Carl-Richard

That's the Schrödinger's Leo. You don't know the answer before you've opened his brain and peaked inside.

How do you unite the world without uniting under a grand narrative? If Tier 2 can't provide it, then people like ISIS or Nick Fuentes will provide it, and you'll be stuck trying to solve those "complex systemic issues" in some roundabout way.

Isn't that the aim of the Tier 2 or Game B guys?

Watch his videos.

@withinUverse I can't add anything that other people haven't already said, but damn that is some cool art.

The guy in the call gives a theory for why he thinks that happened historically (why people sort of fell away from religion in the way that it used to be practiced). It's basically just sociocultural development and a staleness of the old institutions.

I would actually say that most New Age spiritual teachers do not provide proper guidance, as they're not grounded in a tradition with an ecology of practices or a holistic understanding of the human organism (e.g. the Eightfold path). Besides, the accessibility problem is a real problem. No people I know in real life know anything about spirituality. It drastically reduces the chances of getting help. How would they help me with things like working through spontaneous ego deaths or kundalini symptoms? What do they know about the dangers of misapplying spiritual concepts or techniques? If I had always been under the supervision of a teacher in my local community who draws upon a well-established tradition, maybe I wouldn't have spent 2 years spiritually bypassing or another 2 years in absolute terror and rapture from overdoing meditation. It's interesting how we praise our institutions and traditions when it comes to politics and democracy, while pointing out how the alternative would be pure chaos and anarchy, but when it comes to something like spirituality, we're in the dark ages.

I accounted for that in the last paragraph. I know that most people don't make the distinction between perception and consciousness, but if you had made that distinction, I think you would see how the latter version is more consistent with your idea of solipsism than the former version. I see. I think the problem is that I don't ground my metaphysics in dictionary definitions Anyways, I'll give my perspective: I'll give an example. I'll also make a new distinction: "attention" is different from both perception and consciousness. It also helps to really picture it in your mind. Let's say you're meditating with your eyes closed and you turn your attention to the feelings of your feet. The feelings of your feet is a perception. What does the feelings of your feet arise within? Consciousness. Then, let's say you turn your attention to the sound of your breath. The sound of your breath is a perception. What does the sound of your breath arise within? Consciousness. Why is this a useful distinction? Because consciousness does not depend on any particular perception, feeling or sound. Whether you shift your attention from the feeling of your feet or to the sound of your breath, or if you remove perceptions from consciousness altogether (like in cessation), consciousness remains the same. Consciousness is the primary ground of which everything arises out from, and it's a boundless, spacious and formless whole. Every "thing", be it the feelings of your feet, or the sound of your breath, or the lights dancing behind your eyes, is a perception. So you can have consciousness without perception, but not the other way around (because again, perception is a subset of consciousness). Consciousness includes perception, and in a way it is perception, but the distinction is still useful for understanding how you experience the world. There is of course more to perception than this, but this is the basic distinction.

I've heard the same ideas expressed before by many people I respect, and it resonates with my own understanding as well. There is definitely a human need or impulse towards the sacred; for transcendence, for connectedness, for meaning; and that impulse will always manifest itself in some way or another. As with all human needs, you want an optimal outlet for it which is supported in the appropriate context, and the list of seven things he presented was straight in the bullseye. The sort of hyper-individualistic New Age spirituality we see today; the one without traditions, institutions, large-scale communities or agreed-upon ethical frameworks, where you can't go anywhere for proper guidance and where everybody is a man for himself; is toxic and dangerous, and oldschool religion had most of that sorted out, but it's of course generally sort of corrupted and dated, so it needs a revitalization. But this is just the problems with alternative spirituality. The caller also mentioned problems such as ideological radicalization (e.g. ethnonationalism). If you don't have a strong grand narrative that speaks to particularly the youth, they'll easily be picked up by some radical alternative that speaks to that need.

Yet people have different ideas about solipsism. I just talked about your idea of solipsism, and what you're saying to me is completely consistent with that idea. I actually predicted that you would say this exact phrase. Why? Because I understand your idea of solipsism.

We're talking about ideas here, and making distinctions is implied.

These traps are very common when you're first introduced to the concepts. For example, I used "living in the now" as an excuse to avoid personal responsibilities. Of course that wasn't my only problem, but these things do happen.

Solipsism is an idea. Is there no distinction between solipsism and a banana?

Perception is a subset of consciousness, but consciousness is not a subset of perception.

Then I guess Leo also conflates perception and consciousness. Perception is fundamentally form, and consciousness is fundamentally formless. There is of course more to perception than form (and more to consciousness than formlessness), but that is the first crucial distinction.

I'll just let you know that most people here, including Leo, use a different definition of solipsism than you're probably familiar with and that is more common in academic philosophy and just society in general. The usual conception of solipsism is something like thinking that your personal perceptions are the only things that exist, and that therefore other people do not have their own perceptions. The other conception of solipsism is talking about transpersonal consciousness, and that this consciousness is the only thing that exists, and that this consciousness is what you fundamentally are (and what anyone or anything else is), and it transcends perception. By this view, there is no one else but you (the transpersonal "you") to have perceptions, because consciousness is what all perceptions arise within. I don't like the latter conception of solipsism, because most people aren't able to distinguish between perceptions and consciousness, and it causes confusion. In fact, at least in this community, it's more normal for people to conflate the two conceptions than to present a consistent case of either of them.

I don't know about any of these things, but the first one sounds like integrating the self, while the second one sounds like transcending the self. It's technically possible to do both at the same time, but you would usually focus on finishing integration before starting on transcendence. It's less confusing that way. The danger is getting stuck on either one.

Time is an abstraction of the perception of change, just like space is an abstraction of the perception of objects. An abstraction is like a placeholder for concrete things. For example, you can perceive a concrete object, like an ice cube, change its shape in room temperature and then turn to liquid. We say that the ice cube exists "in space" and changes "over time". And this applies to all objects at all times: wherever an object may exist, we call that space, and whatever may happen to that object, we refer to that by time. Hence space and time are placeholders for all objects, all things, i.e. very fundamental categories or classifications of perception; so fundamental in fact, that people often forget that they're just that — classifications, abstractions. It's not that space and time are concrete entities that "exist". They're just placeholders that we use to help us make sense of concrete entities.

Intrinsic motivation

Relying on highly addictive meds to function is a dangerous path. I would seriously reconsider it if I were you. Besides, are you getting these prescribed from somewhere?

I've gotten obsessed by Meshuggah's album "Catch Thirty Three". It's such an original piece of music, so ambitious, so technically intricate, so tight, so well-produced, so-so heavy. It's arguably the heaviest album ever made. If you just want to hear the climax, skip to 39:10

True. So many people think enlightenment is about them. They couldn't be more wrong.

It's perfect.

Only if you're not ready for it. Transcending the ego does not mean removing the ego.

@StarStruck ?