Carl-Richard

"They have tried everything". Sounds like bullshit.

It's not simply about avoiding certain kinds of conscious thoughts. It's about avoiding possibly creating largely unconscious contractions and behavioral patterns that are counter to your goal. In other words, you should limit your "practice" to certain times of the day. After all, practice is not practice if there is no rest. That's called obsession.

Oh yeah, I'm pretty sure that is what my mom plays. I think I got to try to play it once and it made zero sense to me how it worked (maybe because I was like 7 years old 😆). My dad plays the violin and my parents tried to make me play it when I was 5 years old, but I didn't like it. Then my dad spotted me playing air guitar with this random wooden sword when I was 11, and he seized the opportunity and asked "should we buy you an electric guitar?". He is not a guy to simply buy stuff, so I was genuinely surprised and of course very happy. I think he was waiting for that moment all his life ; the spark of inspiration, intrinsic motivation. I think he implicitly (maybe explicitly, I can't remember) taught me about the concept of intrinsic motivation, and it's one of the deepest concepts I've learned that is still with me to this day. I think I can thank him for most of my wacky spiritual genes (although my mother has also become overtly more spiritual over time). Ah, so you are the frontman of Jethro Tull after all. I was going to ask you that Sitting on a park bench (I'll spare you the rest ). Hehe I might be exaggerating a little bit about how smooth I can pull it off, but I do like to whistle a lot, so much so I had to tone it down because I was pissing off my roommates while cooking

That can turn into a massive neurosis though, so beware. I'm speaking from personal experience. The thought "am I being conscious enough?" is the least conscious thing you can introduce into every aspect of your life.

Learn how to play an instrument.

Flute 😃 I like Jethro Tull. And that's about as far as my flute interest goes. Or maybe Camel or early King Crimson. My mom plays some kind of flute instrument that I forgot the name of. I can actually whistle the flute run in that one 🤓 Guitar, sometimes drums. Whistling.

Haha that's cool 😃 You still play music? I've only been "hired" to play in three family-related birthday parties (I was not paid in cash, only in honor, or laughs 😥).

That's not a problem. Meaning is often like that. You're looking for a special kind of meaning, an absolute meaning.

@Agrande I see. I'm happy that it ended well for you. It's not clear how SSRIs work to alleviate depression, but one hypothesis is that it causes neurogenesis in the hippocampus. The hippocampus can get damaged by excess cortisol (which is a factor in depression), and the hippocampus is involved in inhibiting the HPA axis, which effectively decreases the production of cortisol. It could be that taking SSRIs for a year restored some of your damaged hippocampus and thus dampened the chronic stress response associated with your depression.

Physicalism sounds elegant in comparison 😆

Can I ask why you started taking it and why you stopped taking it?

No.

You mean ancient?

Other than literature on systems theory (e.g. F. Capra, G. Bateson), I don't, I'm sorry. Systems theory is essentially a hyper-generalized version of what were talking about. Other than that, most of these things I've gleaned from people like Vervaeke, Peterson, Kastrup, Wilber.

🤓 Fundamentally, I believe the correctness of a frame depends on your goal (pragmatism); frames can be more or less correct (useful) relative to that goal. But it becomes a bit more complicated when you enter meta-theoretic territory. For example, could realism and skepticism be useful for different things? Does using a criteria like convergence (how often something pops up in different places) for ranking the "trustworthiness" of something, make you a realist, or are you still a pragmatist if you say it's merely useful to do so? Does showing skepticism towards most knowledge claims make you a skeptic, or are you still a pragmatist if you say it's merely useful to do so? What if these realist and skeptic tendencies co-exist, then what are you? A meta-theorist? (😉) The thread "The Four Epistemic Naiveties/Pitfalls" touches on this: