Carl-Richard

Have you watched Interstellar? ? Why are you assigning our limited Einsteinian models and human scarcity mindset to beings you haven't met? If they have the resources to observe us from afar, what is stopping them from also observing us up close? All of this could be irrelevant, because if we assume that cultural evolution is correlated with technological evolution, who is to say that these beings don't have the 5-dimensional alien-equivalent of Tier 2 cognition? How would you begin to go about predicting their intentions, let alone explaining anything about them?

Perspective is about making distinctions within a system of nested hierarchical order. It's not about making less distinctions but more nuanced ones. Tier 2 is when the "nestedness" becomes more apparent: that "you" and the world is a result of several steps of a evolutionary progress in several dimensions, where each dimension "nests" and "borns" the higher one through constructive modification. You'll then recognize these steps in other people and use that to understand yourself and the world better. So yes, you can always learn something from someone lower on the spiral than yourself, because your own spiral still contains those elements within it so to speak, and they're currently more immersed in it than yourself, and that can help you to address some of your own blindspots. When the approach is love and understanding rather than fear and hate, any interaction becomes like scientific research. It will almost always benefit you in some way or another, because the only agenda is inclusivity.

Yes, they have less psychological suffering, more peace, presence, less mental anguish, but they are not enlightened. As far as we know, they don't have awakenings, their state doesn't change, and there is no spiritual progression. Maybe this will be studied in the future and we'll have maps for animal spirituality as well. However, our current maps of enlightenment are limited to humans, and I haven't heard of anyone who was born enlightened. Even if it was technically possible to be born enlightened, it would just be too extremely rare to matter to anyone. There are always exceptions to a rule, but the utility of the rule isn't defined by its exceptions. I think the progression component is a pretty useful way of defining enlightenment. The very reason why it's such a hot issue in the first place is because it's a sought-after thing that very few people have accomplished. In that sense, enlightenment isn't as much of a quality as an activity. However, you can also make qualitative definitions of enlightenment that would still exclude animals, namely the idea that it's synonymous with what I like to call "non-dual baseline awareness", where "non-dual baseline" is defined by a lack of self-referential thoughts ~95% of the time (5% attributable to hypoglycemia). Now, the crucial point is that what I just mentioned only applies to humans. I will explain why that is: Firstly, the concept of "baseline" implies that the potential for self-referential thoughts is always there (the underlying mental faculties never disappeared), and sometimes they may even reappear from time to time. Secondly, many self-proclaimed enlightened humans (who I believe to fall under the aforementioned criteria) still claim to be able to deploy thought as a means to an end ("non-self-referential thought"). In other words, enlightenment in this case would be "non-dual baseline awareness" + "the ability to think in order to plan or solve problems". So for an animal to be enlightened in this case, they would need to 1. have no self-referential thoughts and 2. have an ability to think (which isn't so clear). If you instead say that they're just innately unable to form any thoughts at all, that would distinguish them from all other "formally recognized" enlightened beings. Then you have special cases where some enlightened people claim to have lost all forms of thought all together. Now, does that make them an animal? Well, even if they lack the subjective experience of solving problems using mental representations (through visual imagery or internalized verbal reasoning), they still display the same abilities as someone who does that. In other words, they can still pass as someone who is able to think to solve problems. Then the definition becomes more or less tautological in respect to the question: no self-referential thoughts + display of human behavior, i.e. only humans can be enlightened In summary, it's most useful in my opinion to define enlightenment or an enlightened being as "a selfless, thinking being" (or atleast one that displays the behavior of such a being), the qualities of which is partially accessible on a continuum facilitated by spiritual practice, eventually reaching a maximum and stabilizing around a baseline. I also want to make it clear that I've been mostly referring to the most basic type of enlightenment in various maps ("600s" — Ramaji; "Valley of unity" — Sufism; "the Absolute within the Relative" — Five Ranks of Tozan; "Sixth Zen Bull" — 10 Zen Ox herding pictures; "4th Stage" — Patanjali' Yoga Sutras; "4th stage" (Sattvapati) — Advaita Vedanta. https://www.realizedbygrace.org/levels-of-consciousness?lightbox=dataItem-jlvwww23. However, the no-thought state mentioned in the 6th paragraph is usually considered a much later stage depending on the map.

Enlightenment implies that there has been a journey from darkness and into the light. If you've always been in the light, there is no such thing as enlightenment. Compare it with the hero's journey: the animal has never had to travel through the dark abyss of human suffering, overcome it and return to the village. You're not a hero for just living in the village. It's the journey that makes you a hero.

? Before you play devil's advocate, try to show that you're not the devil ?

Are you comparing satsangs with one on one sessions?

As compared to who?

Maybe it was by accident in this life, but if you listen to him describing his past lives, he must have probably had around 100k hours of insanely hardcore spiritual practice. That for sure wasn't an accident, and all of that culminated in him building the Dhyanalinga and establishing Isha foundation. There are many practices he is holding back from his students saying they're too powerful. To say that he doesn't know what he is talking about just because he speaks in a peculiar type of way is a tad bit ignorant.

Probably helped a few people who couldn't do it the diy method.

People who go to satsangs and stuff don't really come for the stories. There is a component of grace that simply comes from being in the presence of the teacher. The stories, in the sense that they're able to awaken someone, simply serves as a vehicle for that grace. Simply speaking about Truth amplifies that natural expression of grace, and you can pick up on that even without registering the words. I can even notice this in myself when I talk to somebody about Truth (in person). It makes me more in present and aligned, quite drastically actually.

Survival isn't the opposite of taking life. Survival is when self-perpetuating patterns compete in a system with limited resources. Even in the case of Hitler's worst atrocities, there was always an underlying argument of how to distribute resources and perpetuate a set of behavioral/ideological patterns. A survival pattern could be about eliminating the most patterns possible, including itself, and it would still be called survival, because that in itself is still perpetuating a pattern. Whether it's capable of achieving that goal or not depends on the access to resources, and the consumption of those resources usually goes at the cost of others. The stage yellow dream is to be able address all patterns in the best way possible.

There is a diffence for sure, but at the end of the day, he did what he did as a product of his own suffering, just like I did as a product of mine, and there is room for compassion there. That is not to excuse or condone bad behavior. Evil is complicated. However, I understand how mentioning compassion in the same sentence as the greatest evil of the 20th century can come off as repulsive and frankly offensive for most people, so I will keep that to a minimum. Besides, skirting that edge with potential nazi sympatizers just around the corner is probably not the best thing to do.

Is lying, stealing, manipulating, and gaslighting for personal gain not evil? Yes, but my desire to listen to it was still not in my hands so to speak. The suffering was too great. When I finally did listen, it was out of sheer luck and happenstance. My conscience currently tells me all life is sacred. Your conscience seems to think differently. How did that happen? ?

I have a conscience, but looking back at my life, there have been many times where I didn't act in accordance with it. Was that all under my control or did my socialization/biology impact it? If so, does that make me evil? Now years later, I can see how I could've acted better. What changed?

Sure. I've been socialized to act suboptimally as well. Am I evil?

You say your conscience can bypass your socialization. I demonstrated how little socialization it takes to override your conscience.

All you need is a good excuse (meat eater esque "this is how I survive") and the same level of dehumanization you've levied against them ("they're not worthy").

You demonize what you don't understand. Strong disagree.

If we assume that we're currently in a low consciousness society and that we'll have a high consciousness society in the future (let's say 100 years), then I would say no. https://www.forbes.com/sites/briankateman/2020/02/17/will-cultured-meat-soon-be-a-common-sight-in-supermarkets-across-the-globe/

You die when you feel OK with being alive.

Systems system ?

or look at the examples where the hard work paid off in the end: http://growbalance.se/2016/11/20/ph-d-happiness-10000-hours-meditation-actually-brain/ You'll never know if you got bad genetics if you don't put in the work

Genetics is one facet of karma. It's just different ways of describing it.

Great example of INTJ's Fe blindspot. Eric Weinstein gets a lot of critique for the way he chooses to explain his theory of Geometric Unity. You can see this under literally every Joe Rogan appearance ("he is a conman", "he intentionally uses jargon to sound smart" "he likes to hear himself talk" etc.), but what is interesting here is that it's coming from a highly esteemed physicist (in other words, it's not simply that it's a complex theory): 58:48 "Nobody knows what you are talking about"

Not to be the "that guy", but the "nature = health" argument has been debunked: Even if you define health and longevity to be distinct concepts (which I do), none of them are particularly correlated with biological fitness (health a bit more than longevity). Blindly trusting nature as a dietician is a bit naive, because 1. nature only cares about whether or not you're strong enough to survive and fight off fertile competitors and 2. that you survive long enough to produce more self-sustaining offspring than your competitors; a.k.a biological fitness. Strength is also not the same as health. Even so, this is far from the whole picture of why a particular diet is observed in a population.