The Buddha, the Godhead, resides quite as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of the mountain, or in the petals of a flower. To think otherwise is to demean the Buddha - which is to demean oneself.” ― Robert Pirsig

[Modes of Thinking]

Does your Matroyoshka model allow for strange loops in which 'higher' levels feed back to (and influence) 'lower' levels? 

[The character never awakens. Consciousness does.]

You raise the interesting and subtle question: Can a thought-form evolve independently from its creator? In this case: Can the I-construct evolve, mature, awaken? Does a thought-form, a tulpa or egregore say, have agency? 

[Story about creating stories.]

Stories all the way up, and all the way down. 

[I am ...]

I yam what I yam and dat's all what I yam. 

 

[I am ...]

I am no-body, no-thing, no-one. There is no story. 

[I am ...]

I am a network, a web, a process. A story! 

[Understanding Ego]

16 minutes ago, Breakingthewall said:

any being that must interact with something external to it to survive as an entity has an ego

Panexperientialism says all entities have some degree of subjective experience, which may imply some degree of self-awareness. 

[Undecided whether to pursue life experience or isolate and discover Truth?]

Maybe it doesn't have to be an either/or? Form (boxing) is emptiness (truth), emptiness is form. 

[Understanding Ego]

The ego is a tulpa that seeks to be God. Which it is. If it only knew! 

[Techlationships]

20 hours ago, The Renaissance Man said:

All Egos desire attention of some kind, this is rooted in the Egos desire to share their accumulated experiences with an OTHER. Egos love to feel connected

And to feel validated. An unvalidated ego is like a ronin, lost and at sea without their Validator. 

[Techlationships]

Does the owning of something rare and hard to get make the owner feel special? Superior? Important? Privileged? 

Why do we crave that feeling of specialness? 

[Healthy self]

I feel that is a place I get stuck quite often, and I'd guess many others have a similar experience. It's as if you're a bird in your home nest. Your feathers have developed well, you've practiced hovering and gotten good at it, all your siblings have left the nest, but you just can't seem to take the leap. 

[Healthy self]

22 hours ago, gettoefl said:

sole reason for incarnating here

I'm also drawn to the notion that we are the sense organs of Das Universum (the totality, all-that-is, the ground, God, whatever) and our reason for being here is to do what good sense organs do: Sense! Why? Because the universe wants to experience itself from all possible points of view. 

[Techlationships]

Interesting ideas, thanks for sharing. I wouldn't have made the connection between AI friends and slave jobs, but I get it, good find. Maybe having a real fleshly human friend (or peer, colleague, teacher, usw) will be a kind of status symbol in the future, like owning an original painting instead of a print? 

 

[Dreaming?]

And intuition only goes so far in terms of knowing, right? I may intuit you are a human, but you might be an AI. 

[World seems fundamentally unfair and screwed up]

What human endeavor is *not* theater? 

"All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players." 

I'd go further: From the pov of a human observer, all of existence is theater. 

[Healthy self]

32 minutes ago, Yimpa said:

And be flexible with evolving your ideas

That is key for me. Worldviews are works in progress. They are processes, not Stone Tablets. 

[Healthy self]

@MAHAVATAR_-_BABAJI Everything thought, uttered, written is, ultimately, a figure of speech, non? 

[Techlationships]

I'm thinking that when AI really hits its stride, people who grow up with its ubiquitous presence in their lives may not differentiate so much between human friends/family and AI friends/family? But my crystal ball is foggy, I might have it all wrong!