The challenges when discussing metaphysical or consciousness topics online

[Ramasta9]

24 minutes ago, Carl-Richard said:

I'm aware of this too. It's something I developed. It's academic brainrot. But I like my academic brainrot 🥲. Going from theory to conclusion is satisfying, and I believe I have collected a nice chunk that goes parallel to my experiential insights. It's just I like to express them in that realm (the theoretical), and I also think it serves a purpose.

Take somebody like Bernardo Kastrup and contrast him with Rupert Spira. They are friends, they talk to each other, but they come from completely opposite ends and yet have arrived at essentially the same conclusions. I've tried to do the same convergence inside myself; I was explicitly a fan of first Spira then Bernardo for a couple of years each. Because I had a problem I was trying to solve: saving my scientific/philosophical worldview from being devoured by my spiritual worldview. I wanted to make them consistent. So when I made them basically consistent, I started operating from the scientific view more, explaining things in the spiritual domain from that view, because I can.

And that can seem lofty and ungrounded, but know that it comes from a place of integrating the two perspectives, getting them to talk to each other, not just knowing one of them. I did not start from the top. And of course this scientific bias extends to all topics, not just pure "spiritual" topics.

Thanks for sharing your perspective and understanding, appreciated. I haven't heard of Bernardo Kastrup, I'll have to check him out one day.

[Ramasta9]

50 minutes ago, Someone here said:

Hilarious sure . Dude wtf is "We are vibrational beings " 😂.  Go tell that to a hungry homeless man in Somalia ..he will roast you and eat you for dinner .

 

That's cause We Are. There is nothing we can do about it. We are literally e n e r g y ~vibrating~ at various f r e q u e n c i e s.

And there would be no point to tell a hungry homeless man that unless he was receptive to make use of it, but first I'd still give him food. 

That's how you build a connection, give people what they need, not what you "think" they want.

 

[Carl-Richard]

15 hours ago, Ramasta9 said:

We are literally e n e r g y ~vibrating~ at various f r e q u e n c i e s.

And this is partly why I think integrating science or theory is often not antithetical but in fact complementary to what would be the spiritual project (be it teaching or seeking), because you're already using your theoretical mind for those pursuits. 

"Energy" is a concept, it has certain connotations. Philosophical and scientific theories just extend such concepts into a more grand picture of connections and conceptual detail, which sometimes can get top-heavy and cause overgeneralization and inaccuracies, but it's also powerful. And the alternative is of course using low detail concepts and tenuous connections that are inaccurate in their own way.

At the end of the day, you have to distinguish between the relative and the Absolute, so the choice is really between a conceptually rich and logically rigorous relative or a conceptually poor and logically tenuous one. Also, with the more purely experientially informed and accidentally assembled and idiosyncratic conceptual frameworks is the tendency for bias. Seeking out a vast range of frameworks, and deep frameworks that have long tradition assembled collaboratively with many people, challenges such bias. And when there is convergence between different frameworks, that gives additional veracity.

I could definitely speak from "feeling" as you do in for example the veganism/fruitarianism thread(s) and talk about how I often felt more light and energized after some vegetarian meals back when I experimented with them and that people like Sadhguru gave me conceptual frameworks that agreed with them (sattvic, pranic foods, digestive times, length of the digestive tract, karmic load, etc.), but then there are of course other perspectives out there (and conflicting experiences, like when I felt very low energy at the gym after eating chickpeas instead of chicken).

And like with Sadhguru and some of my experiences, the relationship is two-way; it's not necessarily only the experience that makes you convinced, it's the experience + the concepts, and sometimes it's not easy to know which carries the most load or which "came first". You've maybe not incidentally read a lot about fruitarianism (etc.), done a lot of research, sought out sources of convergence. So the "experiential" label might only go so far.

Edited Tuesday at 10:02 PM by Carl-Richard