Carl-Richard

Survival is ego based. It's just survival done right. What you really don't like, the ugly parts of survival, is survival done half-assedly or unwisely.

Pro-anything turns off the DMN. That is what flow is.

Do we have any lawyers on the forum? ? We only have STEM or drop-outs.

If you want a more mind-oriented example, you also can see the utility of courage in concepts like disruptive practices (breaking with habitual cognitive functioning to gain new perspective), which can lead to deep insights into the workings of the mind: I did LSD 3 times and weed ~1000 times, and then at one point after I discovered the concept of mindfulness, I spent a week in the mountains with my family doing active mindfulness 24/7 sober (with heavy weed withdrawals, which also meant no desire to masturbate), and at the tail end of that week, I did my 3 first seated meditations ever, and on the 3rd meditation, I awoke. The thing about psychedelics, meditation, or any temporary change in state, is that it's a so-called "disruptive practice". It disrupts habitual functioning and allows for a contrast to arise, which allows you to become more aware of deeply ingrained mechanisms. Imagine being a fish that has only been in water all of his life. The fish doesn't feel the water at all. It doesn't know what it is, because it has always been in water and is fully habituated to the constant stimuli. If the fish is then suddenly lifted out of the water, it'll experience the contrast between water and non-water for the first time, and then as it re-immerses itself, it'll become more aware of the true nature of water. That is the essence of a disruptive practice. The explanation for why I awoke when I did is not mainly the fact that I had smoked weed so many times or done LSD a couple of times, but that I had spent a week where I didn't smoke weed and also where I did something completely new (active mindfulness practice). This was in fact a massive confounding of several disruptive practices. And then on top of that, at the end of the week, I didn't go back to weed, but instead I did something I've also never done before: seated meditation. Essentially, that week was like a huge active meditation retreat with a chronic pharmacological disruption (weed withdrawal) as well as nofap (another disruption), as well as being in a different environment than my usual daily habits (skiing in the mountains), which then finally culminated in another completely new practice (seated meditation). This is what it takes to truly get underneath your own skin. You have to see how it's like without it, and sometimes you have to go to the extremes. This was a more spiritual example, but you can also apply it to exposing yourself to other points of view, new perspectives, new mental challenges, new skills, etc. Courage would be to take those opportunities when they arise, despite how hard they might be (within reason; again, balance ).

I'm not. That was just an example.

Sometimes, directly exposing yourself to something challenging can be inherently revitalizing and facilitate growth. The only time where stress becomes unhealthy is when it's unbearable and leads to a breakdown of the system. This is why things like ice baths, saunas and physical exercise, when done in the right way, leads to a higher baseline state, because it makes you more capable to handle life. This is the deeper metaphysical reason for virtues like courage. It's in a fundamental sense the driving force of your life.

I tend say this to everyone, but for you it sounds particularly important: consistency is the key. If the problem is that when you stop meditating, everything goes bad, then you just need to not stop meditating. It doesn't have to be for long every day either. You just need one moment every day where you focus all your attention on meditation. That said, if we're being realistic, there is nothing in the course of a normal day that will make you unable to spend 1 hour for yourself where you have nothing else to do. So it's just about finding that time, fully dedicating it to meditation, and making it a part of yourself. Also, to me, unless you're completely obsessed with meditation, 2-4 hours is a bit much, and you don't want to burn yourself out either. You can do that, but just don't make it an all-or-nothing deal where it's like you've "failed" if you don't get 4 hours in. And of course, if you're talking about spreading it out (e.g. 1hr in the morning, 1hr in the evening), that is more overcomeable. Just make sure it's quality time.

Speaking from experience, having a decent mystical experience induced by meditation can definitely heal anxiety. The issue though is, especially when it comes to social anxiety, that there will be residual behavioral patterns that need to be rewired to fit the new baseline state, which might be experienced as a bit challenging and might take several years to work out, even if you don't feel particularly anxious in those situations anymore (the feeling is rather of being a bit weird or inexperienced). But definitely, it can make a huge difference. Start meditating every day and you'll at least see a gradual improvement. Try to build up to at least 45 minutes in one sitting, preferably an hour. That is where most of the work is done in my experience.

Could add that word to the list It's quite logical as well. Fundamentally, it solves "the paradox of hedonism" (chasing pleasures makes the pleasures less pleasurable). Why does the paradox of hedonism exist? Because what gives you pleasure is not a static thing. It's constantly changing depending on what is salient to your survival right now. If you eat food when you're hungry, that is pleasurable. If you keep eating food when you're stuffed, that starts become not so pleasurable. It's like this with everything in excess, whether it's masturbation, entertainment, or even exercise, and it's the foundation of virtues like "nothing in excess", "discipline", "courage". You need to be constantly moving, adapting to what your body tells you and what the environment craves of you. Basically, you can boil it down to concepts like balance, holism and meaning: do just enough of the right things, don't neglect any aspect of yourself, and do what is meaningful, either with respect to the particular situation or just as a guiding principle. These principles extend far into abstract realms like healthy daily routines, having a disciplined work schedule, creating your life purpose, etc. It all adds up to maximizing net enjoyment in the end. Enjoyment is not just pleasure as a physical sensation. It's the experience of meaning, purpose, understanding, love, truth; connectedness, beingness, aliveness. There is a richness to life that is only experienced by participating deeply in it in all of its manifestations, and that requires something from you. You don't just receive life. You uncover it as a growing organism in the game called life, and you need to play it well in order to truly enjoy it.

I love psychonauts.

More misinformation

No namecalling.

Your memory is sort of mixed up. One time I talked about smoking cigarettes until you puke and teaching your brain to associate cigarettes with something bad, and another time, I talked about the time I smoked weed for the first time in a year and went into a full panic attack / ego death, which had the same effect. As for applying that logic to your general life, sure, that is just growing up while being authentic to what you are. I'm really doing the same thing still. There is also an extreme version of this called rock-bottom theory: you load everything into the hedonism train and set off at the speed of light down to hell, preferably fueled by drugs, and then your life becomes so unbearably shit that you're left with the choice of either completely revamping yourself or losing everything. Steve-O and Brandon Novak got their own versions of that story (me too, but not to the same extent lol).

You're missing something, but maybe you want to miss it You're still partially aiming for happiness, just not in a way that is shooting yourself in the foot. You'll always have some aspects of hedonism within you. You need some short-term pleasures, and eudaimonia contains that. It's just more holistic, more guided by wisdom. So you reject unbridled and unconscious hedonism, which sure can be a bad thing if your aim is to be a degenerate ?

@Nilsi

@Happy Lizard As for cross-cultural/inter-cultural empirical support, it's generally lacking in the more classical linear stage theories (Piaget, etc.) (you can read about this in Barbara Rogoff's paper "the cultural nature of development"), and the same is the case for SD (I believe you can read about it on the wikipedia). As for conceptual limitations, if you're going for an universal theory of development, maybe a linear stage theory is just not a good fit in general. Maybe it's just too reductionistic and doesn't fit what it's trying to describe. For example, you have other theories that map developmental influences (ecology) rather than developmental altitudes (ontogeny), which may be better for establishing universal features of development.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-structuralism#Post-structuralism_and_structuralism In order to properly understand SD, you need to learn about the intellectual traditions that produced SD, particularly Western developmental psychology. Merely reading a graph on Google images does not suffice. Merely watching a video that Leo made does not suffice. Merely reading the Spiral Dynamics book does not suffice. You need to find out where all these things came from, because the concepts presented in the model are not culturally neutral nor intuitively obvious. They're based upon centuries (or technically millennia) of thinking done by other people. Study related theories in the field of developmental psychology, find out how they were made, find out what assumptions they're using, find out how they define central concepts like "development", find out their conceptual and empirical limitations, distinguish what it's useful for and not useful for, find more models, don't limit yourself to just one lens. If you do that, you might see that SD is really not so special in the grand scheme of things. It's just one particular outcrop of many related things.

I appreciate the Gojira song of the same name

Education, not prohibition.

@Matt23 Not a long time ago, I thought I was discovering revolutionary stuff, but then I found out that the Ancient Greek philosophers have been talking about it 2500 years ago What I call "intrinsic health" is basically "eudaimonia" (instead of hedonism, you have vitality, health, functionality, resilience). If anything, that means I was truly onto something. Discovering perennial truths through your personal life is one of the highest things you can do.

Primary: 1.3. Secondary: 1.3.

Integrity, in every sense of the word.

Ok, so it's not propaganda, but safety concerns.

Do you think that is maybe because ChatGPT is known to sometimes give out misinformation, which could be particularly dangerous when it comes to medical information?

But it did talk about illegal substances.