lmfao

@Wyze Cults keep their followers in line by toying around with the most primal and low consciousness aspects of their human nature. The desire for validation, love, fear, belonging, dogmatism, tribalism: these are all things which cults manipulate. The higher the level of consciousness of the followers, the less extreme the cult can be to get away with their shit. To me, spiral dynamics models what the natural course of development is for human perception and thinking. Why this development happens the way it does, I don't know. SD is modelling the sequence of how humans grow and change their perspective on things when they see their current perspective "isn't working" (with "working" being relative to some hard to define standard). It is because of this that being higher on the spiral is associated with being higher in your level of consciousness. But this is just a correlation. In my view, the difference between stage green and stage yellow is massive. Tier 1 and Tier 2 are very far apart. Hence the people in tier 2 are higher consciousness on average. "Cults" which work for tier 2 people will hence have to be more sophisticated and intellectual in their dogma, and will also have to be far more subtle about their manipulation. Cults for tier 2 will be less cultish. I'm calling a cult tier 2 if its followers are tier 2, not just the leader. I forgot what definition Leo uses for determining whether a group is a cult with a simple black and white answer. Regardless of that definition, I wouldn't be surprised if you can get tier 2 communities with significant cult dynamics.

I found this eerie quote from a book(I find it eerie because of a video I've seen). "You are not you--you have no body, no blood, no bones, you are but a thought. I myself have no existence; I am but a dream--your dream, a creature of your imagination. In a moment you will have realized this, then you will banish me from your visions and I shall dissolve into the nothingness out of which you made me In a little while you will be alone in shoreless space, to wander its limitless solitudes without friend or comrade forever—for you will remain a thought, the only existent thought, and by your nature inextinguishable, indestructible. But I, your poor servant, have revealed you to yourself and set you free. Dream other dreams, and better! Strange! that you should not have suspected years ago—centuries, ages, eons, ago!—for you have existed, companionless, through all the eternities. Strange, indeed, that you should not have suspected that your universe and its contents were only dreams, visions, fiction! Strange, because they are so frankly and hysterically insane—like all dreams: a God who could make good children as easily as bad, yet preferred to make bad ones; who could have made every one of them happy, yet never made a single happy one; who made them prize their bitter life, yet stingily cut it short; who gave his angels eternal happiness unearned, yet required his other children to earn it; who gave his angels painless lives, yet cursed his other children with biting miseries and maladies of mind and body; who mouths justice and invented hell—mouths mercy and invented hell—mouths Golden Rules, and forgiveness multiplied by seventy times seven, and invented hell; who mouths morals to other people and has none himself; who frowns upon crimes, yet commits them all; who created man without invitation, then tries to shuffle the responsibility for man's acts upon man, instead of honorably placing it where it belongs, upon himself; and finally, with altogether divine obtuseness, invites a poor, abused slave to worship him! You perceive, now, that these things are all impossible except in a dream. You perceive that they are pure and puerile insanities, the silly creations of an imagination that is not conscious of its freaks—in a word, that they are a dream, and you the maker of it. The dream-marks are all present; you should have recognized them earlier. It is true, that which I have revealed to you; there is no God, no universe, no human race, no earthly life, no heaven, no hell. It is all a dream—a grotesque and foolish dream. Nothing exists but you. And you are but a thought—a vagrant thought, a useless thought, a homeless thought, wandering forlorn among the empty eternities!" I remember watching this video a few years ago which led me to this quote

@Shadowraix If you're dealing with anyone who's a fundamentalist christian/muslim kiss your chances good bye. This is also applies for the ultra pragmatic, cringy materiallistic types of people. You could never convince them. Perhaps a Sam Harris style of approach works well? Sam Harris was the one who introduced me to meditation when I was big fan of his. I think its impossible to explain full blown non-duality straight away. I think the only thing you can do is point someone towards to the habit of doing these beneficial practices (meditation, yoga) for themselves, but not many people see the point in trying them. Sam Harris tells people about meditating and lack of free will without attacking the scientific paradigm. I remember he said in his talk about death (where he did a guided meditation) that "as a matter of experience" everything is consciousness and the present moment is all you can ever have. But Sam Harris proceeds to them say something along the lines of "but its not the case that everything is consciousness from the perspective of physics or science" so as to not come across as crazy to his audience.

I'll be trying to do a strong determination sit and my back starts out straight but it starts to slouch without me noticing. Should I just refrain from correcting? Something I've often done is that ill inhale very deeply as much as I can so as to force my back to be straighter without using my other muscles as much as possible (since in a strong determination sit there should be minimal movement of muscles besides the ones needed for breathing).

@MM1988 I remember when I had my first glimpse of non-duality I was looking at the urge one has to breathe. Are you creating that urge? Or is that urge simply there without "you" doing anything? And once you see that "you" didn't create that aspect of your experience (the breath), you can apply the same form of awareness to see that "you" haven't created anything else about your conscious experience. Existence itself is effortless, it is a spontaneous happening where the concept of cause of effect collapses. For every waking moment of your conscious experience you are always in a situation which you did nothing to create. If there is no past or future, then how could reality be anything but effortless?

Alright, thanks.

Im guessing that whatever country you go to only a small subset of people are "high consciousness". If I had to guess though, countries in which Eastern religion is popular will be the most "spiritual" on average. That doesn't mean these countries will be heaven on earth nor be absent of regressive societal attitudes. People are saying in this thread that India is the most high consciousness. Supposing that consciousness could be quantified, maybe it's the cause that the arithmetic mean of India's consciousness is higher than western countries but what if it's the case that their median consciousness is lower than western countries? Just a random thought to consider. Non-western countries are lower on the spiral in average, and whilst there isn't necessarily a causal link between level of consciousness and your position on the spiral I'd argue that there exists a correlation at the very least. Islam, Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, these religions all have their dogmas and even if they are all pointing towards the same thing at least Zen Buddhism for example doesn't moralise at you very much. Eastern Religions don't place much of an emphasis on having the right beliefs and dogmas, they place a higher emphasis on seeing reality clearly and acting in accordance with nature.

Good video. Breaking up is indeed hard to do, it's hard to admit you've been putting your energy in the wrong things completely.

Anyone else find that this technique makes their throat hurt a lot and dry out their mouth really quickly?

Nah I haven't seen the film. I might watch it. Sci-fi films can be nice, I remember watching They Live and it gave me an eerie but funny feeling inside.

@Leo Gura Good point. He has a small chnace of winning, although if by some miracle he ends up in a 1v1 with trump I wouldn't be too surprised if he won. Like you said though, voting simply for the highest stage is not always the best choice. They may not interact with the current system set up in the best way possible for both the long and short term improvement of the system. An extreme case of this would be trying to get a stage green person to lead a stage red society. As society is in America, I could see why you could argue for there to be a strong and blatant expression of green so that green has its place firmly cemented in society. He advocates for some pretty bold things. Universal Basic Income, wants the country to stop using GDP as a measure of success and shift towards measuring success in terms of human wellbeing and fulfillment. He's thinking long term about automation of jobs and about how so many people will probably lose their jobs.

Vote for Andrew Yang. He looks yellow as fuck to me. I'll just insert my 100% neutral opinion into the thread.

@TheAvatarState The thing is, Im still gonna consume theory which is instructions based for consciousness work. Ie kriya yoga techniques, perhaps even new meditation techniques. At the end of the day, even though all these techniques are just gimmicks we use to increase our awareness they work. But you'll never reach the high states of awareness till you realise its all a gimmick, quite paradoxical. The thing I've found is that everyone has their own idiosyncratic way of describing things, and this applies to non duality. Many of the individual words I use in my sentences in regards to abstract topics each have an idiosyncratic pattern of emotional connotations I have about the word and images I have in mind when using the word, which is a reason communication is so difficult. The images and connotations you have about some words cannot be satisfactorily verbally distilled. You cannot telepathically show the images, feelings and intuitions you have. But our mouths will keep chatting in an attempt to bypass this, which is partially why there exists so much theory for non-duality. But is talking so bad? It amazes me how much we manage to talk past each other in debates and discussions of topics, partially due to this. When it comes to highly abstract topics, the person writing the sentences often has a million things they want to say and they're struggling to find an articulate way to cohesively communicate their thoughts. I've noticed that if Im reading a piece of text on an abstract topic which contains a lot of vague and technical words/jargon, I cannot understand one sentence in isolation. I have to read several sentence, the whole paragraph, before I know the context of each word and where the author was coming from when they were constructing those sentences in the way that they chose.

@TheAvatarState Nah ur right they're all saying the same thing. It's something so obvious that it gets overlooked.

@Anton Rogachevski LOL I must have found 10 ways to type the exact same shit on the internet on this topic, I swear to christ.

@IVONNE I'll make an intellectual argument for no free will. Think of the universe as just a single system consisting of matter, energy and various particles which are constantly changing form through space and time in accordance to "the laws of physics". You as a biological organism are simply an expression of the universe. These laws may partially be deterministic and partially indeterministic, but the exact degree to which the laws are deterministic/indeterministic doesn't really change whether we have free will or not. In a deterministic universe, the same initial conditions always lead to same result. To give you an example, if I have perfect knowledge about the forces that will act upon a coin during a coin flip I can with 100% certainty predict what the result of the coin flip will be. But for indeterministic events (which may be present in our universe), the same initial conditions don't yield the same results all the time. There is then an element of pure randomness in the universe. Consider the atoms and chemicals in a human brain making decisions. In a deterministic point of view of the universe, every feature of your personality and every feature of your life was inevitable and could be fully predicted from the knowledge of the exact state of the universe billions of years ago. Your whole life is following a script. Event A necessitates that Event B happens, which necessitates Event C , which also necessitates that Event D happens, and so on. Linear cause and effect, albeit the universe having trillions upon trillions of variables our human minds cant ever hope fully fathom. Let's suppose the atoms in your brain are following indeterministic laws of physics. In what sense do random dice rolls imply free will? Whether the universe is random or is following a script, or a mixture of both, neither imply the existence of free will and moral culpability. Inherent to the idea of "free will" that most people have is that free will makes a person good or bad. When I drop a tennis ball in the air, it falls down due to the laws of physics. There is no moral culpability you can assign to the tennis ball, the tennis ball could not have "chosen" to do something else. If I make a decision to commit a crime, that decision is a result of the atoms in my brain following the laws of physics in the exact same way as a tennis ball falling through air. I am no more morally culpable than a tennis ball. But don't let this train of thought make you think that you're some poor puppet who's been destined to be unwillingly strung along into suffering. What this is instead pointing to is that you are the entire universe and are one with it. @RichardY Having a high IQ can perhaps be likened to having a sharp knife. It's a useful tool that is used to fulfil the agenda you give it, the knife in of in itself is neither "good" or "bad".

I have a family history of mental illness and psychosis, and so I've been doing a bit of googling around psychedelics. My auntie had schizophrenia, so did her son, my uncle seems to have lost touch with reality but I don't know what condition he has. Meeting my cousin makes me feel sad, since I remember what he used to be like. So I'm just trying to be careful with all of this. From what it seems, psychedelics were not associated with an increased risk of mental illness according to most sources. So is the idea that psychedelics and the such cause mental illness just a myth?

@kieranperez Do you have any sort of substance/behavioural addictions? Because those are the main reasons I end up miserable.

@Outer Thanks for the advice man. I don't need a drug to surface up emotional baggage and neurosis anyway, meditation and mindfulness gets that job done. I'm still considering microdosing at some point (probably in 7 years or something at 25 when your brain is supposed to have fully developed). Ideally I'd see for myself if safe low dosing has any good effects for me personally, regardless of what some studies have concluded.

@MsNobody Yeah I've seen bird box, it was decent. Yeah the more grounded you are the better, small doses ftw. @Serotoninluv Thanks for the advice. I'd probably wait till I'm 25 or something till I do anything serious. Microdosing sounds nice.

@TheAvatarState Yeah if I do try anything then I guess I should go low doses.

@Wisebaxter I just read, do some coursework or do maths when I'm taking it. I've used it before playing competitive video games as well, for fun.

THIS MAN SPEAKS TOO MUCH SENSE ITS CRAZY. It didn't know it was physically possible for a politician to be so transparent and straight forward.

Suffering is a strange thing. If I enter a high consciousness state I might think/feel that suffering doesn't really exist. From this perspective I'll think that suffering is merely a collection of thoughts which are neither good or bad, and that this even applies to the times when ive been in the worst pits of suffering. But when my consciousness "falls from grace" suffering feels so real again. The whole thing is odd. @AlphaAbundance I think that when it comes to describing the rock bottom levels of consciousness, saying that you'll be reincarnated (e.g. as Spiderman or as an ant) is too much although many people on this forum would likely disagree with me.