Carl-Richard

@Elliott "There is no teacher or student, there is only the One" is a marketing trick to make him seem more enlightened and is more effective for drawing people in than saying "I'm enlightened and I can enlighten you". The latter is actually the most honest position, the former could be the position concerned about not turning people off. Prove me wrong

A word is not a model? What is a model?

If only people could apply the same kind of thinking for the S-word.

"You feel it more, but you're bothered by it less" — Ken Wilber (possibly paraphrasing).

But wouldn't Spira claim that embodying this teaching (that he happens to be teaching) leads to enlightenment? See how the framing ultimately is indeed about style and not substance? The flip into the absolute of "there is just the One, there is no teacher or student" is probably mainly a tool for pointing to the truth, maybe also an optics tool. But the substance is that he is a teacher and he is teaching enlightenment, he believes his teachings work, and therefore he would honestly have to answer "yes, I do believe I can enlighten people". But maybe @Elliott would say "optics matter, it decides how you pull people in and sets their expectations". That is definitely the case, but how much is it the case? If you're already paying 4000$ for a retreat, are you not already sold? And what if the optics of "I'm so enlightened that there isn't even a distinction between teacher and student", what if that is more alluring than the alternative? It's the case in music, humor, sex, that it's often that which is denied or left unsaid, or the gaps inbetween, or the play of subtlety, that causes the most excitement. And for spirituality, maybe particularly so.

Tried the magnesium glycinate again, and while it doesn't have the soul eviscerating effects of vitamin Evil, it makes me want to fall asleep (at the gym). Maybe the dose is too high (now 240 mg pure mineral weight) and there are some possible confounds, but man I can't remember ever having wanted to take a nap when warming up for deadlifts. Anyways, next I'll be trying magnesium malate.

Do you believe that Sadhguru and Spira, if they were allowed to be completely honest and not concerned about optics, would claim that they are able to enlighten people through their work?

That's so fucking dangerous to say.

You have a problem with women? Sorry, that's the most troll comment I've ever written, but let's see the reaction.

Yeah, it's like it produces text kinda like a human, therefore it must be conscious like a human (is what absolutely braindead materialists like Mike Israetel think). Meanwhile you don't hold a dog or a human baby to the same standard. It's such a piecemeal and childishly short-sighted understanding of consciousness.

Wait, did you say "the strong position" when I said "a strong position"? I didn't read that correctly until now. But yeah, if you read me say "something you didn't have a strong position on" and you interpret it as "not having the strong position", maybe we are on different planets indeed.

Are you going to deconstruct this quote for me too?:

I should've read my own mind better that I could see this coming from our politics conversation. If you can give me an advice of not reading minds, I can give you an advice of not arguing for something you didn't have a strong position on anyway. Virtually nothing good ever comes from it.

And to bring up "fallacies" as if they're making a point is just additional red herrings to get lost down, just like the first one you brought up (false dilemma fallacy). You didn't post statements about the cost of books, courses? (I also asked you where you got the 3500 dollar number from, maybe you didn't see it because I edited the comment, but you didn't answer that, backing up your factual claims). I gotta admit it's hard to read minds that change their mind every other comment. There is a possibility I've at some point inaccurately portrayed one or two statements or arguments you've made, but again, it's hard when you're waffling around vague statements that you build on top of with endless ad hoc arguments and quotes pulled from the depths of the internet that must be interpreted with millimeter precision for your initially vague arguments again to be supposedly validated. Again, it's much simpler to just say "here's my position, here is my knowledge, here are my facts", and when you run out of knowledge and facts, you say "I don't know" instead of "actually, I meant this, and here are four new quotes for you to read where every word, despite me not knowing about any of them before right now when I searched them up on ChatGPT, is of UTMOST importance".

I added this after my comment but erased it: "Or is this level of pedantry not allowed when it is directed against you?" Why did I erase it? Maybe because this entire discussion is steeped in pedantry, calling it out means the discussion ends. Had you come to this discussion only with facts you already knew about and didn't just dig up for this occasion (and by the way, the study I cited I already knew about), and had you not made the bulk of your arguments about minute details in literal quotes, and when running into the limits of your knowledge you had said "I don't know, look it up if you're curious" (which I did multiple times until I myself decided to engage in the data mining and pedantry; because the frame you're imposing is "if you can't find the data for me, I win"), we could've had a substantive discussion. This is just a shitfest. 70% increase in endocannabinoids indicates enlightenment? Excuse me?

You asked for a mentally ill person "becoming better", not "cured", not "Enlightened". That's what you were asking for, and you were given an answer for that. Then you pivoted to "show me enlightened person", etc.

From the Dr. K video 23:11-23:33: "So essentially we need to understand, all mental suffering is compulsiveness, [...] and the solution to compulsiveness is consciousness". You can have gradations of consciousness, 70% better, 70% worse, and maybe at a plateau, it's called Enlightenment. But yes, gradations. That you want to shoehorn in an absolutistic on-off interpretation, that's on you.

"He proclaims to have the cure for a widespread mental illness ----> take a mentally ill person, make them better." I showed you a study of 70% increase in relevant neurophysiological markers, and that is when the ad hoc rampage started, you kept on adding qualifications to that very vague statement, the contradiction is never acknowledged because you keep P-hacking, keep up the endless exploratory data mining, keep adjusting the hypothesis. You're not able to be strawmanned when you are a strawman. Ask fans of Spira and Sadhguru here maybe. @Salvijus @Ishanga

Again, so literal. We probably don't. But if you get hung up on words like "blessing" vs "trying", maybe we do. And Spira taught...? Is Spira a conman? Marketing language = conman. Yes. Brilliant. Spira sells self-abidance, by sitting with him and soaking in his enlightenment. The difference is in wording, not in concepts, not in substance. This is the essence of pedantry, where you get fixated on distinctions that lack importance. I can tell. But when you do continue with your style of argumentation of seeking out these weird random factoids that vaguely bolsters your position but which when countered can be easily dropped and claimed as "I wasn't claiming that, you were", or you simply keep adding a new qualification like "deepest teachings" (you never mentioned this at the start) or "3500 dollars vs 14 dollars" (where you were somehow unaware of the 4000 dollars), it is indicative of a larger pattern, of indeed arguing about things you're not very serious about. Just pointing it out. This is akin to exploratory research or P-hacking in science, where you don't have a strong hypothesis you've defined from the get go which you're trying to affirm or disaffirm, but you explore as you go, taking advantage of the inflation of statistical significance from doing unprespecified multiple comparisons, disregarding contradictions to the hypothesis, only presenting that which corraborates the hypothesis, and tweaking the hypothesis down the line. And for context, these were your first statements so we don't get confused: These weird arguments we've been having more recently about depth of teachings, pricing, extremely specific wording of quotes, you added later, and by all reasonable indication ad hoc.

So health. That's one of my answers. The other (related one) is clarity, sobriety, stability of mind. While chaos can lead to new perspectives and innovation (which can be high quality), it has a flipside of simply dysfunction and degeneration. That's ironically what I think happened with Mike (why he made a poor judgement, or a string of poor judgements, in his latest fiasco). He is open about using marijuana on the weekends, and he is open about ideally aiming to get as high as humanely possible every time. If the fiasco happened in and around the weekend (which it did), that could indeed explain why his thoughts were maybe particularly low quality at that time. Again, I've had incredible insights on weed, mostly ones that felt incredible and probably weren't very incredible, but also ones that were frankly incredible. But to really tap into clear, refined, pristine thinking, consistently and deeply, you have to make being sober an art. You have to polish and nurture and cultivate it. Because if the human organism is an antenna for reality, you want the antenna to deliver a clear signal. Think of taking a substance or even eating a high GI food as causing a peak and troph in functioning. If you're an archer trying to hit a target, will you be better at aiming if the target is still, or will you be better if the target is always slightly moving? That's essentially what being sober is about. It's about reducing the peaks and trophs so you can dial in your aim. And it's possible to dial it in so much that you become a lethal weapon in and of yourself. That's essentially what somebody like Bryan Johnson is doing (if soberness is the flatness of the wave, then health is the baseline of the wave). When you cultivate both health and sobriety, the targets will be still, and you will see the targets clearly.

I think it's weird that you think people who dedicate their life to spreading enlightenment don't claim to be able to enlighten people. "But I mean claim as in a literal quote". Yeah, even if you manage to pedantically Houdini yourself out of every quote I throw at you, ultimately, I don't think it matters much (but feel free to make a blistering case for that); it's just honestly very weird that you have to be this literal: If a sailor offers sailing trips but he has never said literally "I'm able to take you over shore", that doesn't remove your obvious belief that you think they are able to do that (and that they themselves think they are able to do that). Again, that's honestly very weird. And then indeed, that you have to boil it down to extremely select word choices, "it's my blessing" ✔️ , vs "I've tried my best" ❌, is just laughable in my opinion. This is the epitome of pedantry. And by the way, last time I checked, Leo is not Enlightened (he is awake), and from what I have seen from Brendan, he doesn't seem Enlightened either. But maybe I would have to look into it more. Let's explore the claim that Sadhguru hides his deepest teachings behind a paywall. Where did you get this idea from, and what specifically does it refer to? And how is it categorically different from what Rupert Spira puts behind his various paywalls? And I'm just saying, I can feel when I'm having a substantive discussion where the points are crystal clear and there is a logical progression to the discussion; where the interlocutor actually has a firm position they've thought out in advance and that they're not constructing as they go and where they don't engage in insane levels of pedantry to navigate away from unforeseen contradictions to their position. In all honesty, this ain't it.

It might sound rebellious but I think video gaming could actually improve your vision in certain ways, and when you withdrew from it, you could have experienced a dip due to that. Certainly if you do something like open-eyed staring meditation, trying to stare at smaller and smaller details of a grainy surface or object, that does lead to transient increases in visual acuity. Video gaming (maybe specifically action games) is essentially a dynamic version of that.

So let me get this straight: you used this weird standard (finding an enlightened person saying that the teacher helped them) to claim Sadhguru is a conman (because you couldn't find it). When pressed on it, not being able to find it for any teacher, you claim all teachers are conmen. Ok. So it's a wish + "claim" + paywall for "strongest teachings" now? And the paywall has to be larger than a book now? Ok, Mr. Ad Hoc. First show me where Sadhguru "claims" to enlighten people, don't give me a quote where he says he "wishes" to enlighten people. Until then, here is another quote from Spira: He wishes you to become enlightened, and he also doesn't deny being able to take you all the way. First off, where did you get $3500 from? Secondly, what's worse: taking 4000$ for a retreat where you allegedly give the same teachings as your free teachings or taking 3500$ for stronger teachings? Both Rupert Spira and Sadhguru offer hardship scholarships for reduced price, and Sadhguru also does rural outreach programs (in third world countries) where everything offered is free. Not true, that's just two of your ad hoc arguments. You will find more. As far as I'm aware, the "esoteric version" I've been talking about, the one that is potentially destabilizing and dangerous, is not even behind a paywall. It's behind a wall of Sadhguru personally deciding to give it to you.

Spira and all the other enlightened people you know probably have millions of followers combined. Certainly you should be able to find just one, right? https://rupertspira.com/watch-listen/archive/love-is-the-reality-of-everything/the-rupert-spira-foundation-information/ https://www.watkinsmagazine.com/you-are-the-happiness-you-seek-an-interview-with-rupert-spira Spira certainly wishes ("claims") to enlighten people just as much as Sadhguru.