Carl-Richard

Based on his claims about being able to go many days without thinking a single thought, Sadhguru most probably lives with his Default Mode Network (DMN) mostly shut off, and people who come near him will empathically pick up on his state, and likewise their DMN will probably shut off as well. In this case, you would've explained Sadhguru's effect on people by referring to a neural correlate (the DMN), which is what you would call a physical explanation. Before you doubt the specificity of such a phenomena, remember that humans are highly capable of attuning to other people's mental states. If someone is angry or sad around you, you'll be able to pick up on that and synchronize your emotions with them (you'll get angry or sad). That specific emotion looks like something in the brain. Only two days ago, during lunch at our school, there was organized a highly emotional talk about the ongoing issues in Iran. I didn't attend the talk. When the people who attended the talk entered the classroom and started talking, it only took about 5 seconds before I started to feel how upset they were (in fact, most of the students decided to attend an activist demonstration in the city the day after).

There you have it: correlations between something physical and something non-physical. Congratulations, you got it Memories, like most things, have a mental part, and they have a physical part. I was talking about the mental part. Granted Sadhguru is speaking the truth and granted that all these other gurus who claim to have experienced countless past lives which track chronologically with history are also speaking the truth, I think you would agree that "soul" is a good term for explaining that phenomena. That's all.

When you bring to mind an episodic memory, there will be a certain pattern in the brain which correlates with that, but the same will be true when you bring to mind the fact that you like planes (which is a semantic memory). Surely then, the fact that you like planes does have a "physical counterpart", just like the fact that the memory of a past life has a physical counterpart.

Yeah, I have no idea why you're tying memory down to the physical processes. I only gave some examples for how science doesn't necessarily have to deal with physical processes. When Sadhguru says he spent many lifetimes preparing to build the Dhyanalinga, 1. do you believe him, and 2. is that a sufficient reason for deploying the soul concept?

Does cognitive science describe physical processes? Freudian psychoanalysis? Jungian psychology? You're talking about an experience of Sadhguru, which when it comes to science, the natural go-to option is a research psychologist. A research psychologist could use qualitative methods (e.g. interviews and thematic analysis), or quantitative methods (e.g. neural correlates, physiological correlates, surveys). Talking about the brain is just one of many options. What if the memories are very consistent and thorough, e.g. you can count back all the lifetimes you've had for the last 3000 years in chronological order?

Oh no, not the MBTI-SD crossover ?

The phenomenological experience of episodic memories is not physical. Which one is it? Isn't the experience of past life memories an obvious first option for deploying the soul concept?

Let's say you have a baby. If you deprive it of food and general safety, it will die. If you deprive it of love and care, it will not develop its higher mental functions. As it develops those higher mental functions, it develops an identity and the need to be acknowledged and treated in accordance with how they see themselves. And only after that, the desire to maximize one's potential arises. Even the mystic who goes into the woods must have had to develop all these things, or else they wouldn't have that drive. Whether or not you're lacking in lower needs is up to you to find out, but if you know you're lacking in the lower needs, you should not try to skip them.

Nope. You have literal brain areas dedicated to these things. If your brain is not well-integrated across hierarchies and lateralization, that's when you get inner conflict (what Freud called neurosis: conflict between different psychic structures). All psychological problems show some kind failure of integration of different brain areas. Plato put this as the man taming the lion and the lion taming the monster. The man is the neocortex (self-actualization/esteem needs), the lion is the limbic system (social/belonging needs), and the monster is the basal ganglia or the reptilian brain (safety and physiological needs). For Plato, Freud, Maslow, neuroscience, etc.; health, functionality and wisdom means your psychological structures are well-integrated. Spiritual bypassing, which is what you're advocating for, is one trap that hinders this process.

iT wAs a jOke, mAn

You were asking if a psychology degree is useful for understanding the mind, and it is, but sure, you can also just study psychology on your own, and that too will be useful for understanding the mind.

It's a skit.

Humans in Africa had roughly the same environment, roughly the same genetics and roughly the same IQ. What caused Jews to have a higher IQ? Just give me your best guess. You don't need to cite anything.

We all have roots in Africa 200 000 years ago. At what point did Jews gain a higher IQ and why?

It was insensitive. "You've been in high school for 3 years and you're only 5 ft tall? Haha, you're an odd guy."

Purity testing people using some obscure model from developmental psychology is what is odd ?

If you watch his interview with a psychologist, you can clearly tell he has closed himself off from a large part of himself due to trauma: certain negative emotions, feminine energy, being-ness. So he is not devoid of inner conflict, and he could dissolve a lot of it if he wanted, but that will probably not happen in a thousand years.

I have no idea why you would equate memory to brain chemistry or intellect, but anyway: I'm saying that claims about past lives is one reason why you would invoke the concept of the soul. You mentioned cases where differences in personality are seemingly not explained by genes or environment (which I think has some problems, e.g. identical twins will never have a completely identical environment). What other reasons exist? And I'm asking for specific observations, not grand narratives like Tom Campbell's worldview, Hinduism or Christianity.

Nowadays I look more like mr. Nilsi (or like in that short guitar video in the journal). I like to grow my beard out and then shave it all off after a month or two and trim my hair very short. One day I'll look like that bald guy at my gym with a 1-foot long beard who does 330lbs on the shoulderpress machine ?

The thing that makes us human is highly complex social structures, language and culture, i.e. the ability to participate in distributed cognition (which is cognition outside your own mind). Chimpanzees actually have a stronger working memory than humans (the ability to hold numbers in your mind), but we're miles ahead in terms of intelligence for exactly those aforementioned reasons. If you don't take advantage of distributed cognition, you're essentially a chimp. Distributed cognition can be thought of as a form of collective intelligence (collective generalized problem-solving ability), but intelligence is not wisdom, as what makes us intelligent also makes us prone to self-deception and "bullshit". A big component of wisdom is the ability to take different perspectives; the balance of integrating and breaking frames and getting unstuck from these self-deception mechanisms. Likewise, if you don't participate in distributed cognition, you'll have a hard time gaining wisdom. As for its relevance to democracy, again, when the integration and breaking of frames (which is analogous to Wilber's "transcend and include") gets out of balance, we get the opposite of wisdom (foolishness). When integration becomes too strong, we get things like group-think. When breaking frames gets too strong, we get too critical and exclusionary. These things are characteristics of the culture war. As democracy is a collective intelligence, our job is to get it to collective wisdom. That is only possible through honest and open dialogue; not debate, but "theologos". Only then, we can arrive at a balanced collective frame integration and frame breaking.

You do the same for poop?

What function does a soul have other than remembering past lives?

Yes, for the 5th time, in a random sample of people, individuals with a higher IQ are statistically more successful. That doesn't mean IQ is necessarily the explanation for the success of a specific ethnic population. What you're doing is essentially this: "the size of a fish correlates with the amount of predators it can avoid, and therefore, a species of salmon in a specific river will necessarily avoid more predators than a small fish in a freshwater pond." You're then forgetting about the potential group differences, e.g. the insane amount of bears that eat salmon vs. the relative lack of predators in a tiny pond. Yes, individual fish are generally more likely to avoid predators if they're big, but you have to justify why size is particularly relevant for that specific group of fish, or else you're not talking about that group. When you're referring to a statistic about individuals, you're only talking about individuals. Just because it looks complex today doesn't mean it started out at that level of complexity. Reading the Torah is not that complex. Becoming a banker or a merchant 2000 years ago wasn't that complex. Maybe over the course of 2000 years of competition and innovation, it looks complex, but the population who mostly did that for a living would have gradually tracked that development of complexity. No need to start off with a massive IQ.

Imagine Leo goes on Lex Fridman and says "I'm the most awake person in the entire world". "Wow.."