Carl-Richard

Constructions, just like "others".

In order to doubt the experiences of "others" the way you do, you first have to construct concepts such as space, time and objects. This is because you treat others as objects within space: different people are different objects with different locations in space, presumably running their little experienceless lives across time. The objects are limited and not equal to the entirity of that space (which you erroneously call your "direct experience"), which is an extended arena where objects are placed. The problem is that what you call your direct experience is actually not "direct" at all. It contains constructions of space, time and objects. You're carving out some limited slice of reality (an "other"; an object) and isolating it from the greater whole (your "direct experience"; space). What is truly direct experience is what exists prior to this carving up of reality, prior to space, time and objects. Hence, direct experience has nothing to do with doubting the experiences of others in this way. Your doubting is itself a construction. Another way to see this clearly is that you're constructing the concepts of "my eyes" and "their eyes" as objects in space. "My eyes" and "their eyes" are carved out as separate limited entities that are located in space and changing across time. There is nothing "direct" about these concepts. They're something you've (unconsciously) constructed and mistakenly taken as reality, hence the metaphor of being asleep in a dream. When you're asleep in a dream, the contents of the dream seems like reality. But when you wake up, you clearly see the dream for what it is; a dream, not ultimate reality. Ultimate reality is beyond space, time and objects.

No. People talk to themselves all the time, both internally and externally. Schizophrenia is a debilitating mental illness with severe cognitive deficits, hallucinations and delusions, including but not limited to poor working memory, flat affect (few emotional expressions), anhedonia (inability to feel pleasure), persecutory hallucinations (e.g. voices that harass you or monsters that want to harm you), delusions of self-reference (e.g. thinking that a song on the radio is about you), thought disorder (e.g. making peculiar conclusions about things, seeing conceptual connections that are tenuous or illogical).

Definition of what?

Ah. But how do you know you saw the same mouse as Leo?

This is inevitable. Like knowledge, communication is imperfect. We use words differently, we talk differently, we think differently. Still, there is a way around the differences. In the words of Stephen Hawking: "All we need to do is make sure we keep talking".

Then all humans are bad, which is fine to believe I understand that enlightenment is a recognition of something that exists beyond all beliefs. But still, enlightened people have beliefs. They just see them for what they are; beliefs. The main danger lies in making beliefs into something they are not; to conflate belief with reality. Beliefs, assumptions, whatever you want to call them, are necessary for maintaining your existence as a human being. Sometimes you need to form a belief about something or assume something based on little information, because your physical existence is limited and you don't have access to all the information in the universe, so you need to make shortcuts in order to survive. Unless you've left your physical body, beliefs are required for existing.

I'm not saying belief is a bad thing. It's just an honest description of what it is. As a beginner on the path, you come to believe that there is such a thing as enlightenment (which at this point is only an idea in your mind, spurred on by an intuition or some conceptual knowledge suggesting that it might be a thing), and you may believe that there are methods that can take you there (some people don't), and you keep trying the methods despite not experiencing enlightenment as a fact (you put your faith in them; you believe in the possibility of enlightenment despite not having a direct experience of it). So of course there is a lot of belief involved, but also intuition and conceptual knowledge, which serve as hints, but your intuition and conceptual knowledge are not direct experience. Beliefs are not incompatible with spirituality. Your beliefs about enlightenment are guided by things like your intuition and facts like the history of yoga.

My short-lived career as a Pivot animator 😂: Pivot is a really simple program for making animations, and I remember I loved to make funny animations with it when I was 12-13. I just re-watched the videos and was a little bit surprised of how good they are (for being that young). I certainly didn't lack creativity 😆 At the same time, I remember I wanted to make videos more professionally (RuneScape videos), and I asked my dad if he could buy me his video editing software that he used for work, and he said yes, but I never got it. I think if I had gotten that, there is a decent chance I could be a video editor today (maybe even a full-time YouTuber). I also asked him for a double bass pedal for my drum set which I also never got, and similarly, I think I maybe could've become a drummer instead of a guitar player. Same with me never bothering to buy a decent music editing software (like Cubase, which is what one of my friends from music class used) or basic recording equipment (the aforementioned friend had his own studio); maybe I could've been a musician today. It's weird to think about how your life could've turned out different, and it kinda hurts when I look back at these missed oppurtunities, because I feel like I'm more of an artistic right-brained person than anything else, and that it feels like I was supposed to pursue these oppurtunities when they arose. I have also always had some deep-seated desire to be world famous somehow (page Dr. Freud for that), and I think that also feeds into the missing-out feeling (as becoming a musician and a YouTuber are probably the top 2 go-to ideas for becoming famous, at least for my generation). On the other hand, I'm partially grateful for not having made some of these more creative pursuits into a job and thus turning them into something you have to do for some extrinsic outcome (turning intrinsic motivation and spontanous expression into extrinsic motivation and contingent expression). I can see some of this development in my academic pursuits, and it seems unavoidable to some extent, despite your passion for it (especially due to the practicalities specific to the academic machinery). It's not something I'm too bothered by, because life is all of life is like that yo some extent (it's about becoming an adult and seeing how not everything will suit your utmost sense of comfort or immediate impulses). Regardless, it's good to have something that you can go to as a "safe space" where nothing needs to happen and where you can be fully free to do whatever you want. But also, there is of course a downside with not being constantly immersed in something and being pushed to develop your skills, as your skill level also feeds into your level of enjoyment. So there are pros and cons to everything, and at some point, you have to be grateful for what you have. And who knows; maybe I wouldn't have found spirituality in any of those timelines? I can't imagine what kind of person I would be or how much suffering I would've gone through up to this point, or if I would even be alive. It's weird to think about.

@Yimpa 😆

9 minutes 45 seconds of your time. You're in a dream, conflating dream for reality. The only way you can see this is to wake up (become lucid in the dream).

Can you explain what that is?

That is not what you were saying. You said science doesn't start with a belief, only ends with it. I'm saying it always starts with a belief. Even in so-called exploratory research where you do an investigation and you don't have a clear hypothesis, there are many beliefs involved in shaping the investigation.

What do you mean by that?

You have to believe that the method is able to take you to the outcome that you believe you want.

What does this have to do with control?

All you see as an ego is illusion. All you feel as God is true.

Science involves forming a hypothesis that you believe is true and then testing it.

When you frame it that way, my peak philosophical insights must have occured back when I was a chronic weed smoker and had the emotional stability of an emaciated Jenga Tower (I'm being a bit facetious, because a was essentially kid back then, and weed is weed. But I might as well since we seem to have reached some kind of common ground). When I try to remember my most profound insights, I run into the problem of 1. not remembering them (because weed), 2. mostly remembering trivial stoner thoughts ("wasting time is because of a lack of planning"; "rivers are machines that run on gravity"; etc.), and 3. remembering hypotheses that lack any specificity or are simply trivial ("this and that can be explained by glutamate vs. GABA transmission"). The one insight that stuck with me most from that era and which ended up being corroborated is "the perception of time depends on access to memories", which came as a result of the only time I deliberately sat down to contemplate a question for an extended period of time (probably only for like 5 minutes to be fair, but still, the intention was there, and it seemed like a satisfying answer). So in summary, despite my mind being an inexhaustable fount of novelty, I wasn't a very clear thinker. I even had this thought explictly one time: "this weed is making me have so many thoughts all the time, I must be getting a huge advantage over other people", which sort of illustrates my lack of "clear" insight. It would've been true if most of those thoughts weren't garbage (or maybe I'm being too hard on myself).

I remember chugging down several tablespoons of turmeric and some black pepper and getting high on it (I was experimenting with how to enhance the weed high). It definitely had a nice effect, but the effort to consume it was a bit much.

Modern society contains various things that are at an evolutionary mismatch with our bodies and minds. For example, porn, hyper-palatable foods (soft, high sugar, fat, salt, etc.) and social media are not things we've evolved to consume at all, let alone on a regular basis. And why are they so bad? Because they're hyper-salient (highly stimulating) sources of things that are considered rare or valueable resources from an evolutionary perspective. When you get accustomed to consuming these highly stimulating things, your brain downregulates your ability to get reward from less stimulating things that are healthy and build resilience (make you stronger), like exercise, real social relationships and real foods. You're essentially numbing yourself to the things that you're supposed to do as a healthy organism, and you're making it harder for yourself to be motivated to do those things. And as you become less motivated and do less of the things that make you resilient, you become weaker and experience progressively less pleasure and more pain, and then you keep going to the hyper-salient sources of pleasure, because those are the only things that can give you pleasure, which creates an evil spiral which is hard to get out of (in other words: addiction). Another factor is the lack of some kinds of evolutionarily matching stimuli, like natural environments (trees, green hills, skies, mountains), natural lighting (direct sunlight), large social networks (we evolved to live in tribes with upto 150 people), regular physical activity, etc. The artificial environments that modern society exposes us to are "hypo-salient" and make us more prone to addiction, as we have to compensate for the lack of stimulation we otherwise get from the natural environment.

But it doesn't have to be repetitive unresolved conflict, i.e. classical neurosis, or being constantly distracted by irrelevant information, i.e. psychosis. Again, in enlightenment, the DMN is not discarded, only re-prioritized. As you said, it's a trade-off between functionality and novelty, but you could make the case that there exists an optimal trade-off, judged by how "useful" it is. For example, how low IQ can you have before the gain in novelty is not useful for anything? I would claim enlightenment is generally closer to the optimal trade-off, while the Western normal exists on the lower end of the trade-off optimum. When you deviate from the optimal trade-off, any gain in novelty that is useful becomes exceedingly rare, but again, the novelty that is gained might be specific to that level (not possible through any other means), which might be useful for society at large. I think it helps to emphasize that functionality includes to a large extent the concept of intelligence in the strict cognitive sense (information processing capacity; working memory, executive control) and not just "softer" psycho-emotional aspects that impact well-being. These of course overlap, but to emphasize the distinction is prudent in this case, because you're indeed trading off intelligence (in the sense stated) for novelty, which is a tricky trade-off. Nietzsche might've been one of those rare cases where an otherwise sub-optimal trade-off did produce some exceptionally useful insights. That said, Buddha surely had a creative output: his teachings (the Four Noble Truths, the Eightfold path, etc.) were quite brilliant in capturing the intricacies of the spiritual path and providing a framework for advancing on the path in a balanced way (one that discourages so-called "spiritual bypassing"). Creativity doesn't necessarily have to involve a complete and utter novelty of the kind that has never been seen before, but often simply a refinement or integration of existing insights (I would actually argue that most forms of creativity are of the latter form, but you can of course have gradations on that).

Let me be a skeptic but also a New Ager at the same time: if there are people who can give detailed accounts of claimed past lives, even thousands of years back in time (I know one such case), then where are the self-proclaimed starseed people with detailed memories from their star system of origin? To be very clear, I don't mean the people who say "hmm, I think I might be a Pleiadean, because I feel weirdly attracted to it when I hear the name". I mean the people who say "yeah, we lived in these small huts that levitated above the ground, and we communicated using telepathy, and one day when I went to school, I fell and hit my head, and I was taken to the hospital and was magically healed". Can you find me these people, or just any reasonable argument or evidence? Then you might be onto something. Regardless, it goes to show that if you want to convince someone about something, you can't just be casual about it (which is probably how most people approach this type of New Age beliefs; it's just something to fill your head with; no burning desire to truly get to the bottom of something). Be ambitious about it.

This is an old thread. If you want to start a new thread, do that (but don't expect it to stay up for long either; it seems a bit unproductive to merely complain about a certain type of people).