Carl-Richard

There are different degrees and aspects to this phenomena. You might be used to looking at them from a distance, but have you actually held one in your hand? I used to be creeped out about big spiders until I moved into a basement with huge spiders everywhere in my room. Now I no longer find them creepy. Another example is my mother who is a doctor. She is used to examining people's bodies and has a much lower threshold than other peoole for talking about disgusting bodily stuff at the dinner table. This is very interesting because she is usually extremely digust sensitive when it comes to other things like keeping her house clean and personal hygiene. I think the best example of how digust is subject to conditioning is how you are able to take a shit, wipe yourself and flush without constantly fighting the digust response, meanwhile if you see a human turd on the street, you'll most likely find it comparatively unpleasant.

I interpret the idea that we don't see reality but only interfaces as a shot against the materialist's conception of reality. It's not that there is no reality at all, but it's just a way of communicating the deceptive nature of the model. In this model, "interfaces" becomes the new reality. It's still another conceptual mindtrap, but in a sense it's atleast going in the right direction: critiquing absolutistic views and establishing relativity. However, you don't get to Truth by just moving towards more relativity. It only serves as a means to free your mind from limiting perspectives. To truly arrive at Truth, you must at some point start to move out along a new axis: away from concepts and into Being.

Survival.

If there was anything I could take back from what I said, it would be my use of the word "literally". I realized that I accidentally went full zoomer on that one. Everything else I stand for 100%.

I believe the local adaptation that you're talking about is often more culturally determined rather than genetically determined. When humans migrate, they would maybe have to learn new survival techniques (problem solving, tool-making etc.), but that doesn't require much action at the level of the genes, unlike say the adaptive radiation that happens with the introduction of new a species of frogs to an island. Nonetheless, genetic adaptation to the point of constructing novel phenotypes that confer a drastic environment-specific advantage usually takes millions of years. Homo sapiens appeared only 200 000 years ago. All humans are basically equally adapted to their environment at the level of genes, atleast in a behavioral sense.

Then maybe their local adaptation wasn't such a big deal after all?

A theory is that he called them vermin because he associated them with something disgusting, and he was known for having a very strong disgust-response (he liked having things clean). Disgust, fear and hate are different sides of the same coin (let's call it "defilements") . You fear, hate and find disgusting that which you're not used to. "That which you're not used to" inherently carries a dimension of the unknown within it. All defilements stem from the fear of the unknown, and it's directly tied to survival. It's what keeps you alive, and it's why you suffer.

You didn't really have a choice. All the people you would ever meet looked totally like yourself. All humans who live inside the same tribe are for all intents and purposes equally adapted to their environment biologically speaking. The type of adaptation you're talking about would require some drastic genetic dissimilarities, and I think the probability of those encounters would be too low to warrant an introduction of genes associated with assortative mating into the gene pool. What are the odds that a kenyan and a greenlander would ever meet? Extremely low. So low infact that I see no way that there would arise an adaptive mechanism that would account for the potential fitness disadvantages (that is also an assumption) of that encounter.

Fear of the unknown.

You have no idea what you're talking about.

Those are all literally different words for the same thing.

You don't watch somebody sneeze and then analyze that sneeze along the lines of whether or not it's something you should use as a guiding principle in your own life etc.. In other words, it's kinda trivial.

@Tim R It's just that some statements are less meaningful than others and some are more or less fitting in a given situation. It seems like you're trying to extract meaning out of "how can you be so dumb?" as if it was a non-duality oneliner.

Logic Lord please

What he said.

I don't understand.

This is 99% of people. Not much you can do about that.

You're blowing this way out of proportion.

Descriptions like these can be applied very broadly without having very much to do with Yellow.

A name is a concept. A hand is a concept. Belief is conceptual. That is the connection you're looking for.

Not in a detached manner but in an embodied manner.

I'm not saying it can't ever "work". Of course it's better than doing nothing. It can even be better than meditation if meditation doesn't work for you. However, what it does not work for is establishing a stable baseline of mindfulness (perpetual, self-consistent non-duality). Your mind will never shut up on its own if you keep redirecting it with these meta-exercises. You might be able to shut it up for a while, but that silence will be interrupted when that impulse to do the exercise re-appears and you're lost again. It's this mechanism that is so toxic, and I'm so so familiar with it. If you want to go for stability rather than sensationalism, you must leave a sizeable space open in your day where you can rest. That is where you actually grow. You don't gain muscles if you work out 24/7 a day and never rest. Muscle building happens between workouts. This is what balancing the masculine and the feminine is really about. You need to allow yourself to just be, surrender to yourself (feminine), and when it comes down to doing work, you do it with all your might (masculine) untill you fully exhaust that impulse. “There are only two mistakes one can make along the road to truth: not going all the way, and not starting.”

Pornstars would like to have a word with you Power dynamics makes it into an iffy subject.

Hell yeah. But for real though, I spent two years cultivating mindfulness, and it simply doesn't work. It's like chasing your own tail. It has nothing to do with how you approach it. Merely by holding on to the belief that mindfulness is in anyway desireable or worth your time, you will remove yourself further away from it, no matter how subtle you think you're being. Are you willing to drop your attachment to mindfulness and spirituality in general? Are you willing to let go of everything in your life? That is what it takes to wake up. My advice, to spend 97% of your day without purposely entertaining that attachment, is in my experientially informed opinion a step in the right direction. That is all I'm going to say.

I don't consider it a practice either: I consider it to be a neurosis; pure, 100%, nothing else. I only became truly mindful once I dropped the idea that being mindful is something you should be concerned about.