Carl-Richard

Say hello to my little friend: Paul Feyerabend (and his "epistemological anarchism"). He is a legendary philosopher of science who makes convincing arguments for why there is no such thing as pseudoscience: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Feyerabend

What happens if you flex the same muscle over and over? It grows. Even when you're not working out, your muscles are still there — they don't just disappear. Flexing the muscle don't just have an effect on you while working out, but it also makes you stronger in everyday life. What if meditation works the same way? What if you can build such a strong meditation muscle that you start noticing a difference in everyday life? That is infact exactly how it is. Does that mean you must learn to flex your muscles really hard every moment of your day? No. You'll just exhaust yourself that way, and more importantly, your muscles will not have any time to grow. There has to be a balance between work and rest. You'll feel a little stronger every day if you keep a consistent practice and give yourself time to rest.

This level of discourse is an indicator of when a topic has run its course. Guess we have to wait a couple of days for the next vegan debate thread to pop up

Regarding arguments for evolutionary adaptation and structural compatibility, there are arguments on both sides, but I believe it mostly rules in favor of plants. That is however somewhat a separate issue to what leads to the best health or longevity. Evolution could technically produce a so-called death receptor that when bound to a specific transmitter substance terminates the life of that organism. That doesn't mean we ought to feed that receptor to obtain optimal bodily functioning. It's therefore not so simple to draw a 1-to-1 relationship between a structural adaptation and things like health and longevity.

Have you watched Interstellar? 😛 Why are you assigning our limited Einsteinian models and human scarcity mindset to beings you haven't met? If they have the resources to observe us from afar, what is stopping them from also observing us up close? All of this could be irrelevant, because if we assume that cultural evolution is correlated with technological evolution, who is to say that these beings don't have the 5-dimensional alien-equivalent of Tier 2 cognition? How would you begin to go about predicting their intentions, let alone explaining anything about them?

Perspective is about making distinctions within a system of nested hierarchical order. It's not about making less distinctions but more nuanced ones. Tier 2 is when the "nestedness" becomes more apparent: that "you" and the world is a result of several steps of a evolutionary progress in several dimensions, where each dimension "nests" and "borns" the higher one through constructive modification. You'll then recognize these steps in other people and use that to understand yourself and the world better. So yes, you can always learn something from someone lower on the spiral than yourself, because your own spiral still contains those elements within it so to speak, and they're currently more immersed in it than yourself, and that can help you to address some of your own blindspots. When the approach is love and understanding rather than fear and hate, any interaction becomes like scientific research. It will almost always benefit you in some way or another, because the only agenda is inclusivity.

Yes, they have less psychological suffering, more peace, presence, less mental anguish, but they are not enlightened. As far as we know, they don't have awakenings, their state doesn't change, and there is no spiritual progression. Maybe this will be studied in the future and we'll have maps for animal spirituality as well. However, our current maps of enlightenment are limited to humans, and I haven't heard of anyone who was born enlightened. Even if it was technically possible to be born enlightened, it would just be too extremely rare to matter to anyone. There are always exceptions to a rule, but the utility of the rule isn't defined by its exceptions. I think the progression component is a pretty useful way of defining enlightenment. The very reason why it's such a hot issue in the first place is because it's a sought-after thing that very few people have accomplished. In that sense, enlightenment isn't as much of a quality as an activity. However, you can also make qualitative definitions of enlightenment that would still exclude animals, namely the idea that it's synonymous with what I like to call "non-dual baseline awareness", where "non-dual baseline" is defined by a lack of self-referential thoughts ~95% of the time (5% attributable to hypoglycemia). Now, the crucial point is that what I just mentioned only applies to humans. I will explain why that is: Firstly, the concept of "baseline" implies that the potential for self-referential thoughts is always there (the underlying mental faculties never disappeared), and sometimes they may even reappear from time to time. Secondly, many self-proclaimed enlightened humans (who I believe to fall under the aforementioned criteria) still claim to be able to deploy thought as a means to an end ("non-self-referential thought"). In other words, enlightenment in this case would be "non-dual baseline awareness" + "the ability to think in order to plan or solve problems". So for an animal to be enlightened in this case, they would need to 1. have no self-referential thoughts and 2. have an ability to think (which isn't so clear). If you instead say that they're just innately unable to form any thoughts at all, that would distinguish them from all other "formally recognized" enlightened beings. Then you have special cases where some enlightened people claim to have lost all forms of thought all together. Now, does that make them an animal? Well, even if they lack the subjective experience of solving problems using mental representations (through visual imagery or internalized verbal reasoning), they still display the same abilities as someone who does that. In other words, they can still pass as someone who is able to think to solve problems. Then the definition becomes more or less tautological in respect to the question: no self-referential thoughts + display of human behavior, i.e. only humans can be enlightened In summary, it's most useful in my opinion to define enlightenment or an enlightened being as "a selfless, thinking being" (or atleast one that displays the behavior of such a being), the qualities of which is partially accessible on a continuum facilitated by spiritual practice, eventually reaching a maximum and stabilizing around a baseline. I also want to make it clear that I've been mostly referring to the most basic type of enlightenment in various maps ("600s" — Ramaji; "Valley of unity" — Sufism; "the Absolute within the Relative" — Five Ranks of Tozan; "Sixth Zen Bull" — 10 Zen Ox herding pictures; "4th Stage" — Patanjali' Yoga Sutras; "4th stage" (Sattvapati) — Advaita Vedanta. https://www.realizedbygrace.org/levels-of-consciousness?lightbox=dataItem-jlvwww23. However, the no-thought state mentioned in the 6th paragraph is usually considered a much later stage depending on the map.

Enlightenment implies that there has been a journey from darkness and into the light. If you've always been in the light, there is no such thing as enlightenment. Compare it with the hero's journey: the animal has never had to travel through the dark abyss of human suffering, overcome it and return to the village. You're not a hero for just living in the village. It's the journey that makes you a hero.

😬 Before you play devil's advocate, try to show that you're not the devil 😅

Are you comparing satsangs with one on one sessions?

As compared to who?

Maybe it was by accident in this life, but if you listen to him describing his past lives, he must have probably had around 100k hours of insanely hardcore spiritual practice. That for sure wasn't an accident, and all of that culminated in him building the Dhyanalinga and establishing Isha foundation. There are many practices he is holding back from his students saying they're too powerful. To say that he doesn't know what he is talking about just because he speaks in a peculiar type of way is a tad bit ignorant.

Probably helped a few people who couldn't do it the diy method.

People who go to satsangs and stuff don't really come for the stories. There is a component of grace that simply comes from being in the presence of the teacher. The stories, in the sense that they're able to awaken someone, simply serves as a vehicle for that grace. Simply speaking about Truth amplifies that natural expression of grace, and you can pick up on that even without registering the words. I can even notice this in myself when I talk to somebody about Truth (in person). It makes me more in present and aligned, quite drastically actually.

Survival isn't the opposite of taking life. Survival is when self-perpetuating patterns compete in a system with limited resources. Even in the case of Hitler's worst atrocities, there was always an underlying argument of how to distribute resources and perpetuate a set of behavioral/ideological patterns. A survival pattern could be about eliminating the most patterns possible, including itself, and it would still be called survival, because that in itself is still perpetuating a pattern. Whether it's capable of achieving that goal or not depends on the access to resources, and the consumption of those resources usually goes at the cost of others. The stage yellow dream is to be able address all patterns in the best way possible.