Carl-Richard

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Posts posted by Carl-Richard

  1. Posted · Edited by Carl-Richard

    2 hours ago, AION said:

    That is social intelligence you are talking about which overlaps with emotional intelligence but I get what you are saying.

    It's emotional intelligence in the sense that your impulsive emotional responses get challenged by a higher knowing. The examples I gave were largely social, but you can apply it to non-social things as well. You can for example expect that things will get broken or things deterioate or things don't go exactly your way. Reality is constantly changing and is not all catered to your highest concerns. If you expect reality to be a completely pampered and safe, like a children's playground, and if you think you yourself is pampered and safe and that anything that challenges this notion you don't entertain as real, you will get triggered very easily.

     

    2 hours ago, AION said:

    Most people are tapped into the social matrix and their behavior is very predictable. It is like playing against low tier chess players who are easy to read. 

    Do you think you are not tapped into any of the social matrixes? Do you think you are not "easy to read"?

    I think all of our behavior is very much predictable. Even the type of topics we like to talk about. We almost always talk about or hear about things we already know, but we talk largely as if somebody is hearing it for the first time and weirdly that we're saying it for the first time. Then, the true "point" about the conversation becomes not about sharing new things or learning new things, but reminding ourselves about what we find important (which is of course, important, as our existence depends on honing our attention). And to prove my point: I know about "the social matrix", I know that social intelligence and emotional intelligence overlap, I know some people are more socially embedded than others. But thanks for reminding me 😆

  3. Posted · Edited by Carl-Richard

    When you read or work or do something intensely for a while (e.g. a few hours), you sometimes need to a take a little break, and after the break, you come back more fresh, your mind works better, you are more sensitive, and you can keep going.

    This is the same logic for having a weekend, but it's just a larger cycle, a larger time horizon (you work for say five days, then you rest for a few days). You also come back more fresh after the weekend, ready for more.

    This is the same logic for having a holiday, but again, a larger cycle (you work for most of the year and then take some weeks or months off). Likewise, you come back refreshed after the holiday, ready for more work.

    Now, the same logic applies for death, only a larger cycle (you work for a life, then you take a few years off). And likewise, you come back more fresh, ready for more work ☺️ What's more fresh, what mind is more clear, what sensitivity is greater, than a new mind and body?

  4. Posted · Edited by Carl-Richard

    When you look at any behavior that might trigger you or somebody else, where you would ask "why are you doing this?", "why are you like this?", "why can't you stop doing it?", one perspective to have and that increases emotional intelligence is: it should be expected, it should come as no surprise. Why are you expecting anything else? Of course people are arrogant, selfish, "stupid", etc. This is how people are, and also how you are.

    If you get triggered by something, it's because they are failing to meet some standard you impose on them. But if you don't expect them to meet that standard, you getting triggered might happen initially as a small impulse, but then you remember the fact that yes this is all to be expected, and it's no longer a big deal.

    Also, if you get particularly triggered by something, it's likely because it's something in yourself that you don't like. If you tend to squirm at your own arrogance when it happens, which you also should allow yourself to do, but if you squirm at it so much that you can't accept that you are in fact sometimes arrogant, if it's just too unacceptable to even bring to the surface, you will have a very strong reaction to it when you see it in somebody else.

    So if you expect that people will be arrogant, it will come as no surprise when they are. And if you expect that you will sometimes be arrogant, you will not react so strongly when other people are. Now, this is not a suggestion to become a doormat or not dealing with people or not standing up for yourself. I'm talking about the cases of being triggered about things that are really not affecting you that much but for the fact that you are triggered (e.g. reading a forum post).

    Tl;dr: Come to expect people's behavior. Don't be surprised every time it happens. You should know how people tend to act by now. And you are not that different.

  6. Posted

    9 hours ago, Nilsi said:

    Quick follow-up:

    I think - and that’s just the vibe I’m getting from you, I haven’t deeply read through everything you’ve written - we actually disagree on a very important point.

    Jordan Peterson’s disavowal of Nietzsche is just emblematic of it. You know, when he says Nietzsche was a great genius yada yada, but nonetheless, you can't create your own values. He falls back into his usual structuralist psychology, drawing mainly from Freud, Jung, and Piaget, and argues that there’s an implicit value structure - what people today sometimes call the "Religion that is not a Religion" or whatever campy phrase they’re using.

    But I think this is precisely what the thinkers I’ve listed are challenging: that there really is no such thing.

    And I’d even argue that trying to reduce their ethics to some disguised religious framework dressed up in postmodernist drag completely misses the point. There really is no such structure.

    When even the "Self" is put into question, there’s no up, no down - only an ensemble of multiplicities. Contingency. Radical freedom. Style. Deleuze’s rhizome might be the best allegory for this: everything looping into everything else, like a DMT fractal-scape.

    There is no master signifier anymore.

    God really is dead at this point.

    It’s just a trip.
    And one hell of a trip.

    There is structure and hierarchy as far as we can construct them and act them out. The tendency is that you largely become what you believe. If you believe the world and your potential within it is flat and devoid of any serious topology, you will likely remain that way and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. The value in thinking hierarchically is not as much about capturing what is as what you allow yourself to become (not just in a personal development sense, but epistemically, the very way you apprehend reality). Nevertheless, the attitude "pull yourself up by your bootstraps, don't be afraid to dream" vs "be realistic, cut the crap" produces very different outcomes. It just applies epistemically as well. You in a big way create the world you live in.

  9. Posted · Edited by Carl-Richard

    1 hour ago, ExploringReality said:

    @Carl-Richard

    No, I don't feel like that.

    I have had 5 mystical experiences through psilocybin, and LSD. I have had bad trips and gnarly insights that only a few can relate to. I have seen the other side, but the game is hide and seek. Once awoken, there is no going back, not really.

    There is having the experiences on psychedelics, then there is having them during meditation or other intentional practice, and then there is having them unintentionally. Once you start having them unintentionally, it starts to become real clear what it's all about.

  10. Posted · Edited by Carl-Richard

    I think Clown Core’s Van might just be the most tragically misunderstood masterpiece of contemporary music—perhaps even misunderstood by the artists themselves, who, trapped within the confines of their literal van, inadvertently created a magnum opus of existential absurdity. The dominant narrative simplistically frames them as jokesters, ironic noise-makers, sonic clowns honking their horns in mockery of musical conventions. They’re seen as chaotic jesters, stitching together fragments of madness, toilet humor, and jazz fusion into a wild pastiche of sonic nihilism. But when I hear Van, I detect something infinitely more profound: an earnest mourning of authenticity's absurd impossibility in the late capitalist hellscape.

    There’s an undeniable metaphysical poignancy to their treatment of sound—the frenetic honking, disjointed saxophones, guttural screams, and toilet flush percussion—all meticulously composed yet relentlessly distorted. This is not mere clowning around; it’s a Beckettian cry into the void, an attempt to reclaim immediacy through its deliberate annihilation. Every honk, every distorted shriek, every out-of-tune synth is not stylistic randomness but a profound philosophical statement: authenticity reduced to absurdity precisely because sincerity is impossible.

    In this sense, Clown Core’s work on Van becomes the ultimate hauntological artifact—a Derridean exploration into a future we neither want nor deserve, and a past we’d prefer to deny ever existed. Each song is not an expression of genuine emotion but the eerie echo of sincerity drowned in an ocean of absurdity. They offer not real feeling, but the clownish ghost of emotion: a spectral laughter reverberating endlessly inside a cramped, windowless van hurtling toward nowhere.

    It is no coincidence that Van emerged amidst global despair, absurdist memes, and the cultural exhaustion of late-stage capitalism. Its relentless rhythm, punctuated by toilet breaks and horn blasts, speaks less to comedic relief and more to an attempt at conjuring meaning where meaning has long since evaporated. It is music made at the end of history, honking at the void, fully aware the void won’t honk back.

    Ironically, perhaps the artists themselves fail to grasp this profundity. Their insistence on remaining physically confined within the vehicle is an overly literal attempt at authenticity, ironically undermining the absurd metaphysical poignancy of their project. By becoming literal clowns in a literal van, they risk converting their spectral brilliance into kitsch. It’s as if Kafka’s Gregor Samsa actually wanted to become a giant insect—thus losing his metaphorical resonance entirely.

    This is the Žižekian paradox in full bloom: the authenticity they grasp at dissolves precisely because it was only ever meaningful as a ghostly potential, never as an actuality. Clown Core, in trying to embody absurdity, inadvertently risk trivializing the beautiful tragedy of absurdity itself.

    Ultimately, Van is not about comedy. Nor is it about irony. It is about the tragic, beautiful impossibility of sincerity in an absurd world.

    It is not music of laughter.

    It is the echoing silence between laughs.

    It is not about absurdity.

    It is about the crushing seriousness of absurdity’s impossibility.

     

    @Nilsi I'm so sorry 🤣

    Written by ChatGPT 4.5 (I didn't even read it yet because I can't stop laughing 😂)

  11. Posted

    If you feel like you are a person making choices, moving this body, saying these words, writing these sentences, that you have a past or future, that you are not literally as much the chair you are looking at as the thing supposedly centered in this body, if you have not been trembling in the face of your own death and broken through to the other side, if you have not been crying in bliss and amazement at the fact that you are this thing that has existed forever and will never stop existing, chances are you are not there.

  12. Posted · Edited by Carl-Richard

    1 hour ago, The Renaissance Man said:

    Either training like Bugenhagen or slowing down the eccentric will lead to almost identical results (if you don't get injured)

    That's the problem: they don't. When you overly control everything, you make yourself weaker. You reduce the energy output during the exercise (this is a tautology: control is about holding yourself back. We can also go into the neuroscientific details of inhibitory signalling, etc.). You get less neurotransmitter recruitment, less hormonal recruitment, you feel like a sissy. Try horsing tremendous weight and compare how you feel then vs anally controlling some pencilneck weight.

    The results might be closely the same if you only care about hyperthrophy (which is also highly questionable, and in fact, I don't believe it, for the same reason I stated above). But if you care about how lifting makes you feel, not just during the session but days after (and the direct "side effects" like increased cognitive functioning), you should go for intensity as the number one goal. That is why I like sprints, because there is nothing else that makes me feel the same way. It's like cranking my veins full with nitroglycerin, like the real Limitless pill.

    Looking at the studies he and his buddy Jeff Nippard have been cooking up lately, the field of lifting-based exercise science for hyperthrophy is in its infancy. I would love for them to do a study comparing experienced lifters who train while maximizing for flow and intensity vs slow eccentric. And I'm not talking about just cranking weights like some lunatic who doesn't know what he is doing. I'm talking about intentionally and specifically trying to cultivate the state of flow, the state that is as far as I know the best predictor of performance in professional athletes.

  17. Posted · Edited by Carl-Richard

    On 9.3.2025 at 6:05 PM, The Renaissance Man said:

    Mike Israetel (Renaissance Periodization) for strength and hypertrophy training is another special one. Despite having a huge following, the quality of the information is at the very very top.

    I have a huge bone to pick with Mike Isratael. His "slow and controlled" approach to seemingly all exercises is seriously problematic and the way he arrives at that position could be an example of "epistemic scoundrelness" in my book. I think critics like Eric Bugenhagen who you could consider a meathead is much more on point about how you should generally approach lifting ("gusto", intensity, while keeping full range of motion). I think slow and controlled is best reserved for only some exercises or if you are working to fix muscle imbalances or recovering from an injury.

  20. Posted · Edited by Carl-Richard

    Before reading:

    Close your eyes and take a few (e.g. three) deep breaths. Then sit with your eyes closed for 20 seconds while making yourself feel as relaxed as possible.

    Then do 2-3 minutes of staring at one point on your desk (e.g. the smallest detail you can pick out) and really focus all your attention on it.

    Then simply close your eyes again and rest for 20 seconds.

    During reading:

    Sit upright and relaxed (find a sitting style that makes your spine erect but not in an uncomfortable or laborious way; e.g. the way Sadhguru sits in most situations with one leg tucked under his bottom), breathe through your nose, avoid distractions and disturbances, be well-rested, generally do things that maximize or improve mental performance (adequate diet, exercise both for muscles and cardio, meditation habit, brain training habit).

    After reading:

    Do a quick mental recap of what you have learned while softly glancing at the pages you have read (maybe a few seconds per page).

  22. Posted · Edited by Carl-Richard

    21 hours ago, LordFall said:

    @Carl-Richard Can you define what mysticism means to you?

     

    Quote

    mysticism

    /ˈmɪstɪsɪz(ə)m/

    noun

    1.

    belief that union with or absorption into the Deity or the absolute, or the spiritual apprehension of knowledge inaccessible to the intellect, may be attained through contemplation and self-surrender.

    https://www.google.com/

    In other words, trying to experience (directly) God, Consciousness, Non-duality, Oneness, Unity, Love.

     

    21 hours ago, LordFall said:

    In my experience people I’ve met around green have maybe 5% of turquoise energy and little yellow, they don’t understand how the system works they’re just hurt by it and react very emotionally against it. I would say even a lot of people on this forum don’t really embody turquoise like I would see it and don’t understand the cause and effect of the world. 

    I don’t think a turquoise thinker would react very negatively to Donald trump for example. 

    Mysticism, non-reactivity, ego transcendence, has existed for millennia, since Hinduism and before that. Meanwhile, Turquoise is a stage that supposedly evolved only a couple of decades ago. How do we square that?

     

    21 hours ago, LordFall said:

    60-80s era state geeen induced by LSD sounds like it could’ve be been different but I haven’t read any thinkers from that time. Steve jobs as a yellow-orange innovator coming out of that era makes sense. 

    The 60s LSD hippie era is a perfect example of what I'm talking about, because despite being introduced to mysticism both culturally and supposedly experientially through psychedelic states, they had a (painfully) Green approach to addressing social problems, not Yellow, not Turquoise which is supposed to transcend and include Yellow. The Tim Learys and the Ram Dasses of that era weren't saying "how can we work with the elites, how can we make the elites understand the masses and the masses understand the elites?" but rather "how can we topple the establishment, how can we spread this message of non-conformance, of 'questioning authority', of 'turning on, tuning in, dropping out'", etc.

  23. Posted · Edited by Carl-Richard

    39 minutes ago, LordFall said:

    @Carl-Richard why don’t you think it has a conceptual basis? Sounds to me like plenty of enlightened teachers fit the general description. 

    Q.E.D.

    Because conceptually (or at least a very common intepretation), it's an ill-conceived mixture of late Green and early Yellow ideas and non-dual/New Age mysticism. And similarly, this mixture (I believe) is reflected in its empirical foundation, because in the West (which all the people that Turquoise was based on were from), you tend to discover non-dual mysticism at around Green, because that is when you become more open to other perspectives than the standard line of (then) contemporary society, other cultures, and henceforth other cultures where mysticism has not been repressed for millennia (virtually exclusively those who harbor buddhism and hinduism). And for those intepretations that try to consequentially deny it having to do with mysticism, they seem not distinct enough from Yellow to warrant a distinct stage (e.g. "global view").

  24. Posted · Edited by Carl-Richard

    11 hours ago, SQAAD said:

    But in my current state , i have no access to this realization except for brief moments.

    Keep going. Awakening is waking up from the dream, but you go back to sleep. Enlightenment is waking up and carrying it into the dream, being lucid in the dream, lucid dreaming. It's only a matter of repetition and eventually letting go of all control or agency.

  25. Posted · Edited by Carl-Richard

    16 hours ago, Sugarcoat said:

    Happy Easter


    Why did Jesus become so popular? He isn’t the first to spread a god message. We have non dualists today talking (non duality doesn’t appeal to the public it only works when it’s embedded between the lines and not explicit because then people won’t get it’s about non duality which is perhaps how some holy scriptures work I don’t know though) we have speakers like eckhart tolle and Rupert spira etc . I respect Jesus and see the value in it but I don’t get why he got the most popular

    Because of the idea that you can claim your allegiance with Jesus without being very explicit about what doctrine you need to follow and still be saved. It's fast food spirituality. It streamlines the process. You don't need to do much ground work, you don't need to prepare much of the ingredients, all you need to do is turn up the heat and out comes the food. You basically only need to open your mouth to the body of Christ.