Joseph Maynor

These are all great things. I tend to contract and then relax with spirituality. Right now I'm in relaxed state. The last 90 days I was in a contracted state. Neither one is better or worse than the other just different for me. The contracted state is when I'm focused on "doing the work", the relaxed state is when my mind is almost entirely blank where I can sit for hours doing absolutely nothing. It's like tide comes in, tide goes out.

AI is almost kind of an assistant. It's not a substitute for your mind. We're collaborating with AI now.

I had a long discussion of this on the other forum. What I concluded is that account of direct experience is an assumed philosophy. In other words, when we reduce experience to "direct experience", we're leaving something out. It's very sneaky because we assume that we can think of inputs to our consciousnesses like sound, smell, taste, touch, sight, thought, emotion, and those form the "atoms of direct experience." Without offending anyone, I don't buy that theory of direct experience, I think it's a reductionism. It's useful, but often the conclusions drawn from it I think leave something out. Morality is not just about feeling, it's a perception or a knowing: an experience, but not a direct experience in that reductionism sense. When we say morality is just or just is a feeling or emotion (not saying anyone here is saying this), that attempt to get at the phenomenological essence chops off part of it. This is why philosophers like Hume developed the is-ought dichotomy thus relegating morality to something different from what is. You're not going to find an ought in an is or from an is. I disagree with that! But you can see how that Empiricist account of direct experience tends to exclude morality from what is. Therefore, Hume had a boo! hooray! account of morality. No booing or hooraying (and thus morality in general) has anything to do with what is for Hume in his Empiricist account of direct experience.

I will, thanks. I was getting into Materialize for a while but then I started kinda liking CSS due to the control. I'm not a huge fan of Bootstrap. Tailwind seems like a pain but at least it has more flexibility. I'm always wondering if it's just better to learn CSS as annoying as it is. I like Vue, but I don't have a need for it quite yet.

I feel like art is basically a form of Creation but Creation goes well beyond art. Art is what is agreed to be creation. This is a good video to get started on this investigation:

Interesting interpretation. That's not what I intended to convey is different. What I was intending to say is more like going into the cave metaphor. You deliberately get away from spiritual language for at least 30 days. It's that simple! The longer the better even.

But who determines ignorance?

Ralston seems like a really socially fun guy to be around. It's interesting to me that most people seem to want a one-sized-fits-all procedure or answer from him.

True. But one can also be deceived by following a teacher. It's a weird balance between being influenced by another and being brave with your own insights.

I agree. Feeling is an aspect of cognition for me. Also intuition.

This is a really undervalued practice. I've done this a few times. Getting away from spirituality for like 30 days or more is profound like a psychedelic. And then re-engaging after that.

I see a lot of Ralston influence on here. I watched @BlessedLion's interview. If you don't even listen to the meaning of what he says -- but just focus on his vibe, he's very entertaining and captivating. The first time I watched it I focused on the meaning. Now I'm just listening for feel. He's very charismatic as a speaker. His pacing, cadence, and humor is excellent. Just going from the audio alone.

He seems to have a real issue with playing down immoral acts. The cutting someone off in traffic example is fine. But what about more egregious immoral examples. He makes it seem like the only reason morality exists is because of your mindset and attachment to a you. Sometimes people are doing bad things to others on purpose that bother and hurt them. If you don't think about it, it goes away, i.e., morality is a social illusion seems a little naive to me. Also an exception to his social reality example. There's also the issue with talking to yourself. Even if there is nobody around, we still talk to ourself. Not sure if that is social, but it's not how we conventionally think of social. He seems to be making an argument that language is inherently social and therefore corrupted or untrue. Notice his answer regarding fear or being afraid -- "It's always we don't need to do this". That's a very bold statement. He seems to think we create our minds or can create our minds entirely. He seems to think we have total free will and choice and can fix our own unreasonable thinking by contemplating untrue things we're presupposing. And the untrue, he associates with the social which I find odd. He wants to turn off the social oddly. He's in many ways very much like Jean-Paul Sartre: Q: What kind of world do you want? A: We get the life we deserve. The assumption is: All of us have 100% responsibility and ability to create our own life.

I think this is kinda probably true on some level. But only life can reveal this to you. This is why I encourage people to be social. The social corrects for a lot of things that you might not see alone.

This is a great example of this from my perspective. I love these videos from a humor perspective alone.

Isn't this just an exchange of one matrix for another one? Sneaky how this works.

I agree that it is important to realize not everyone deals with trauma the same way, but you might not see how you're dealing with trauma like another person might be able to. In other words, you may say I'm fine when another person can see that you're coping in some way. Just something to consider. We like to deny that we're unhealthy or overemphasize how much we have healed.

This is a good video that shows how to be playful in conversation IMO. Nice balance between information and humor.