Carl-Richard

I'm going to geek the hell out of this, but why do you say "hello" when you greet someone? It's a ritual that establishes connection. When you're greeting your close friends, you might develop your own way of greeting, signalling a special kind of connection. Greeting your YouTube audience is just like that. All these various kinds of social cues are contextual markers for how to behave, and I think that is fundamentally why we use them. When you hear "heeey it's Leo", you know it's Leo time and it's time to listen carefully. When you hear "waddup it's ya boy Skinny Penis", that sets a different tone.

I've been through this exact line of thinking. The way out of it is to think of the stages as levels of complexity, and that it's not modelling a strict developmental sequence, but rather developmental altitudes. But still, it's the case that individuals are statistically more likely to start out from a stage of lower complexity and then move upwards through stages of higher complexity, but that this process is of course not 100% linear, as Spiral Dynamics involves the interplay between individual and culture, and that this dynamic is a bit more open for variation than say the stages of growth within the womb or the growth of a plant. It's also true that the model was conceived in a largely Western context, based on empirical data from Western individuals and conceptual constructs from Western science, which means that the particular stages might not apply in a non-Western context. But this is not just a problem with Spiral Dynamics, but all of Western social science in general. We base almost all of our findings on "WEIRD" study populations (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic), and even worse than that, it's mostly just university students. That is of course very limiting, but it's a truly pervasive problem that won't be fixed anytime soon.

But anything might be true. Why are you particularly focused on whether people could be conspiring against you?

The thing is I wasn't trying to communicate what happened to me by that entire post. That already happened in the first sentence. I was trying to link it up to a scientific hypothesis I've had in mind for a few years and also Vervaeke's concept of relevance realization.

Yeah, and any future plans.

Blissed out yogis can be low on the spiral as well. Spiral development and spiritual development are from a general standpoint only weakly correlated imo. Contrary to the "popular" or "trashy" or "low-culture" beliefs about Spiral Dynamics; Jesus, Buddha or Adiyogi were not Turquoise. They were probably barely piercing Blue. As for violent heavy metal, as @integral was alluding to, it's not that black or white. Meshuggah, which has created some of the most violent sounds in metal music ever, has an album called "ObZen" (as in "obscene" + "Zen"). The album cover has a picture of an androgynous man meditating with blood on his hands. So even in that imagine alone, you see that it's possible to marry the pure and the violent, at least conceptually. And the music in that album is likewise simultaneously trans-like and meditative and on the other hand terrorizing and disgusting-sounding. The amount of thought and conceptual brilliance put into the overarching concept and each song is certainly "high art". Besides, the story (in my interpretation) deals with a man who wakes up to himself but also becomes aware of the corruption within himself and of the surrounding world (pointing to the two-way split again). Tell me if all of that isn't profoundly deep. Then on the other hand, I've noticed times where I think heavy metal feels too violent for me to listen to, and it sometimes correlates with how "sensitive" I feel. But on the other hand again, there are many times where I listen to heavy metal while entering states of no-mind and it's completely ok. So again, the only real pattern here is that it's not black or white. So it seem to have very little to do with spiritual development, but you could make the case that more complex music correlates more strongly with spiral development. For example, I would place the guys in Meshuggah at Green. You won't find that level of conceptual and musical detailedness in say a standard country song (which is more likely Blue). But you also have pop songs that ooze Green (certainly Orange) in a more cultural way (less cognitive), but which are painfully simple both conceptually and musically.

Maybe I should've asked what you're currently doing first (it's a bit late over here lol).

Find the notepad on your phone. Set a specific life goal that you think is meaningful for you and lay out the concrete steps you need to take to pursue it (e.g. getting a degree, then getting a job). If it's something you find truly meaningful, you're tapping into intrinsic motivation, which is the most powerful motivator. Write it down. Write a daily work schedule for pursuing that goal. Plan out the conditions for taking breaks (and do take at least one break a week, but otherwise never deviate from the plan unless you're e.g. terribly sick or for other reasons not able to work). Just in general, whatever your mind tells you to do, write it down and plan the conditions for fulfilling that goal, and COMMIT to that. Whether it's a daily errand like buying groceries or a long-term goal like getting better at dating or an intellectual idea, it doesn't matter. Write it down so that your mind is not burdened by excess thoughts, indecisiveness and uncertainty. These are meta-tools that are extremely useful for getting some basic structure into your life at all levels and on track towards something meaningful, regardless of the particular goal you have in mind. For me, they're indispensable. Merely choosing a goal, even though if you end up changing your mind at some point, is curative on its own, because you'll be going towards something, which is fundamentally what we're designed to do. You'll also be growing and learning different skills and things about yourself. Merely writing a schedule and sticking to it eliminates indecisiveness and uncertainty from your mind, and it makes your mind think clearer, which energizes you and gives you momentum. Merely writing things down is curative because you solidify that structure and also outsource your mental working capacity and eliminate unnecessary clutter so that you can focus on what is meaningful.

Haha keep telling yourself that

Hey, we need some people to be interested in science But yeah, that's the greatest understatement ever Silence can kill.

I just realized that my experience of being unable to think random useless thoughts after my awakenings is actually just relevance realization being refined. This also made me think about my hypothesis that the reduction of self-referential thoughts associated with meditation could partially be explained by memory re-consolidation. To recap: sitting in a physiologically calm context (lower heart rate, slower breathing, etc.) and with psychological detachment (the ability to see your emotional reactions as an appearance rather than the emotional content) means that the memories which are recalled in that setting get re-written with a weaker emotional load, and over time, the thoughts become less threatening and are less likely to cause rumination. And now I can better explain why: it's because less emotional memories are less likely to be relevant. If there is an important problem that needs to be fixed, your mind will load it with emotions and bring it to your conscious attention (because emotions exist to tell you what is relevant to your survival). But when a thought is less emotionally loaded, it will become less likely to occupy your attention, hence meditation reduces the time spent thinking in general. Pretty cool.

The planet will be just fine. Even if humans wipe out 99% of life on the planet including themselves, give it a few million years and you'll have big fertile ecosystems again. We're really only a threat to the current ecosystems.

In the tree example, "shadow" has a very specific meaning. You've made it into a metaphor, which is definitely not specific. "Energy body" is also not a very specific concept. What even is an energy body? What does it have to do with geometric shapes? What do shadows have to with it? I'm just left with more questions than answers.

No ?

I don't feel like that is specific enough. For example, if you see a shadow on the ground that is shaped like a tree, what would be a suitable explanation for that? Well, for me, it would be that there is a tree that casts a shadow on the ground because the sun is shining on it, blocking out some of the light that is reflected off the ground. There are of course other ways to explain it which aren't as specific, for example "the sun is low on the sky today", but that would maybe be more suitable for why there is a shadow on the ground in the first place. The example I gave is actually very analogous, because it explains why the shadow is shaped like a tree and not say a rabbit (because there is a tree casting the shadow, not a rabbit). Likewise, I'm interested in why the tiny geometric patterns are shaped like that, or why they are moving like that and not in some other way.

What — you didn't find it relevant?

If literally anything is possible, why are you entertaining this particular schizo thought and not something else?

Instead of going deeper on SD in particular, you could read a bit about other types of stage theories, particularly in the field of developmental psychology, and contrast it to "non-stage" developmental theories there (e.g. Bronfenbrenner or Sameroff) to get a fuller understanding of the concept. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structural_stage_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Developmental_stage_theories https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Developmental_psychology

Regardless, you've reached the end of the explanatory tree.

Then I consider your reasoning to not be useful.

There are many things that are logically possible but which are not reasonable possibilities. For example, you have no way to prove right now that the Flying Spaghetti Monster doesn't exist, or that there isn't a hyper-dimensional space unicorn floating around the orbit of Neptune, or that every time you close your eyes at night, there isn't a giant spider that creeps up from under your bed and sits beside you. All of those things are logically possible, but they're just not very reasonable. My last post talked about this: if you want to reduce the vast potential of suffering that your imagination can conjure up, you have to make peace with the unknown and not let it bother you too much. When you're driving your car, your steering can malfunction and make you crash into a ditch. When you're flying a plane, a loose nut can get dislodged and get sucked into the engines. There is an infinite amount of logically possible scenarios like that. But why worry about them?

What is your view on the idea that individuated consciousness seems to be intrinsically tied to biology?

@Jehovah increases Thanks ChatGPT ?

Of course the concept of the ontological unknown is just a concept that the intellect makes up, but that doesn't mean the concept isn't pointing to something in reality. It's the same thing with the concept of non-duality: it's a concept pointing to something in reality. I guess what the non-dual tradition is saying is "just don't concern yourself with the ontological unknown; concern yourself with what is experienced directly". That is why it rejects things like matter, because nobody has directly seen matter, only direct experience. But that doesn't in principle invalidate the existence of the ontological unknown. It's just an ontological preference to say you only care about the known. Therefore, "the absolute" is only absolute in the realm of the known. It can also be the case that the unknown is just a fantasy, or a kind of artefact of the functioning of the intellect (which is to ask questions; "what if?"). In other words, for the intellect to ponder the unknown is self-serving to its very existence. Of course it will do that — it's in its nature. If the known is "this", it will ponder "not-this". If the known is non-dual, it will ponder duality. Also, I guess the non-dual tradition focuses on accepting the unknown, to make peace with it, rather than rejecting it. Because when you're obsessing about the unknown, you keep projecting "what ifs" all the time, which is the root of suffering. It doesn't get you anywhere other than existential OCD. So if you care about reducing suffering, accepting the unknown by letting it remain unknown and living in the known is the way to.

This is a bit of a tangent, but I've been thinking about something @SeaMonster once said. The unknown is often equated (maybe mistakenly) with non-duality or pure being. But what if non-duality is rather just the conceptual unknown, and thus still non-conceptual knowing (because obviously, non-duality is known)? So then, what about the truly "ontological" unknown? Does it actually exist? If it does, we can't know if non-duality is actually the true absolute, but instead only absolute in the realm of what is known. The only counter to that would be that the unknown is actually known. Thoughts?