Carl-Richard

Many people misunderstand the role of effort in spiritual growth. There is nothing wrong with effort. Effort and effortlessness is a duality that needs to be transcended. People who are enlightened either did a lot of work in this lifetime or in past lives in order to get to where they're at today. Sure, the few milliseconds before enlightenment may be described as an effortless and authentic expression of "being-here-now", but if you look at the years of struggle leading up to that point, that description is far from the case.

You would have no problems with that word if you had the chops to become enlightened . All the spiritual teachers that I've heard talk about past lives said that they had been on the path for a looong time before awakening in this lifetime.

You need lifetimes of spiritual practice to become enlightened, probably around 100k hrs in total. That is why it might seem impossible in just one lifetime. It's never too late to start though

Suicide is not the answer, because that is yet another survival drive masking itself as an "ultimate solution for everything". A solution for what exactly?: Well, only the fullfillment of another survival need. You have to give up the thing that is driving you towards suicidal thoughts. Only the ego wants an ultimate solution. Enlightenment doesn't come as a result of turning away from life. It comes from gradually acing life and going beyond it. Look at Sadhguru's life before awakening at 25. He was running multiple successful businesses. Suicide was the last thing on his mind at that moment. His being was simply ready to evolve to the next level, and all of it was several lifetimes in the making.

Visionaries seem unrealistic to the common man, because they focus on what reality will come to be, rather than what reality is at the present. To be honest, what Daniel is doing isn't very dissimilar to what Leo is doing. It's just that he takes a much more collective/social lens while Leo tends to take a more self-development lens. Forward-thinking and optimism has sort of become an accepted part of self-development, meanwhile collective issues are much often seen in a pessimistic light, because of the complexity and slow-moving nature of social systems. Besides that, both are really talking about the same things.

Just meditate on compassion instead. You skip the comedown bit.

Because Truth goes against all of your survival instincts.

*dies of excitement*

Do something that requires you being surrounded by Yellow people. It'll basically only happen if you align your life purpose with Tier 2. https://www.santafe.edu/ https://consilienceproject.org/ https://neurohacker.com/ https://www.flowgenomeproject.com/

Survival is about identity. Whatever you identify as being, survival is about the perpetuation of that identity. For most people, that includes their individual physical body and their beliefs, actions, habits, general behavior patterns. For some, the circle of identity is more expansive and includes everything in the universe, and they might then place less overall emphasis on the physical body relative to most people.

Sheesh

Take the Mensa test.

Mhm. That is what a successful collective is at the most basic level: a collection of great individuals. They created everything you see around you that we're all enjoying the fruits of. What I'm essentially saying is that we should treat these things with tender care because it's the most precious things we have.

Taken from a conversation in the youtube comment section of this video (cmon, bear with me ): 5-MeO-DMT - The Magic Pill To Enlightenment & God He hasn't responded yet, but I will add his responses as they come if the conversation still stays interesting (I at least found his original response inspiring). Until then, forgive me for leaving you with the old spiel of taking a "meta-perspective" when it comes to psychedelics and the brain . You guys can also jump into the conversation if you want

All the greats stood on the shoulders giants and lived in societies that were built on thousands of years of collective coordination; politics, business, infrastructure, production and services, architecture, medicine, military etc. Without that, we would not have the intellectual traditions that discovered things like individual rights and democracy. We would have to spend most of our time gathering food. It's so deeply interwoven into our daily lives at this point that we've become blind to its absolute importance.

Care to elaborate on that? It's kinda the crux of the issue here: what role does the collective play in individual freedoms? My point is that these two "opposites" exist in a dialectical relationship. A functional set of individual freedoms arises in tandem with a functional collective. If you weaken one of them in sufficient amounts, both will suffer. It's therefore not simply an either/or question of choosing individual freedoms over collective stability and vice versa.

@impulse9 @Parththakkar12 Let's entertain the idea of not just "nature" but "human nature" for a while. Isn't it true that humans were obligate collectivists for most of evolutionary history? After all, what was the societal structure before the advent of agriculture? Pre- Dunbar number tribal bands. There was no such thing as "individual rights" back then. Survival of the individual was synonymous with the survival of the tribe. This actually never changed – it's still true today. It has just been forgotten because of the massive survival success of the collective, and now when the collective is threatened, people are confused when one considers implementing collective measures. So if humans are fundamentally collective creatures, why are you guys so against human nature?

Let's imagine what that process of questioning one's own beliefs looks like: You ask a question using the cognitive semantic structures granted to you by the social matrix, and you form a hypothesis. You learned that the hypothetico-deductive method is a virtuous truth-finding device from the social matrix. You then test that hypothesis by probing some more into your own socially conditioned semantic structures and conjure up an answer, and then a thought arises out from these structures that say "I just had an original thought!". That is the extent of self-deception that is going on here. The thing is that there never was even a modicum of originality in that process. It's simply the case that your mental patterns and motivational drives are helplessly a product of the social matrix.

Mind is cognitive stuff like thoughts, beliefs, ideologies etc. Consciousness can be its own thing, but it can also involve aspects of mind, heart and gut etc.

I believe I also got some insight into what the ingredients are that go into creating a clinically psychotic mind (a mind that looses its ability to keep in touch with a relative, socioculturally sanctioned consensus reality), because to be totally honest, I had some glimpses of that within myself, and I was probably going down that road if it wasn't for a sequence of very fortunate events. In short, I believe that the psychotic mind is just the end result of spiralling down that dysfunctional feedback loop: unresolved trauma, paired with a hyperactive mind and a neurotic personality (negative internal attribution style, introversion, excessive rumination, anxious attachment style etc.), excacerbated by external stressors (substances, life events), and an escape into an idiosyncratic and mentally constructed world. The mind reacts to the aforementioned conditions by dissociating itself from the "normal" types of cognitive patterns that otherwise ground you in an emotionally embodied and socially aware consciousness of reciprocal collective understanding, and instead ventures into an abstract and vaguely defined mentalscape with loosely defined concepts and arbitrary semantic connections. They say it's hard to distinguish genius from madness. I say that madness is when the hyperconnectivity and isolation of one's semantic content exceeds its sociocultural bearing capacity; that one corrupts one's ability to mediate between one's own semantic structures and the common semantic structures held by other people in the local environment, and this usually happens like I said in a runaway chain reaction that eventually terminates in a psychotic break. In milder cases, it goes by names like magical thinking or thought disorder. Now, what is so genius about the genius is that instead of retreating into his own fantasy world, he holds consensus reality in one hand and the hyper-creative, non-linear mental space in the other, and the result is a beautiful synthesis – a bridging of the two worlds – which is able to inspire and innovate.

They are nevertheless a source of mystical experiences. Psychedelics and meditation are just two technologies of many that saints and sages have utilized all throughout history to alter their consciousnesses. Jesus himself engaged in ritualized near-drowning to induce near-death experiences i.e. mystical experiences. Buddha starved himself to near to death to realize The Middle Way which lead to the The Four Noble truths etc.

When I was addicted to pot, I realized that I wasn't primarily addicted to the numbness of being stoned (at least initially). I was instead addicted to the way it fuelled my overactive, neurotic and philosophizing mind, and simply as a side effect of that chaotic mental activity (and the numbness of course), it made me more able to avoid my broken conscience and neglected social responsibilities. When your mind is always immersed in that level of bouncing-off-the-wall dialectical ping-pong, you spend less time worrying about what you're actually supposed to do (namely being an adult). I actually found this out one time when I decided to throw some alcohol into the mix, and I didn't find it exciting at all, because it killed the cognitive hyperconnectivity and creative forcefulness of the unadultered weed high. If I was simply trying to numb myself, I would probably go to alcohol and beyond (which to be honest happened a bit later, straight before I quit drugs all together. There might be a link there). When that is said, I would say that the driving force behind my behavior at the time was always trauma. In fact, I believe that thought itself as a phenonema only arises when you need to deal with some immediately apparent problem, and if they seem to arise independently, repetitively or out of nowhere, there is some emotional baggage or attachment that is yet to be resolved (be it a mild attachment to an intellectual idea, some unresolved emotional trauma, or using the former to drown out the latter like I did, which is itself a feedback loop of dysfunctional behavior; hiding from the problem and creating progressively more problems in the process).

Not me at least, because I fear I would lose myself if I did that

Yeah let's abolish all medicine. Individual freedom is only granted to you by the existence of a collective in the first place. If you're willing to let it all burn to the ground, then there will be no freedom anyway.

I did not order this red herring, sir. People are free to go around ignoring their own health as long as it doesn't hurt other people. Viruses hurt other people. This is the argument. Sure, maybe if people were more healthy, it would lead to a marginally higher overall resistance against COVID-19, thus it would technically hurt less people, but which lane are you then choosing?: increased COVID-19 fatalities or decreased COVID-19 fatalities?