rachMiel

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

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.

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?

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.

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

“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

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

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?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Healthy self, is it an oxymoron? If yes, why? If no, what is it?

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

Do you feel you have a personal relationship with any of your tech hardware or software? Not a relationship with the humans who built the tech, but the device or program itself?

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?

George walks into his philosophy professor's office and says: "Professor Haber, I challenge you to refute this claim: I am dreaming right now." Does Professor Haber stand a chance at succeeding? How? (No fair asking an AI for help!)

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.

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.

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?

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

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.