Carl-Richard

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Everything posted by Carl-Richard

  1. When I think of transmission, I usually think of the tendency of humans to influence each other at subtler levels than thought or language, but it technically happens at every level of their being. That is fundamentally what empathy is, although that word is mostly used in the emotional domain. But you could extend it to non-human things as well, as everything influences your mental state. For inducing a more primordial state, nature walks are an obvious option, or looking at a vast landscape or large mountains. I think those things often depend on learning through concepts, or at least through experience, but it can also happen spontaneously.
  2. My dude, he is talking about the personal psychological mind, and you're talking about the transpersonal field of Consciousness.
  3. ?? There is something called Figure 8 straps ? No mountain is too big.
  4. If they weren't (), you could easily run a simple correlation analysis between exercise and general well-being (I could do that if you do the heavy work of filling in the Excel sheets )
  5. Rack pull 3.5 times your bodyweight is very intense, oh yes
  6. or Sat-Chit-Ananda?
  7. Gary Weber awoke while working as a senior manager of R&D in a big manufacturing business, but it took him 25 years and 20 000 hours of daily practice. https://www.reddit.com/r/Meditation/comments/rkxifs/how_bhagavan_ramana_maharshi_changed_my_life_gary/
  8. For the right person, they can be devastatingly effective. Besides, I don't buy that a teacher only teaches through their words. It happens at every level of their being: behavioral, emotional, intellectual, energetic. You can know this if you hang out with a depressed person all day vs. a happy person. They're "teaching" you their mental state.
  9. Haha no problem. Religion as a general phenomena of course has a lot of wisdom, and I would prefer to practice mysticism in an environment that is actually supportive of it and which is also not in some cult leader's garage.
  10. Returning to the experience of God as myself, à la mysticism.
  11. I can also talk a bit about my personal experiences viewed through the three-way split I've been talking about: In my late teens, I was stuck in a kind of Peter Pan syndrome, constantly living life in a daze of fantasy and comfort-seeking; no sacrifices, no taking responsibility of living in the world. Every real-world action had to be in perfect alignment with my highest ideals and the feeling of safety and comfort, or else it wouldn't be worth it. At some point, you're fed a dose of reality and pushed to make some sacrifices and compromises, which culminated when I was 21: I was given an ultimatum by my mother to straighten up or get lost, replaced smoking weed with meditation, started pursuing academics, became more focused on health; a transition away from primal impulses. Amidst all of that, I had a bunch of spiritual awakenings, but I realized that I wasn't ready to surrender to God, which brought me a lot of pain, but that whole journey also gave me some "edge" psychologically. Then I became very heavily focused on the mind, and today, the focus is on integrating emotional and social aspects. The next step after that is probably returning to God (mysticism).
  12. That can certainly be true when you consider how wisdom is not easily reduced to concepts or logic. An intuition occurs to you as important despite you not knowing where it came from or what is the logical justification. That is also what distinguishes wisdom from intellect, because the intellect likes to view the world through clear-cut concepts and logical propositions. A truly intuitive person can often operate completely without logical justifications and still touch on deep truths. The problem is often that other people don't understand them, or that it's hard to communicate through language (which is why they often gravitate to more emotional forms of communication like poetry, music, art). One of the things wisdom is showing you is that the world isn't easily carved out into neat categories or linear stories, hence the saying "an image is worth more than a thousand words".
  13. Wisdom is one of those things that is hard to capture conceptually, but that is actually true for anything in reality. We can still try. For example, I think wisdom generally correlates with life experience, and it's often displayed as a kind of maturity or self-awareness. Think about the difference between a 15 year old boy who just learned about the scientific method versus a 60 year old professor. It's not just that the boy is less knowledgeable, but he is also more confident in the extent of his knowledge than the professor. The professor has learned where science does not apply and generally what kind of egoic traps can trick you into thinking you know more than you do (self-deception). You can give both of them the same IQ (which is not such a stretch when you consider that IQ peaks in the early/mid-twenties), which can help to distinguish wisdom from concepts like smarts or witts. Other than that, the other concepts I mentioned earlier like balance, holism and general awareness (as opposed to repression) could easily be big components of wisdom. The problem is that since these are such vague concepts, it doesn't easily prompt concrete examples in your mind, but I tried to do that with this thread.
  14. That's certainly a big feature of it
  15. I'm just waiting for the time it doesn't produce mediocre answers to deep questions.
  16. Let me also tie this to my insights about meaning (or rather Jordan Peterson's insights lol): At the bottom of the evolutionary tree, you have an organism purely driven by instinct, and its experience of reality is likewise simple: it has not yet developed a complex social brain, definitely not a rational brain. Yet, this organism can be said to experience meaning by fulfilling its survival needs, which in this case is limited to things like the need for competence (the simplest form of this arguably being movement itself). This becomes obvious when you walk it up the evolutionary tree: What does a social organism experience as meaningful? Why do people go to parties? Why are social gatherings, religious ceremonies or holidays experienced as meaningful? Because they fulfill your social needs, but also because they provide meaning in a more abstract sense, because humans are able to experience meaning through abstractions. The things that make a book, or a movie, or even a scientific theory appealing is that they're abstract representations of meaning (narratives), or simply abstract representations of movement. A narrative involves direction, movement, a start and an end. If an organism's movement through a concrete environment is experienced as meaning, then a human's movement through an abstract narrative is also experienced as meaning. But you're not just limited to experiencing the meaning of narratives as a mere abstraction inside your mind. You can also do it through concrete activities. Rituals — be it religious ceremonies, holidays, parties or nature hikes — all have direction, concrete steps, starts and ends. They're the concrete embodying of narratives. Maybe the fancy glitter of religion is not all for nothing?
  17. Bingo. The question you're really asking is "does God care about me over other things?" One creature's pleasure is another creature's pain. You're breathing oxygen molecules that somebody else could use, you're eating food that somebody else could eat, and you're eating living organisms. You can limit unnecessary suffering for yourself (which you can think of as aligning yourself with God), but that is a subtle process in the grand scheme of things. It doesn't protect you from asteroids or vulcanoes. Aligning yourself with God entails accepting that God won't save you. It's bigger than yourself.
  18. Forum goes under social media.
  19. My thoughts and experiences. My mind is not your mind: my thoughts are not your thoughts, my experiences are not your experiences. But all of it is God's Mind.
  20. Without wisdom, you're prone to self-deception, which affects your understanding.
  21. Asking ChatGPT for metaphyical insights is like asking McDonalds for a four-course meal.
  22. And then you have this one:
  23. Not all death threats are equal. There is a difference between receiving a death threat in a comment thread versus receiving an email with your address and demands.