Adeptus Psychonautica about Connor Murphy and Actualized

[Forestluv]

11 minutes ago, Corpus said:

Debates are like a fight to reverse anothers' position, and this flows from each participant. Openness is needed if any learning is to happen and this could mean consciously adopting some humility and an enquiring nature such that one can admit they might know less than another. 

I suppose there is some value in Orange-level debates, it just seems very inefficient to me. Yet most minds are oriented toward perceiving everything as two opposites and the mind becomes attached and identified to one position and wants to defend that position. Look at the debate between Vaush and Tim Poole. How much did either expand? I’d estimate Tim expanded by perhaps 0.000001%. That is inefficient to me. In the same amount of time, I experienced 1,000x that expansion within a community in an Ayahuasca retreat. There are very different communication dynamics.

Competition can have value, yet is can also be a major deterrent to progress. Yet evolution is a gradual process with competition as a fundamental feature. Perhaps that will change in the future. Yet that’s how it is now. The vast majority to the world is Tier 1 in which competition and ego defense are prevalent.

[Tim R]

18 minutes ago, Forestluv said:

I’m not in humanities. I teach/research, developmental biology, genetics, neuroscience and cell/molecular biology. Yet I’m not a traditional Orange-level scientist. I’m highly integrative and include psychology, sociology, mysticism, ethics etc into my science courses.

@Forestluv Wow, nice!! Where do you teach? I mean, in what sort of institution do you teach?

Edited December 7, 2020 by Tim R

[Forestluv]

Just now, Tim R said:

@Forestluv Wow, nice!! Where do you teach?

At a liberal arts college in the Midwest, USA.

[Tim R]

@Forestluv How do your students response to your style of teaching? How much of psychology and mysticism can you embed in your teaching style before it gets "too much"? 

[Gesundheit]

That's what humans do.

Leo is following his passions of changing the world while doing what seems to be peripheral damage during the process.

Connor is scheming to get laid and earn more money.

And Rob is worrying about humans and humanity.

[Nahm]

[Danioover9000]

@Gesundheit

7 minutes ago, Gesundheit said:

That's what humans do.

Leo is following his passions of changing the world while doing what seems to be peripheral damage during the process.

Connor is scheming to get laid and earn more money.

And Rob is worrying about humans and humanity.

   Human, all to human, by super mustache guy.

  @Corpus

 

46 minutes ago, Corpus said:

 

Debates are like a fight to reverse anothers' position, and this flows from each participant. Openness is needed if any learning is to happen and this could mean consciously adopting some humility and an enquiring nature such that one can admit they might know less than another. 

At higher conscious levels, debating with someone oriented to argue his position is like trying to teach a foreign language to a guy that is drunk and vomiting.

 

 

 

 

   I'm not that good with logic and debating, so it seems like debating is needed to contrast open-mindedness. Is there any value to debating?

[Corpus]

41 minutes ago, Forestluv said:

I suppose there is some value in Orange-level debates, it just seems very inefficient to me. Yet most minds are oriented toward perceiving everything as two opposites and the mind becomes attached and identified to one position and wants to defend that position. Look at the debate between Vaush and Tim Poole. How much did either expand? I’d estimate Tim expanded by perhaps 0.000001%. That is inefficient to me. In the same amount of time, I experienced 1,000x that expansion within a community in an Ayahuasca retreat. There are very different communication dynamics 

What I hoped to convey was that debates are by their very nature adversarial in contrast to a discussion which seeks to grow the participants. Yet the latter can stem from the former if those involved allow it to. Efficiency tends to relate to an outcome, and people start at where they are at, and a variety of approaches are necessary. Vaush vs Poole means nothing to me as I am not based in the USA. And undoubtedly communication dynamics will be different in a psychedelic retreat but again, are not uninfluenced by what the participants bring there in terms of any positions they may hold, and how firmly. Those who attend such retreats are "self-selecting" in a sense.

41 minutes ago, Forestluv said:

 

Competition can have value, yet is can also be a major deterrent to progress. Yet evolution is a gradual process with competition as a fundamental feature. Perhaps that will change in the future. Yet that’s how it is now. The vast majority to the world is Tier 1 in which competition and ego defense are prevalent.

I agree fully. Let us see what unfolds.

As an aside- this latter quote was added after I quoted the first bit. Are mods excluded from having to admit to additions/corrections to their posts?

[Forestluv]

4 minutes ago, Tim R said:

@Forestluv How do your students response to your style of teaching? How much of psychology and mysticism can you embed in your teaching style before it gets "too much"? 

I need to tread carefully. Students in the U.S. are now highly conditioned by social media, entertainment and what is practical in their life. In high school, they are fed facts to memorize and simply study for exams. Most students cannot maintain attention for more than 20min and cannot read 10 pages of text continuously. That is really hard to break through. I need to present it in a certain way.
One example:

I teach freshman students the scientific method, open-mindedness and direct experience by creating experiments that test intention, intuition and ESP. I have students pair up and do Zenner cards together. There are five cards of different shapes:

One student chooses a card and tries to transmit the image to the other student telepathically. There are all sorts of ways they can try. The other student tries to get in touch with their intuition and guesses what the card is. They each do 20 trials. 

We then do statistical analyses to see if anyone pair showed statistical significance. We look at mean, standard deviation, Chi-square tests, ANOVA. There are various ways to analyze the data.

We then talk about being open-minded and how to design experiments that fairly test - without any pre-conceived assumptions. In the experimental design, we also want to leave space for phenomena to enter that we might not have hypothesized.

As an example of a closed-minded scientist I say: Imagine a scientist who believes this is all “woo woo” bullshit and he goes into it with the mindset of proving it’s “woo woo” bullshit. He designs the experiment such that there are two strangers separated by a wall. . . Yet is this design fair for what we are investigating? We decided that wasn’t good design because it was eliminating channels of potential transmittance. On the other side, two students may give each other cues. One student may say “I wonder if it’s the circle”. The other student’s may open their eyes wide and subconsciously reveal the card. The student then says “I’m guessing circle”. . . We decided as a class that this wasn’t fair because it doesn’t count as ESP, so we had a rule that a student could not verbally talk out the process, yet they could stare at each other no verbally.

As well, what do we count as a “positive”? One student pair suggested we re-design the experiment. She was trying to imagine her partner’s card. She envisioned her partner in nature laying by a river, so she guessed the water card. I was actually the star card. Her partner said “I was trying to transmit it to you by imagining I was laying in nature staring at the stars”. The students were like “Hey, it isn’t fair to count this as a complete miss!! We were communicating telepathically these images of nature. Isn’t that what we are turkey testing for?”. I agreed. We decided that an open-minded scientist we re-do the experiment so we could include these as “partially correct”. 

Every time I’ve done this there is always at least one pair that does very well. Off the chart statistically significant. Then we talk about reproducibility and how we can do that fairly. Perhaps one reason they did well was because it was a spontaneous, relaxed, fun environment. Could they score well if we demanded that they prove they have ESP in a controlled laboratory? A very serious environment with cameras to prove they aren’t cheating. This might seem rationale, yet it also throws off the energetics. Perhaps there was legit ESP, yet only with that one person in that one environment. And sometimes a student transmits well, yet cannot receive. And when we shuffle partners, the dynamics change. Some students that scored high with one person, did horribly with another. Then I direct their attention to direct experience - notice how you were on the same wavelength with one student - yet not another. We also talk about chemistry with different people and resonance. Students are like “yea, I was feeling on the same wavelength with her, yet not with him”. What might be some factors that effect our ability? . . . For those that scored close to significant, could we improve our abilities with practice? What if we spent a year training with a master?

Students absolutely love this class and expand a lot. It opens their mind about science and how we can integrate and expand science. And I can get away with it in my science department. We are using the scientific method and statistical analyses. With the “woo woo” content, I just have to use some keywords like”innovative pedagogy”, “hands-on” and “engaging”. 

 

 

[Danioover9000]

@Corpus

22 minutes ago, Corpus said:

What I hoped to convey was that debates are by their very nature adversarial in contrast to a discussion which seeks to grow the participants. Yet the latter can stem from the former if those involved allow it to. Efficiency tends to relate to an outcome, and people start at where they are at, and a variety of approaches are necessary. Vaush vs Poole means nothing to me as I am not based in the USA. And undoubtedly communication dynamics will be different in a psychedelic retreat but again, are not uninfluenced by what the participants bring there in terms of any positions they may hold, and how firmly. Those who attend such retreats are "self-selecting" in a sense.

I agree fully. Let us see what unfolds.

As an aside- this latter quote was added after I quoted the first bit. Are mods excluded from having to admit to additions/corrections to their posts?

   I think mods can do that. They edit quotes all the time.

[Corpus]

42 minutes ago, Danioover9000 said:

@Gesundheit  I'm not that good with logic and debating, so it seems like debating is needed to contrast open-mindedness. Is there any value to debating?

 

17 minutes ago, Danioover9000 said:

@Corpus

   I think mods can do that. They edit quotes all the time.

Thanks for confirming that. It can make quoting them a pain!

I also hope your "quote of my quote" was answered above. I find that debate, discussion, teaching and presentation are all distinct, subtly. All offer value but conflating them can be problematic.

[Moksha]

1 hour ago, Forestluv said:

I’m not in humanities. I teach/research, developmental biology, genetics, neuroscience and cell/molecular biology. Yet I’m not a traditional Orange-level scientist. I’m highly integrative and include psychology, sociology, mysticism, ethics etc into my science courses.

Damn, I wish I had a teacher like you back in my college days.

[Forestluv]

1 minute ago, Moksha said:

Damn, I wish I had a teacher like you back in my college days.

Thanks. Ironically, only about 10% of students resonate with me. Most students give neutral or negative reviews and some avoid taking my courses. About 5% resonate strongly. They come to my office to talk about their lives, tell me their secrets and release ghosts from their closets. They are like groupies that take every class they can with me. They give me gifts, send me cards and ask to go out to lunch with me. Yet on the other extreme, about 5% of students avoid me like the plague. 

[Moksha]

16 minutes ago, Corpus said:

I find that debate, discussion, teaching and presentation are all distinct, subtly. All offer value but conflating them can be problematic.

It depends on the level of Consciousness of the people engaged. Tolle talks about having political conversations with other relatively Conscious people. Enlightenment doesn't mean you don't have opinions; it means you don't identify with those opinions. To me, this is the perfect cosmic soup for any kind of discussion. Two Conscious people, sharing their perspectives, without attachment to the outcomes of their discussion. That is true discourse.

[Moksha]

7 minutes ago, Forestluv said:

Thanks. Ironically, only about 10% of students resonate with me. Most students give neutral or negative reviews and some avoid taking my courses. About 5% resonate strongly. They come to my office to talk about their lives, tell me their secrets and release ghosts from their closets. They are like groupies that take every class they can with me. They give me gifts, send me cards and ask to go out to lunch with me. Yet on the other extreme, about 5% of students avoid me like the plague. 

Pearls before swine, or as the Gita puts it:

Do not share this wisdom with anyone who lacks in devotion or self-control, lacks the desire to learn, or scoffs at me. Those who teach this supreme mystery of the Gita to all who love me perform the greatest act of love; they will come to me without doubt. No one can render me more devoted service; no one on earth can be more dear to me.

I remember in my first psychology class, meeting with my Mormon professor to ask him about free will. The conversation could have been so much richer, if he had your level of awareness.

Edited December 7, 2020 by Moksha

[Forestluv]

3 minutes ago, Moksha said:

Those who teach this supreme mystery of the Gita to all who love me perform the greatest act of love;

Beautiful ? ♥️ 

[Corpus]

14 minutes ago, Moksha said:

It depends on the level of Consciousness of the people engaged. Tolle talks about having political conversations with other relatively Conscious people. Enlightenment doesn't mean you don't have opinions; it means you don't identify with those opinions. To me, this is the perfect cosmic soup for any kind of discussion. Two Conscious people, sharing their perspectives, without attachment to the outcomes of their discussion. That is true discourse.

Absolutely- the level of consciousness will govern if a debate or true discussion ensues. Teaching alters the tenor of the dynamic if super-added to either, and learning can ensue. 

16 minutes ago, Forestluv said:

Thanks. Ironically, only about 10% of students resonate with me. 

About 5% resonate strongly. They come to my office to talk about their lives, tell me their secrets and release ghosts from their closets. They are like groupies that take every class they can with me. They give me gifts, send me cards and ask to go out to lunch with me. Yet on the other extreme, about 5% of students avoid me like the plague. 

Being in a position of responsibility such as you hold can make that level of interaction potentially hazardous to your security of tenure and reputation, and can impose additional potential stressors . But I doubt I am telling you something you didn't know. Such is how it is, but polarization of views prompts an investigative curiosity in a portion of those minded to grow. Good job Sir- but make sure they pass their exams! 

[electroBeam]

2 hours ago, Forestluv said:

These are just my experiences, observations and impressions - and what happens to be appearing now. I’m not saying it’s an objective truth that I’m uniquely privy to.

Nice, multidisciplinary research is definitely one of the big driving factors, along with other things like SD and economics.

 

I find it interesting that you compare debating to discussion in terms of effectiveness. IMO debating and discussion are on a different wavelength because their relations to truth is different. Debating assumes there is 1 truth that is the same for every person. Discussion assumes that there is no actual monopoly and such monopolies(if any) only make sense within limited contexts(I even think groundlessness is a grounding that cannot be assumed as well lol) So debating and discussions literally do different things. I thought of an analogy of a car vs a helicopter, but even that doesn't really work because both cars and helicopters have the same goal: getting somewhere. Maybe debates vs discussions are like comparing a car to a psychedelic. Cars and psychedelics get you somewhere. Cars take you to the shops while psychedelics take you to machine elf land. Yet comparing them in terms of effectiveness is interesting because both things are on wildly different wavelengths.

[Forestluv]

26 minutes ago, Corpus said:

Being in a position of responsibility such as you hold can make that level of interaction potentially hazardous to your security of tenure and reputation, and can impose additional potential stressors . 

Tenure definitely helps. No way could I get way with what I do without tenure. In terms of losing tenure at a college, it’s more about crimes, sex or drugs with students, or giving the college really bad press like doing racist , anti-lgbtq stuff in classes. An eccentric professor sprinkling in some mysticism flies under the radar.

I’m more concerned about talking to students about psychedelics or their psychological problems. There are grey areas I try to avoid. 

[Forestluv]

22 minutes ago, electroBeam said:

I find it interesting that you compare debating to discussion in terms of effectiveness. IMO debating and discussion are on a different wavelength because their relations to truth is different. Debating assumes there is 1 truth that is the same for every person. Discussion assumes that there is no actual monopoly and such monopolies(if any) only make sense within limited contexts(I even think groundlessness is a grounding that cannot be assumed as well lol) So debating and discussions literally do different things. I thought of an analogy of a car vs a helicopter, but even that doesn't really work because both cars and helicopters have the same goal: getting somewhere. Maybe debates vs discussions are like comparing a car to a psychedelic. Cars and psychedelics get you somewhere. Cars take you to the shops while psychedelics take you to machine elf land. Yet comparing them in terms of effectiveness is interesting because both things are on wildly different wavelengths.

That is one way to view it. I generally view communication differently. I just used a categories of “debate” as a simple construct. I see it much more nuanced. There are various communication dynamics that come into play, they are integrated and each have their own spectrum of degrees. In a simple construct of “debate” and “discussion”, I think a low amount of conflict and challenge can be helpful in development. In general, men tend to take this way to far and get bogged down into narrative control, being the intellectual alpha, winning the debate etc. Yet on the other extreme, I’ve watched women speak in such a passive, agreeable manner that nothing gets developed. I recently watched two women on YT discuss neuroplasticity. One was a neuroscientist and the other was a psychologist. I got excited to see how the two different perspectives could intertwine and develop a new integrated model. Yet they were waaay to agreeable constantly saying “oh yes, great point”. It was like they were being super careful not to hurt each other’s feelings in any way. One time the psychologist wasn’t quite describing neuroplasticity quite right because it’s not her specialty. The neuroscientist knows this, yet let it go with “yes, good point”. I was yelling” Tell her about the cell biology of it! Tell her the neuroscience perspective. It’s nothing personal.!”. Yet she didn’t and it turned into a bunch of goo that never took form. It’s disappointing because they could have constructed something cool together.