Carl-Richard

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Posts posted by Carl-Richard

  1. Posted · Edited by Carl-Richard

    2 hours ago, Peo said:

    I smoke weed only 1-2 times per week. Am i doomed? 

    Not necessarily "doomed", but you will experience at least some of the effects I listed earlier at all times to some degree (cognitive narrowing, impaired learning, elevated cortisol and lowered stress tolerance, health damage and carcinogenic effects of smoking, numbing of emotions, disorganization of thought and behavior).

    If it's something you do every weekend, there is of course also the tendency to cause a dependency on weed to "have fun", but it's not quite at the level of depending on it to "function" (which is more if you smoke every day and when you stop smoking, you can't sleep or eat very well and your mood is severely disrupted).

    See what happens if you smoke every other weekend instead of every weekend. Maybe you will be forced to find out other ways to enjoy yourself and you will also feel an additional sense of freedom that you don't have to smoke every weekend in order to have fun.

  2. Posted · Edited by Carl-Richard

    7 hours ago, Mannyb said:

    What’s the point? What do you want to know?

    I just think it's useful for people to know what thoughts and ideas people have about weed that smoke a little more than they are willing to admit.

    It's a seeming trend for weed users to paint this idealistic picture of weed that they aspire to inhabit but which remains mostly that; an aspiration, a dream, and a way to keep smoking while aiming at something higher and promising yourself that one day, you will be there. But as a stoner, your promises aren't often kept. It tends to remain an ideal, a dream, and the rubber never quite meets the road. The eternal curse of the stoner is the potential that could have been but never became.

    You know who talked about how the best way to use weed is to take long and good breaks and then smoke as much as you can in one sitting and treat it as a shamanic/psychedelic ritual? Terrence McKenna. He smoked weed every day.

  3. Posted

    1 hour ago, Mannyb said:

    Sometimes it’s me.

    Sometimes it’s the machine.

    Sometimes it’s something ancient speaking through both.

    I only share what rings true.

     

    But I did sense a little tension in your words…

    No pressure.
    Just wondering—wanna open up?

    Please state when you are using AI in your post.

     

    Quote

    What’s NOT Allowed:

    [...]

    • Posting AI-generate content like text, images, or video without disclosing that it was sourced from AI

    [...]

    https://www.actualized.org/forum/guidelines/

  4. Posted

    1 hour ago, Mannyb said:

    @Davino

    Pleasure is part of life. It’s not the enemy—it’s the imbalance that poisons us.

    We live in a world overstimulated by artificial dopamine: notifications, sugar, porn, quick hits of escape.
    So naturally, the healing instinct today is to fast, to quit, to return to stillness—to recalibrate.

     

    But pleasure itself isn’t the problem.

     

    Like Shivapuri Baba said:

    “One should not live for pleasure; but, if it comes, it should not be rejected also.”

    That’s the middle way.

    Don’t chase it. Don’t fear it.

    Let it come—and let it go.

    Pleasure, when not clung to, becomes presence.

     

    It’s not about denial. It’s about sovereignty—feeling your own supply and welcoming the rest without attachment.

    Are you literally just posting ChatGPT responses all the time?

     

    Life is not food, but food is good.

  5. Posted

    52 minutes ago, AION said:

    Everything we consume has a soul. When we use it we integrate with it. That is the whole point of medicine. One needs to respect it and honor it. Especially things that are given by nature. Cannabis is something wonderful. Respecting Mother Nature. If you don’t respect it, it won’t respect you. Respecting another is respecting yourself. 

    So every day?

  12. Posted · Edited by Carl-Richard

    Probably the most concerning effect is that it dissociates you from parts of your memory (not just short term memory, but long term memory). It limits your cognitive field of vision, narrows it down, and interferes with your ability to connect new information to existing knowledge, to see and feel parts of yourself that you might be hiding from (often the more uncomfortable parts), and generally to be responsive to inner and outer signals that may help you move in the direction you want to go. It can be a great hindrance for personal development.

    Other than that (and also connected to that), it

    • interferes with your ability to learn
    • messes with sleep hormones and sleep cycles
    • elevates cortisol which can lower stress tolerance
    • is often smoked which is bad for your overall health and causes cancer
    • makes you numb to certain emotions and might diminish empathy (while also heightening it in some cases)
    • teaches your mind to rely on outside sources for your joy rather than creating it from the inside through meaning, natural presence and good health
    • makes your body and mind dependent on a fluctuating and unstable state (that lasts for a few hours) which destabilizes your mood and general functioning
    • lowers your ability to organize your thoughts and behavior

    What is the best way to use cannabis (if you don't have a better alternative, which there are many candidates for, e.g. serotonergic psychedelics)? Once in a blue moon. It can increase creativity by a lot, it can help you break with stuck patterns and get a new perspective on things.

    But beware that even when used infrequently, it has a lasting effect on your system, as it contains lipophilic substances which go into all your cell membranes and all your lipophilic cell organelles and stay there for quite a bit of time longer than the supposed "duration of action" or even biological half-life. As a rule, you will feel the effects for at least a week after consuming it.

  15. Posted · Edited by Carl-Richard

    On 5.5.2025 at 10:08 PM, Davino said:

    How can I be more balanced in my life?

    How can I be more balanced now? Am I too tense or too relaxed?

    What activities throw me out of balance? Why?

    What activities get me into a nice inner balance?

    How can my room be more in equilibrium?

    What parts of my life are more out of balance?

    What is the type of balance that I need in my life?

    Balance is largely synonymous with holism: you want to not just focus on one thing, but many things, and you want them to exist in proportion to each other so they serve a greater whole. What the balance should be is dictated by the whole. What is a human? What does a human need?

    What I might add is that humans "need" or are capable of focus, so that some things take more space or serve you more than others. That could for example be what life purpose is, or pursuing your passions. So balance doesn't have to be rigidly egalitarian, but again serving a higher telos, the whole.

  19. Posted · Edited by Carl-Richard

    13 hours ago, SwiftQuill said:

    @Carl-Richard I guess we just agree to disagree. I trust my own assessment of SD. You don't.

    I trust them on one level but not another.

     

    13 hours ago, SwiftQuill said:

    I don't think it's naive at all to use models this way. It's a rough indicator of where you are.

    Look, you understand what I mean by "it's naive" in the context of what I said. It's not like "naive" in an absolute sense. This is more Blue 😂

    If you want a lesson for "self-identifying" where you are on SD, see how often you interpret things as "either/or", or treat things as absolutes, or say that things must be done just one way and not another, or whether you can hold two different things at the same time, or whether you tend to use one approach for all things or tailor the approach to the specific situation, etc.

  20. Posted

    4 hours ago, SwiftQuill said:

    Or, hear me out, you just read the model and ask yourself how many traits you possess from each stage. And how many values you embody from each stage. And you assess yourself according to what makes the most sense.

    Yes, this is what most people do, and it's perfectly ok to have this naive approach to it. But I also like to ask questions about epistemology and criticize the limitations of our assumptions, etc. And they're not mutually exclusive. If you can't carry both, that's on you. I do this with everything: MBTI, SD, Cook-Greuter's 9SEDT, science, spirituality, yet I also partake in all of them.

     

    5 hours ago, SwiftQuill said:

    One more thing you can do is NOT impose your assessment on someone else, like Leo does all the time here. Maybe give people the autonomy to self-assess without derailing discussions all the time by saying someone is stuck in stage orange or stage green or whatever.

    That's very Blue. But I generally don't label someone with a SD stage unless it's as a joke or unless in the abstract while I'm making a point while both are talking about SD. But I will also say that people on this forum are actually more Blue than they think.

  21. Posted · Edited by Carl-Richard

    55 minutes ago, Reciprocality said:

    There are patterns of behaviours in various societies, these implies a state of mind where intentions resides.

    These consciousness models describe several of these patterns and predict that if one of them occurs in someone then a certain set of other behaviour patterns is likely to occur in them too.

    All roads leads to Rome, whichever pattern your behaviour exhibits it will be insufficient in certain contexts if you dear to challenge yourself sufficiently, the psychological evolution and trajectory that follows is similar across cultures. 

     

    We age into these patterns of thinking and acting, we find people similar to ourselves who went through the same phases, the same phases they went through thousand years ago and will do in a thousand years from now. When we observe others we may infer which developmental phase they are going through and maybe even realise that they are exactly like us. 

     

    All this were clear throughout history in every society, the macro-level intellectualisation is just a repetition of the immediately obvious in our perceptive field, because we went through some of the phases, just like the others.

    @Carl-Richard You speak about people on the forum not having <lived> the "tier 2" paradigm they spout, and suggest that only 2% of the population reaches this level, but what do you really know about most of the population? What is even the distinction in your mind between 1. who most of the population are and 2. that about them which is stuck in tier 1? How many 40 and 50 year olds (who may actually have lived a little bit) have you stared in the eyes after a thorough conversation and deemed to be "undeveloped tier 1"? I would certainly pay good money to actually rig you with a camera and speaker setup and see how straight your face would be as you spout that evaluation. How could you even evaluate whether someone were tier 1 or 2 if you don't even have the slightest clue the level of thought patterns they go through as they evaluate you?

    Yes, it's hard to evaluate someone's stage. That is my point.

  22. Posted · Edited by Carl-Richard

    22 minutes ago, Reciprocality said:

    Units representing a generalised idea derived from the real distinction between experienced things occurred spontaneously due to how the ability to identify things presupposes the agency sufficient to hold that identity independently of the thing that bears it.

    We'll divide this sentence into three sentences and we'll see if you yourself can understand it:

    • Numbers are units representing a generalised idea derived from the real distinction between experienced things.
    • These occur spontaneously due to how the ability to identify things presupposes an agency.
    • The agency holds that identity independently of the thing that bears it.

    The first sentence is ok but can apply to many things, not just numbers. The last two, what the fuck.

  24. Posted · Edited by Carl-Richard

    4 hours ago, SwiftQuill said:

    I understand you insist that I've "likely" mimicked green or yellow after being exposed to the SD model I get it. That it's a concern you have about people who learn about the model.

    That said, I don’t feel it applies to me in this case.

    It always applies. It's not "likely". It's a constant. The only way it doesn't apply is if you were already solidly Yellow before learning about the model. This is in fact a core assumption of the model, that the individual evolves as a response to societal, and more generally, external conditions. The claim I'm making is that this evolution happens at the level of relatively empty and shallow mimickry as well, as a stereotypical, dumbed-down version. And it's hyper-charged when learning about SD which exposes you to the concepts of the very highest stages. The fact that this mimickry happens is a truism that doesn't have to be elaborated on, but the most funniest example of it is maybe the cargo cult phenomena if you have heard about it.

     

    4 hours ago, SwiftQuill said:

    I’ve simply gone through a number of internal and external transformations over the past five years

    I'm the same age as you. What do you think I would answer to that question?

     

    4 hours ago, SwiftQuill said:

    If knowing Spiral Dynamics makes all self-reflection invalid, then the entire model becomes useless. Just intellectual gatekeeping dressed up as theory. No one passes your purity test.

    It does not make all self-reflection invalid. Mimickry can help you develop, but it's still not the real thing. You see, "if you were a real Tier 2 thinker", you would not think about this like a black or white thing — that's real gatekeeping.

    The concept of wisdom is useful even though it's hard to grasp. People chase Enlightenment even though they are not enlightened.

  25. Posted

    52 minutes ago, SwiftQuill said:

    And I simply disagree that using the period from before knowing it as a good point of reference.

    It doesn't tell you much about where you are today in itself, but it tells you a lot about where you were, and you can extrapolate based on that.

     

    57 minutes ago, SwiftQuill said:

    I personally have evolved a lot in the past 5 years. 

    If you have evolved a lot in the past 5 years, imagine how much you will evolve in the next 10 years.

     

    48 minutes ago, SwiftQuill said:

    There are some quizzes but they're not too good in my opinion.

    They're garbage, useless.

     

    59 minutes ago, SwiftQuill said:

    And unlike Leo insists - no, I have not regressed from green to orange. The fact I've learned more things, suffered more, and introspected more, doesn't mean I've regressed.

    Perhaps you were always in Orange. It's possible to download a simplified version of a stage from the culture also (e.g. Green). That is what I believe teenagers do all the time with leftist ideas or in colleges (and even spiritual ideas), while in reality, they are expressing mostly stage Red and Blue.

     

    1 hour ago, SwiftQuill said:

    So in my case in particular, since I 100% don't fit into orange (way past it) and I've also exhausted green (perhaps not 100% but most of it) I would feel comfortable saying I'm yellow.

    Did you by any chance exhaust Green before or after learning about SD?