Carl-Richard

Lol why so serious?

What steps should I take to become more conscious? Because meditation and deep thinking is generally done in a quiet place, and these people are also generally more resilient and developed than the average person, so they often don't need to rely other people as much. But to provide the correct conditions for resilience and development is different from already being resilient and developed. Adults don't need as much care as children, but if you deprive children of that care, they will not become functional adults.

The idea that meditation practice without a social safety net is a way to empower yourself is based on a set of assumptions. Are you willing to question those assumptions?

Try to make one post without calling somebody else low consciousness.

This is the tightest live performance of a guitar solo in technical death metal history: 7:00

Haha thank you sir ☺️

I will agree that the average Christian boomer is not aiming at the mystical experience in the same way as whatever you're presenting. Was Buddha not a mystic? Jesus? Mohammed? Mystical experiences have shaped cultures for millennia. It's deeply tied to the origin of culture itself, certainly religion. Ok, so most "religious" people are just mindlessly following unrecognized dogma, I agree. But again, that is true for most people in general in any domain: political, social, scientific. It's not endemic to religion, and I don't see you addressing that point. You can contemplate while your balls are being sawed off. I'm defining religion as when spirituality is being done in a supportive and healthy environment, so that doesn't compute for me. You're free to clarify what you mean by "healthy environment". I have given extensive lists of what I mean which you can dispute or add to if you want. I'm labeling your standpoint "New Age" in the same way you're labeling my standpoint "beliefs". I can name it something else if you want. What about WEIRD spirituality?: Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic spirituality. "Tradition? Uh, no thanks, I like it WEIRD!" (That's of course less accurate though).

We steer the ship in the right direction and pray to the weather gods.

"have learned to cope". Brother, I'm not talking about coping here. I'm talking about thriving as a human being. I'm talking about reaching your highest potential. You can cope, but that means you're missing something. I don't care about just getting by. That is boring to talk about. It's not an ideal to strive for. Besides, the world is in a meaning crisis. People are sad and lonely. You already know all that.

In general, - do we need spirituality? Yes. - do we need friends? Yes. - do we need support and care from our family and our local community? Yes. - do we need guidance from wiser and more knowledgeable people than ourselves? Yes. - do we need ethical and legal frameworks against abuse and misconduct? Yes. - do we need a shared basic framework of understanding, rituals and symbols? Yes (believe it or not). - do we need institutions to keep these things in place? Yes. Good, so why separate spirituality from all these other needs? Why put up arbitrary barriers between different fundamental human needs? "So guys, I'm going to create my own type of spirituality. It includes not eating food, because eating food leads to all sorts of problems. Avoiding all food is true spirituality. Eating food is what religious people do."

The question was answered.

Don't do the 5-MeO-DMT, don't smoke weed, stop meditating for a while, find some friends and be a real person. Things will get better.

What is your definition of religious fundamentalism? The separation between the fundamentalist and modernist Christians in the 1920s in the US happened because some of the Christians started questioning some of the dogmas. According to your definition, the modernist Christians are no longer religious.

In general, do you think it's better to do spiritual practice in a room filled with exhaust and maggots eating at your eyeballs while somebody is giving you intravenous injections of PCP and alcohol, or would you prefer a more healthy environment? Sure, you can expose yourself to stressors in a controlled way as a part of your spiritual practice, but the key there is "controlled". When something is outside your control and you can't change it and it affects your health, that is not good for spiritual practice. "Social stuff" is to trivialize it. It's a social safety net, a buffer for stressors, mental health support and care, and a source of knowledge and wisdom from people who know more than you (and preferably an old tradition tested by time). This particular point is very personal to me. The lack of a social safety net around me when I first awakened is the greatest injustice I've experienced as a human. I'll acknowledge like I did earlier that some lineages of particularly Christianity was burdened by some theological shifts around 400 BC (but again, this not endemic to religion in general). But other than that, the difference between New Age faith and Christian faith is that you'll be promised heaven on Earth instead of heaven in the afterlife, and in both cases, you have to indeed take it on faith until you're on the other side, and you have to trust some external example outside yourself as a motivator (your guru, your saint, your savior). What that looks like in practice is identical for both cases: it's the same levels of dogmatism, confusion, self-deception. The difference is that the New Ager does it mostly alone while fearing for their sanity and while probably getting exploited by some eccentric figure on the fringes of society.

By that definition, I became religious when I was 14 and found Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris on YouTube. What you described sounds more like religious fundamentalism: people who take a very literalist interpretation of holy scriptures (e.g. Adam and Eve literally existed) and an absolutist stance to their religion ("my religion is the only truth"). That is just one type of religiosity. Also, fundamentalism is not specific to religion either. When I was 14, I though that scientific theories were literally true, and that science was the only truth. You can also take a symbolic and pluralistic interpretation of scriptures (i.e. not literal and not the only truth). For example, the story of the Fall can be interpreted as a metaphor for when humans became self-aware, which probably happened 30-50k years ago (we developed the ability think symbolically and self-reflect, remember the past and predict the future, which created the conscious egoic identity). When the ego was created, we were separated from God and "fell into sin". To transcend the ego is to reunite with God and clear yourself of sin. If you take that interpretation, just imagine what other kinds of wisdom is hidden in there. Even so, fundamentalist religion is not incompatible with your favorite parts of spirituality either. You can still have direct experiences of the divine as a fundamentalist, but of course, it's generally a bit harder, particularly in Christianity (you can thank St. Augustine for that who started placing God outside of direct experience): https://www.classics.ox.ac.uk/invention-faith-pistis-and-fides-early-churches-and-later-roman-empire @UnbornTao @Understander So what you guys are really opposed is neither religion in general nor religious fundamentalism, but rather something like the views of one theologian in one branch of Christianity.

I'm fine with what I'm doing now After I found a standardized data cleaning protocol for the survey that I used for measuring physical activity (Godin's Leisure-Time Questionnaire), the first hypothesis turned out to actually be statistically significant at p < 0.10, which is cool, but it's a really weak effect (the standardized regression coefficient is at 0.070). I could probably easily add another 50% to the sample size if I wanted to, but I would rather move on to more important stuff. I used a linear regression in JASP.

So I had two hypotheses in my bachelor thesis: H1: mindfulness is correlated with physical activity H2: controlling for intrinsic motivation towards exercise weakens the correlation between mindfulness and physical activity, which could indicate that the effect of mindfulness on physical activity is mediated by intrinsic motivation towards exercise. I ran the analyses, and none of the hypotheses had a statistically significant result (which means both hypotheses get scrapped). Then right after running the analyses, I had the realization that running an analysis for another hypothesis (H3: "mindfulness is correlated with intrinsic motivation towards exercise") is the logical next step after scrapping H1 and H2, because it could add support to a moderation relationship as opposed to a meditation relationship (mindfulness moderates the relationship between intrinsic motivation towards exercise and physical activity). The stupid thing though is that I had this realization right after running the analyses for the other hypotheses, which means that H3 becomes a "post-hoc" hypothesis, and presenting it alongside the other hypotheses would be considered HARKing ("“presenting a post hoc hypothesis in the introduction of a research report as if it were an a priori hypothesis”), which is considered an ethically dubious practice. There are many types of HARKing, and there are many different views on what types of HARKing are considered OK, and there is this one view that says that this particular scenario is an OK form of HARKing (because it's justified based on the theoretical background of the thesis), and also, my advisor says that I could do it and it would be OK by him, but I still feel tormented by it. If I had only spent one second thinking through the consequences of scrapping H1 and H2 before running the analyses, I would virtually certainly have spotted this extremely obvious H3, and I would not be in this situation. So yes, I feel tormented by it even though my advisor has green-lighted it, so am I being too neurotic? Do you think a very strict examiner would penalize me for going along with it? (I'm of course going to disclose the whole decision-making process behind H3, which is called "THARKING" — a transparent form for HARKing, which absolutely minimizes the ethical dubiousness). I don't want to poison my work with ethical misconduct ? I would truly appreciate some advice

What is your definition of religion?

All I'm saying is that seeking the highest value is a fundamental need within the human organism. I'm not saying what the expression of that has to look like. But what I am saying is that it's better to fulfill that need it in a way that also supports other human needs, like safety, belonging, etc., which is why I propose to you the need for religion. You wouldn't go to a restaurant if they only served food but no drinks. You'll feel like you're missing something. And that is all religion truly is: spirituality without the obvious missing pieces. I don't see how discovering spirituality through some obscure YouTube video and meditating in your basement without anybody in your life knowing what the hell you are doing is just how things are meant to be. A spiritual guru is followed, a spiritual path is followed, a spiritual concept is taken on faith until it's experienced. And instead of getting the concepts from a culture, you get it from a cult.

That moment when the first sentence in the introduction of the most widely used measurement device for dispositional mindfulness in the scientific community is a reference to Ken Wilber

You only fight for things that are highly valueable. Hell no ? Richard Dawkins might be old, but he is still alive.

Is food a relative value? Does something being relative change the fact that it's an universal human need? "The highest value" is a human need, and it can be manifested in many different forms. What that exactly looks like has only gotten a little weird because of things like postmodernism and capitalism. That's a relative notion, dogma in fact. Distinguish between the need for religion as a general concept and a particular fundamentalist interpretation of an already existing religion.

If I can accurately predict and label every utterance you make, wouldn't that be a little bit concerning for somebody who is scared about being trapped in a belief system? We can chill if you want to

I'm not sure how to interpret your post. If you're saying that religious people are not conscious of the absolute, you'd be surprised how many Christian, Sufi, Hindu, etc. mystics you just offended. If you're saying John Vervaeke or Bernardo Kastrup are not conscious of the absolute, Vervaeke is a practicing Buddhist who has had awakening experiences, Kastrup has taken psychedelics and had ego death experiences many times (and is friends with Rupert Spira). They're not just book nerds (even though that isn't actually relevant to what we're talking about imo).

@UnbornTao Yep, one minute in and that sounds exactly like New Age dogma: "religion is based on belief". But hey, I can agree that most fundamentalists Christians approach it that way, but then you have people like John Vervaeke, Bernardo Kastrup or some of my professors who bring a bit more nuance to the concept. Besides, my previous points still stand: New Age spirituality is not immune to anything that religion is not immune against, and in fact, thinking that it is, will only make it more likely that you'll deceive yourself.