Carl-Richard

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.

Dunno, but one hilarious thing I ran into while reading about sleep is trying to explain what the hell is going on during sleep paralysis in a dry scientific way: You emerge from REM sleep. You're awake, kinda. You're perceiving things in reality, but you're still in a dream-like state; you might experience a sense of panic or terrifying hallucinations, and you can't speak or move because your body is still experiencing the muscle atonia from REM sleep. So are you really awake or are you just dreaming? Is reality a dream? 😆

@Reciprocality I would agree with @Consept that if you tried really hard to say simple and meaningful things, you could probably provide some useful thoughts. But that requires a certain set of values. Do you actually feel a strong drive for meaning, for being understood through and through by yourself and others? Is your need for self-expression something more than merely coming off as deep and profound? Do you want to connect to something truly real? Find that impulse within you. And as a bit of a side note, for people who care about this notion, I think this is what being an independent/original/free thinker is really about. When you strive your very hardest to deeply connect with what is real and true, at the cost of sometimes not coming off as the smartest, most virtuous or most profound person in the world, you'll actually start to think for yourself, because thinking true thoughts as an unique individual is what produces original thoughts by definition. It has very little to do with isolating yourself from outside influences (in fact, you can't really escape outside influences, especially if you want to think). Simply being an unique individual and trying your best to get at the truth inevitably produces an original result, and it's really the only real way it happens. People who don't aim to think true thoughts (at least unconsciously) but instead take shortcuts and go by surface-level appearances (for example on the level of ideology in the form of group-think, or on the level of language with grandiose and pseudo-intellectual word salad; both which work to serve an ego that needs a certain type of emotional validation), these people are the ones who don't think for themselves, simply because they don't know how to think. Not coincidentally, it's the people that know how to think that we fashion as original thinkers, not the people who fail to think. Ironically, the concept of an original thinker is really about appearances and social recognition, which is why you shouldn't care about it if you're an original/true thinker. Knowing how to think true thoughts means your thoughts get recognized as thoughts worth considering, and you're always an unique individual and will always think unique thoughts, so the more true thoughts you think, the more unique thoughts people will recognize you for. Hence more true thoughts = more recognition as an original thinker. Tada! Also, in a sense, you'll stop thinking for yourself, because you'll be driven by something larger than yourself. And this is again why coming off as an independent thinker no longer becomes important. A big part of it involves acknowledging when you don't understand something, seeking clarification, trying to be as clear as possible, and accepting when you're wrong (which happens less and less the better you get at acknowledging when you don't understand something). Anyways, late-night ranting again.

Do you talk this incomprehensibly to people in real life? Do people understand you? Genuinely curious.

I literally laid out how being strong makes you healthy. Maybe read it again.

Firstly, an organism is not a stationary object. All organisms evolved to move in one way or another (either more overtly/motorically like most animals or more metabolically like most plants). Secondly, stress is not unhealthy: chronic and overly intense stress is. Stress in manageable doses makes you stronger, and being strong means you're more capable to handle stress in general, which makes you less prone to chronic stress and injuries, which makes you more healthy. Imagine what would happen if one day you just stopped walking. That is one big source of stress off your back. "But that isn't stress though, is it?". Well, let's say you stopped walking for a whole month, causing significant muscle atrophy in your legs. Then try to walk up a couple of flights of stairs. Tell me if that is not stressful. Now, did walking suddenly become a bad activity just because it caused you a bit of stress? No. Unless you keep walking without ever taking a break, causing you to be in a state of chronic stress, or you walk too intensely and for example pull a muscle, walking is not bad for you. So why is working out supposedly bad for you? The problem is not walking or working out: the problem, if any, is that you're weak and that you need to train yourself up to tackle it better. And so it is with everything in life. All of life is really just a big collection stressors, and some of it might cause you to be chronically stressed or cause injuries if you're too weak to handle it. Grandma might break her back just by bending down funnily, which is not something you want to emulate. An unathletic person might have an existential crisis just while carrying groceries or standing too long in line (or when something slightly bad happens at work, because, as you know, health is bio-psycho-social). So, would you like to face those stressors while being weak or while being strong? Which do you think makes you more healthy?

Are not movement and non-movement part of the same one reality? In reality, they're continuous entities. For example, try to find the definite limit where the movement begins and where it ends. You'll find out it's either an infinite regress or it's rather arbitrary where you draw the distinction. Carving things out as distinct entities is something we do for convenience.

How do the individual statements connect? That is the point of a sentence: providing things that connect. If they don't connect, you're just saying a bunch of random statements.

It's the interpersonal equivalent of a psychosomatic syndrome (mind causing body causing mind causing body etc.): When you feel bad, other people in your environment might start to feel bad, and then you might attribute their feel-bad behavior as the cause of you feeling bad, which makes you feel more bad, which makes them feel more bad, etc. With these things, it's generally unclear what is the root cause. Most interpersonal dynamics are not easily described by linear causal relationships (A → B). They're more easily described by circular causal relationships where all the causal factors arise simultaneously in a co-dependent relationship (A ⟳ B). The same can be said for psychosomatic syndromes. When we talk about relationships and say things like "he made me feel bad", we have to keep in mind that we're mainly doing it as a pragmatic move to express how we feel and that it's only ever one limited part of the story. And we should express how we feel, because that is how relationships work. But we should be careful about determining the reasons for why we feel what we feel. The safest bet is to be probabilistic and quantitative: "I feel x most probably and mostly because he did y, maybe less because z happened yesterday, and most probably and much less because of w etc.). More importantly, we have to keep in mind that our feelings are biased and that we're often blind to a part of the story. But at the same time, you should never deny your own feelings outright. Your feelings are legitimate, just not absolutely legitimate.

When you feel hated by people, people may come to actually hate you