Carl-Richard

I doubt he ever gave that as a prescription. Rather, your need for sleep will naturally drop when you develop a calmer baseline state.

I have an idea: let's try to look at the behavior of people who call themselves spiritual/religious and go from there.

You can learn about direct experience through any religion, just like all the mystics throughout history have. Conversely, you can gather a lot of beliefs from self-proclaimed spiritual people that have nothing to do with direct experience. The stereotypical example there is crystals and tarot readings, but also just deciding which spiritual practice to pursue has an element of faith and belief in it. You'd make a good altar boy Yep, you seem to be well-versed in the individualistic "spiritual" doctrine. Well, that's what many academics seem to do. Distinguishing religion from spirituality, without merely pointing to social/cultural/historical happenstance, is actually a hard problem. I'm aware that you're giving me the "common sense" distinction that the majority of (secular) people in society seem to use, but I want you to go a little deeper. Again, you're showing good adherence to the doctrine of individualistic "spirituality". That's good

Haha this guy is a freaking ninja. Like, just wow: 1:25

For example, the image you posted. It's not direct experience. It's a teaching, a pointer. Doctrine: "direct experience is paramount", "looking inward", "personal exploration", "non-duality", "you are God", "you are Infinity", "reality is One". Rituals and practices: meditation, mindfulness, yoga, self-inquiry, contemplation, psychedelics. Faith community: Actualized.org, spiritual YouTube channels, other internet forums, spiritual retreats, Buddhist monasteries (?)

@m0hsen @UnbornTao If you take a look around, self-proclaimed spiritual people tend to rely on teachings which are not themselves direct experience, which seems according to your definition to be religion. Self-proclaimed spiritual people tend to fall into the same behaviors of being guided by faith, belief, conjecture, hope and belonging as religious people. A more defining difference is that they tend to do it in a different social and cultural context. This is evident by how 99% of threads in this place are about how somebody "doesn't get it", "you're taking things on belief", "you're conflating absolute and relative", "don't conflate the concept with the experience", "false teachings", "what people don't seem to understand about awakening", "how do I awaken?", "is this awakening?", etc. In other words, belief is an integral phenomenon to spiritual communities, same as religious communities. But sure, some religious people seem to place belief higher than direct experience, but it's not a particularly defining distinction.

Who were some of the first spiritual teachers in history?

You don't think religions teach direct experience? Don't confuse the concept of Religion with actual Religion.

Yes it should 🙂

Spirituality and religion should be inside the same bottle

But are genes for brain hemorrhages dependent on genes for neuroticism?

If you'll allow me a moment of starry-eyed idolization of a spiritual guru, it does seem like he has a "third eye" kind of control of it though. He seems to only give in once it's absolutely necessary, which for him is apparently multiple brain hemorrhages deep. And it's not completely mysterious either: people in these states of consciousness tend to be incredibly resilient, and the same can be said of their intuitive foresight (or luck or whatever). If your goal is to run arguably the biggest "spiritual" organization in the world as smooth as a whistle, and you have these qualities, the level of damage or dysfunction where you feel like tapping out will be significantly higher than most people. That said, maybe he got out of his depth and was simply lucky he didn't die. As for spirituality not being a cure for genetic ailments, it's not like you can avoid a brain hemorrhage if that is what is going to happen, but how you deal with it in terms of healing is very dependent on things like your mental state and general physical health. This is mainstream knowledge now. If you take a course in biological/health psychology, it's all about the fuzzy boundaries between mind and brain: psychosomatic illnesses, functional somatic disorders, subjective health complaints, the placebo effect, mental coping and appraisal being an integral component of the stress response, mental coping and cognitive therapies being used to deal with chronic physical illnesses, mental disorders like PTSD being associated with negative physical health effects like cardiovascular disease, the 7 factors of "resilience" that protect you from disease are mental/social in nature, etc.

Maybe worse when you literally work through multiple brain hemorrhages 🤔

That's what happens when your goal is collective yoga

I dunno, when somebody posts something psychedelic in the psychedelic section, my first thought isn't "it must've been a mistake". I guess this is us being on the opposite sides of the autism-psychosis spectrum 😆 (differential sensitivity to subtle cues like context markers 🤓).

Did he post this in the psychedelics section? Are you tripping?

I want to count how many times this exact point has been made on this forum and create a live counter for it on the top of the spirituality section so that maybe one day people will become bored of it.

Only if you don't know what you're doing and you over-exert yourself (or if you intentionally over-exert yourself despite knowing the negative consequences).

I think one thing that happens with some people when they think about working out is that they have a negative cognitive frame of it as something difficult and hard. According to Cognitive Activation Theory of Stress, this frame ("stimulus expectancy" and "outcome expectancy") is largely what causes the "stress" (the "bad" stress; chronic, sustained stress). Once you're able to mentally cope with the challenges associated with working out, it's not a source of "bad" stress — it's "training", unless you overdo it and it becomes a sustained stress response ("strain"). https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0149763409000232?via%3Dihub And if you want to counter this by saying "but what about the non-cognitive part of the stress? Isn't that inherently tearing on the system?". No. Again, it only becomes a problem when it's prolonged and sustained. Literally anything you do; any action, any thought, any movement; initiates the stress response to some degree. It's an ingrained part of your functioning. The optimal way it works is that you activate the stress response, you do the work, solve the problem, and then you rest. The problem only arises if you don't solve the problem and don't get to rest, and that is when the response gets prolonged and you experience the "bad" stress. Now, how trained you are will determine what that point is for you. The reason why working out is generally healthy is because for some people, that point is reached in everyday life, even while not working out, simply by trying to do everyday activities, for example work, or just merely moving your body. Working out decreases the likelihood of ever hitting the point where bad stress occurs in your life, and it's the bad stress that decreases functioning and has the strongest negative impact on longevity. As for the argument that short-term stress increases resource consumption, increases calorie-intake, bodily strain, requires more rest, and that this reduces longevity; while this is strictly true in isolation, as somebody mentioned earlier, you have to look at it in context: if you never get into situations of high short-term stress, you'll avoid that, but you'll also experience a severe increase in prolonged stress, and the former is quantitatively AND qualitatively incomparable to the latter. It's qualitatively different because, in line with the CATS model, it's really easy to mentally cope with a workout, while any constant and prolonged stress from life you'll most likely experience as outside your control and therefore has a much worse profile of mental coping (e.g. "hopelessness" and "helplessness" in the CATS paper). And now, I'll make the quantitative case (which someone else also made earlier): A proper high-intensity workout lasts maximum 90 minutes. You're awake for 16 hours (960 minutes) a day. If you could choose between 90 minutes of high-intensity "stress" (which is not "bad" stress) say 3 times a week, which is "stress" you can rest and recover from, and 960 minutes of prolonged/actually-bad stress 7 times a week, which you cannot rest and recover from; if you know basic arithmetic and if you know anything vaguely theoretical about how the human body works and if you have ever experienced the intense negative side effects of going from a period of regular exercise to no exercise; you would have to be psychotic to choose no exercise. The question shouldn't be "exercise: yes or no?", it should be "how much and what kind?".

That's if you have a wacky definition of health. If you define health as optimal functioning, then health and longevity are virtually synonymous. If you define health as having big muscles and fucking a lot of bitches (reproductive fitness), then sure, that definition of health might not be synonymous with longevity. Sure, if you manage to keep your resting heart rate below 50 or so, if you have no musculoskeletal issues and you cope well with your daily life, and if at the same time you happen to be working out less than someone else, then sure, working out more might not help you that much in terms of longevity. But I'll assure you that in virtually all cases, getting to those levels requires some amount of working out (or just general physical exercise); whether it would be considered light or extreme exercise, whether it's intentional or accidental; that's beside the point.

Define light moderate exercise.

It's impressive what sleep deprivation and cramming the day before an exam can do to your dreams, if that's a potential explanation. The dream basically consisted of my mom trying to show me this invisible creature that was learning how to walk on a tightrope. At first, I couldn't see it, but then as I applied deep focus, I could start to see a faint outline of their body. The more I focused, the more I became aware of them, but their body was still extremely subtle and translucent. It was as if I had to slowly and through great determination unlock and train a second pair of eyes to be able to see them. Then the weird thing happened where I was attempting to "merge" with them, not physically, but telepathically, where I would literally become this translucent silhouette of a being for a moment, experiencing walking the tightrope from their perspective. After a while of intense concentration and psychic determination, I managed to do so — I became the being walking on the tightrope, and it was an incredibly euphoric experience. While being in this other form, I still knew that I had a second body, but I just wasn't currently operating it, or I was temporarily plugged in to this other experience. It still felt as real as my other experience, and it felt like I had achieved some marvelous feat and broken through preconceived notions of what was possible. It makes me wonder if this very thing is possible in real life, with the right level of dedication and practice.

That's like, just your opinion, man.

What do you like to do?

Lists.