This thread may be unpopular; so be it. If I reach a single person, that is enough.
Seven years ago, I discovered my life's purpose -- but didn't realize it at the time. I had discovered Buddhism, and this notion that one could attain perfect happiness without a single material possession instantly lifted up my spirit from the depths it had remained in since childhood, since I had learned of death, and had heard those stories of children who become orphans from a plane crash, knowing that the only thing separating us from them is a stroke of luck. And that chasing any happiness in this world is to embrace a dice roll with a good probability of immense suffering. You can call it silly, but to single-digit-age me, consigning yourself to fate like this was more or less insane, and that was only confirmed by the large quantity of childhood suffering outside of my control. So from there I ducked out of (most) socializing to learn everything I could, unconsciously in response to this issue.
When I discovered Buddhism, I was truly elated for the first time in years, to this doctrine promising everything that I had desired. But as I dug deeper, I encountered problems with this scripture, and meditation and so on that could only build to one conclusion: Enlightenment is not real. The pieces building up to this conclusion are too numerous to list, but essentially there is little evidence to believe in a state of enlightenment qua profound transformation of your moment-to-moment experience where the problem of change is solved. What does happen though is a non-dualist revelation analogous to the mystic experiences of all religions. In fact, for the Hindus and Jains it was this experience that led to liberation in the next life. Nothing came afterward. Now consider that yoga and meditation were practiced in India for a solid millennium before Buddhism, and if such a state existed the Hindus and Jains would have surely noted it. So this revelation is quite achievable, but it is functionally the end of the mystic path. There is almost no evidence to suggest otherwise.
Now, why am I writing this post...? Because I can't accept that outcome. I refuse to believe it simply ends there, and we have a healthy amount of evidence that is largely ignored which gives us reason to be skeptics. Here's a brief list:
- Meditative jhanas exist, and they are (allegedly) the most pleasant sensation a human can experience, they can be sustained for hours, and demand very little energy. These show up on brain scans.
- You can take drugs in a lucid dream, and this produces the effects of the drug (for the majority). What's more, if you imagine a drug you've never tried, it will match whatever you expect to occur.
- The human body functions remarkably well on drugs, or in other altered states of consciousness.
- LSD has been observed to produce virtually any symptoms imaginable, or even no symptoms at all.
- LSD-like effects may be obtained easily through hyperventilation, at no cost to oneself (save a little energy).
- I have myself replicated some effects of alcohol and cough syrup through meditation.
- Predictive processing is a fact at this point; we humans play an active role in constructing our perceptions.
- Meditation has effects on the parasympathetic nervous system we did not know were possible until recently. Wim Hoff and Tummo do as well.
Hence the following conclusion:
- There is little reason to believe in the "No free lunch" theory of human happiness, that is to say, that our good must be obtained at some expense.
You can take a very, very tentative stance that our body's homeostasis lends itself to survival by default, but that perhaps by some mysterious process this homeostasis may be changed, and so effects that are normally won through bitter exertion are now had easily.
I am aware this is fringe -- probably too fringe for here, honestly. But be aware you are my best shot. The Buddhists are too dogmatic, the dreamers are too "spiritual". There is clearly something worth investigating here, but apparently nobody is doing so. My tag is crashestoearth on discord, but I'm responsive here as well. Add me if you're curious, and skeptics too please chime in. If you are a Buddhist dogmatist though I'm not interested. Thanks for reading.
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Notes -
It is probably dangerous if you achieve higher control of yourself than average people can. Changing an emotion into another is fairly exotic, but changing the target of emotions is a common defense mechanism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Displacement_(psychology) As far as I'm concerned, all alchemy is actually psychology, but projected into the real world. Embodying an emotion sounds like it could just be a result of attention directed towards an emotion, such that said emotion is the meditation object?
Am I right to assume that you've read this? https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/09/20/meditative-states-as-mental-feedback-loops/ I think the main take away is that feedback loops are unnatural, and that the brain tries to prevent them by default. Which is why you need a great concentration and ability to avoid distractions. When accelerating in a fast car or listening to music, I sometimes get chills (ASMR response), but it depends on how I tune my attention. I have to sort of "surf" on the stimuli. This likely generalizes to all senses and emotional responses (chills doing massages and the build-up of tension/anticipation doing important scenes in movies, etc). Does this not imply that feedback loops are the norm? Merely that with most peoples ability to concentrate, they only last a few seconds.
The link you sent sounds like a manic episode. heightened energy, racing thoughts, feeling that things are connected, higher and higher escalation. I sometimes feel like that on stimulants, and when I think about important things thoroughly until I have very strong beliefs (in other words, tidying up doubts and loose ends and other internal conflicts and inconsistencies. If you want to feel really great, spend a few hours doing this). I've often heard that Kundalini has strong effects, and that the "out of body" aspect is dangerous (makes some people go crazy). I think the positive effects come from focusing on your body, mainly the "chakra" areas, and creating feedback-loops on these sensations. By the way, the reason why "out of body" experiences is bad may be because our perception of yourself has a specific place in your head, say between the eyes and back a bit, and that it's dangerous to disconnect from this. You know how it feels like you're floating doing sleep paralysis? This is the brains model of the body, often called the spirit body by mystics, and it may be related to our sense of Proprioception. I don't know if you can accidentally mess up this sense, but it's possible. I personally experience discomfort at times because it feels like my "point of self" is slightly off center, maybe because the left and right side of my face have different sensitivities. Anyway, I've heard that some cultures place their "selves" in the heart rather than in the head, and some crazy book (I forgot which one) recommend shifting this area around as an exercise, so maybe it's not that dangerous as long as you don't move outside of your body, but this is guesswork on my part.
I'm not sure why just focusing on ones heart (or chakras, or kundalini) has strong positive effects, but our brains relation to the body is probably more important than we thought (hence Yoga and such). Books like "The body keeps the score" and some obscure books claim that discomfort and even trauma is basically located in the body and causes muscle stiffness and "blockades" in the "flow of energy" whatever that means.
And about consciousness, what people call "awake" is simply not living on autopilot. To have a consistent sense of self rather than periodic self-awareness with blurs in between, you make your sense of self the object of meditation and train yourself to maintain it at all times. I've read a book on this once as well, but I don't remember the name. Sometimes, meditating on something strengthens it, but sometimes it breaks it down (say a word over and over again and it will lose meaning). I'm not sure how meditation which strengthens the self and meditation which dissolves the self are different. The ways to reinforce things and destroy things seem eerly similar. Meditation makes some people more alert, more alive and more anchored in the moment, while it causes other people to disassociate, have no ego, and become apathetic or stoic. I wish I knew the tiny differences in approach which causes these wildly different outcomes.
Finally, I have a bonus insight for you. The strength of your senses is what makes you feel alive. Having dirty glasses, ears blocked by earwax, a loss of smell due to a cold, etc. always makes me feel like reality is less real. So it seems like sensory inputs is what ground us in reality (which may be why the numbening effects of dissociation makes reality feel like a game, movie or dream rather than reality). I hope these insights were useful! If you want, I will try to dig up the titles of some of the books I've read on this, though 40% of it is my own original ideas and guesses.
AFAIK the point is letting your guard down so that the emotion completely consumes you in a controlled environment. The idea is to "sublimate it" like therapy, but to such a degree that your attachment to this emotion in general burns away.
Yeah, this is true. This is why Indian rituals have long made sport of overwhelming the senses above all, through things like kirtan. I seem to remember some old anthropology quote about how naive and barbaric pagans are, because their idols and rituals are so loud and noisy that there simply can't be any deeper feeling behind it. But more than likely, the overstimulating nature of pagan rituals all across the world serves to overwhelm the senses, so that the brain is tossed on a sea of confusion for a brief time and is more open to processing the raw experience. You can replicate that now by listening to this. When the brain lacks confidence it's more open. Etc.
I've definitely had the "thinking center" of my brain change places a few times before. Once a few weeks ago, during a particularly bad episode of insomnia, it was like a bunch of thread had fallen loose from the spool and took extra energy to reach my "thoughts". Another time was during meditation, where it did a very bizarre rotation down to my throat and rotated back up. Yet another was an incredibly neat phenomenon where I was meditating in a chair, and for a brief feeling it was like my perspective rose "up and over" my head, and I realized then our perception of reality is based on the tiny nook in our minds from which we see everything normally, and if you happen to see from anywhere else, everything will appear differently.
Mm, yeah, it's good. But I still have no great leads. There's no desperation for these weird Eastern practices to be true, or whatever -- it's more like "We have several millennia of records, they claim incredible things, some of them have already proven to be correct, but nobody is reading them". Personally it astounds me that the Indian discovery (and Chinese discovery for that matter) met with such little fanfare during the Enlightenment. It was by integrating the mystic traditions of Eastern high priests that the Greeks began their scientific golden age, and so to see the Eastern world met with either profound apathy, or religious fanaticism, is really strange. Because obviously when you tell someone about the Tao and it sounds dumb and impractical, the move isn't to say wow these Chinese sure were bad at philosophy, but to realize the very book is telling you words suck at conveying meaning, and virtually all intent behind its writing is lost, and to get at it you've got to dig and dig and dig and dig. And I would absolutely love to do it, but I'm on Japan now, and next comes India, and I'll be in a casket before I have time for China. But anyway... have you looked at the Tibetan practices or tantra at all? That's the most promising area IMO
Before I reply to this comment, let me first write this: Enlightenment is real. It changes how you experience things, the only question is how much it changes and how great this experience is.
"Letting your guard down" makes you more receptive, but I don't think it starts the feedback loop. Otherwise, the same feeling would appear every time, but instead I think it's the feeling you start with which gets amplified.
Common advice related to meditation techniques contradicts itself. It's sold as a way of removing attachment, but also as a way of experiencing the moment. As a way of finding yourself, but also of destroying your sense of self. I don't want to experiment more with meditation before somebody can tell me if it results in dissociation or if it helps one get rid of it, for I've had "experts" tell me both. This is a shame, as I would otherwise have much more data for you. "Mindfulness" is good though, at least people who practice it have stronger ASMR responses according to research.
This part is interesting because it's new to me. I suppose it's related to predictive processing? I struggle a bit with numbness, and one of my solutions is mentally removing the constraints on future states by telling myself that every situation is new and that I don't know what may happen.
This sounds different. I meant the location of the "I" inside the head. Thoughts being hard to reach does resonate with me, but I think that's a side-effect of exhaustion or low dopamine. An energy drink fixes it, at least until the energy drink wears off. On second thought, maybe you meant that you felt further away from yourself than usual. Your other experiences are very interesting, but I haven't tried anything like them myself.
Training yourself to hold your focus fully on something (emotion, feeling, an area of your body or your sense of self) and creating a feedback-loop would allow you to test out like 7 different practices all at once. By the way, it seems like you're losing faith in these teachings because you think they should be more popular if they actually worked? But many of them were intentionally kept hidden, and it wasn't uncommon to believe that these things couldn't be communicated. An attitude of "He who knows, does not speak. He who speaks, does not know" probably held back the popularity of much of this.
Also, what would you need in order for spiritual practices to be "real"? You can experience a state of mind in which everything feels profound, but that doesn't mean that the profound connections you see have real depth. Are you fine with the experience, or are you looking for more scientific results which influence the outside world and not just the mind?
I can tell you that these are true at least:
1: Visualization generally works. This relates to "praying" and "desiring", which tunes your brain towards getting or experiencing specific things using the same system which makes you able to wake up at exactly 7am if you wish (most people have experienced this, right?). A quote from The Alchemist goes "When you want something, the whole universe conspires in order for you to achieve it". I'm still not sure if the subconsciousness is stronger than we think, or if human consciousness can influence the probability of things (my visualization sometimes affect the behaviour of other people)
2: You can feel really great just by having strong beliefs. You get that feeling of certaincy which is not much unlike confidence. It feels a bit like being in the flow state or like everything is within your control. If you do something with enough confidence, other people are unlikely to question you, so in the personal and social realm, this is quite powerful. It can just fall apart when you engage with more objective things.
3: The first jhana is real at the minimum, this suggests that other methods of focusing are likely to work.
4: If you escape the state of constantly distracting yourself, and pay attention to the bigger picture, you will often experience enough coincidences that it's just a little bit weird. This adds a lot of meaning and depth to life, so I don't even want to try to disillusion myself about it.
5: Changing ones body temperature and heartbeat by will is possible. The power of placebo is quite strong, so most of the things you're trying to do are probably possible through imagining that they occur (What I think happening when you do drugs in dreams, and likely similar to how hypnosis works)
6: The "energy scale" is basically true: https://www.actualized.org/forum/uploads/monthly_2022_11/636af7340097d_LevelsofEnergy.png.41f9c93fecfbb701a3ec558364120c5d.png
(But enlightenment is likely not a level of energy, but rather a change in perception in which much less categorization and mental modeling takes place) When I reached the highest state a few years back, I experienced some strange things. The environment around me felt smaller, more familiar and like it was my own. (When I'm depressed, the environment feels bigger and hostile/foreign). At some point I thought about my girlfriend leaving for somebody better than me, and the idea made me happy on her behalf. It's the abundancy mindset taken to the limit. At one point I waited on a friend for more than an hour after we had agreed to meet up, and not only did I feel fantastic the entire time, I also did not get bored, and I wasn't in a hurry to do anything.
If you just want small superpowers by modifying or training your perception, then I suggest psychonetics: https://web.archive.org/web/20211015001108/https://deconcentration-of-attention.com/psychonetics.html (I don't recommend doing any of the exercises which requires you to strain your eyes, though)
And if you're just looking for happiness, bliss, peace of mind, or immunity to stress, then just ask, I will try to explain how to achieve these. They are quite easy, they're just dangerous as they can result in complacency, or in guilt (when a loved one dies and your mood somehow doesn't seem too affected)
By the way, I once walked outside with my brother, and suddenly got a really bad feeling. We stopped walking at the same time, looked at eachother, and said something like "we need to get out of here" at the same time. A sudden, shared sense of impending doom. We also once got a strong dejavu at the exact same moment. We just froze and then started talking about it at the same time. Two minor experiences I have had were: Feeling a sudden sense of familiarity with a place I had only been a few times before (it felt as if I had been there for many years), and for a moment before falling asleep, having my entire perception overwritten by an image of an eye and a strong feeling of being observed for like half a second. These experiences were more extreme, but they're much easier to dismiss since they happened to just one person. By the way, unlike people on the subreddit you linked, I've never touched psychedelics. I will be experimenting more with bodily sensations, but I always have a million small projects going on at once, so I may get distracted before I have anything fun to report. Edit: Oh, one more thing! You can get the best relaxation ever if you just kind of give up for about 30 minutes. Set an alarm as you shouldn't even keep track of time. Don't worry about any sounds you hear. Yes, this means that your house could catch on fire without you noticing, that's how determined you have to be to just forget everything completely. When I did this, it felt like I had gotten 5 hours of solid sleep, it was amazing.
I know very little about this, but it seems to be about turning off all defense mechanisms which separates people, and then indulging in pleasure? I haven't done the sex part, but I've removed these defense mechanisms which separated me from other people before, and it allows me to meet a week of social needs in just a few hours, it's really great. I only allow myself to do this around unvulgar people, though. I could be one with my environment or nature as well if I trusted it, but at the moment thoughts of germs, bugs and other danger/uncleanliness causes me to separate myself from my environment. I can't even enjoy my soft bed unless I'm really tired. If I removed these negative associations, I could become like a cat just chilling on a whim. So what I gather from a quick Google search is that Tantra is like the physical version of enlightenment/acceptance/non-duality/lack of separation. Being on friendly terms with everything.
I need to read more about this as well. Is this the practices you're refering to? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tibetan_tantric_practice
Yep. Here's the initiation ceremony for Saiva Tantrikas, for example.
Try holotropic breathing. Like meditation or psychedelics it gets stronger across consecutive days.
Non-dual perspectives are fine, but we need to draw a distinction between metaphysical truths on the one hand, and perceptive shifts on the other. You can make yourself believe in any religion you'd like, it's easy, happens all the time.
The brain is trying to maintain homeostasis at all times, and part of that homeostasis is a consistent world-view, which is why a huge fraction of the pain when something horrific happens isn't just the pain, but the fact it wasn't supposed to be this way! yet it is. There's basically a high floor of cognitive dissonance that you, I, and everyone else are operating on at all times where we assume that certain very bad things in this world simply won't happen to us. Other people get ball cancer, but me...? Nah. You rejoinder Oh that would be a waste of mental energy, duh, we're just being practical! but the point is we don't have a plan for when things go really south, which is why most cases of psychosis happen precisely because our mental models are exploded, and it's why the zenith of LSD experience is the whole universe aligning to a single purpose, while the nadir of LSD is a total fracture of your world view, like "Oh shit I was a chair rotting in an abandoned factory for 20 years and my previous life was a lie!". We're the only species that has psychosis, and the only one that has "world views". Your body will do some truly impressive shit to maintain homeostasis, which is the premise behind meditation, and this thread. Including the placebo effect. This is an area that's not being explored.
Wanna try an experiment? Do some heavy thinking during sex, and pay attention to your thoughts during orgasm. There should be a brief, brief period of ecstasy where your thoughts connect and everything naturally clicks into place. It's very neat.
Curious, I'll look it over.
I mentioned Krishnamurti downthread; this is probably how he achieved his "calamity". For any worries about going insane, I'd like to suggest the likelihood of going insane from any altered state of consciousness correlates with the amount of thinking you do during the state. Doing heavy thinking while deep in meditation is essentially screwing with the wiring of your perception, you are almost definitely in over your head, while Zen-style "no-thoughts-head-empty" is harmless if you have the discipline to do it properly.
Tantra and Tibetan practices are the most confusing side of Buddhism, and I've yet to find a good resource on it. So yeah, sorry. I really need to get back into looking around.
Interesting, thanks! By the way, if you want a modern take on possession, read "Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre". It has a section on masks and letting yourself getting possessed by characters. Psychologically, they probably have a lot in common. There's also some research on how virtual avatars and characters, and even ones social rules, affect ones identity and behaviour. As for the ceremony, is the bell and incense used? For that would affect the senses. The whole divinity/godly aspects are almost required in order for one to take something seriously. Things have the weight we give them, so we use rituals in order to legitimize them. Praying, for instance, is likely a form of visualization, but we envoke the idea of god because we cannot believe in our own power. Tarot cards and Rorschach tests help you read yourself without filter, but in order to believe in the power of their subconsciousness, people need to believe that a diety is present (The oracle). People can barely meet a wise character in a dream without thinking that some external being helped them. It seems like we need to believe in something higher than ourselves, or even in something higher within ourselves (being made in the image of god, the transcendental function, being connected to a higher power, etc). Not that we should take all the credit for ourselves, making ourselves out to be gods (at least not the ego or the self we identify with). Nietzsche kind of tried with the ubermensch thing, he regards the human body as divine because all of this is hidden within it.
Anyway, that was a bit of a tangent. I will try various breathing techniques, but only when I feel certain that I won't be giving myself brain-damage (I'm a bit high in neuroticism).
We experience life through ourselves, so truths about ourselves are truths about the world as we experience it, or truths about our relation to the world (not the agent nor the environment, but the agent-environment interaction). But the truth simply is, right? Figuring our a profound truth feels good, and results in viewing the world differently, but it doesn't change anything. By the way, I do believe that these ancient sages did figure out important things. The hermetic principles and modern physics have a lot in common. Can you understand the world just by thinking? Probably to an extent, Einstein seemed to manage this, and Tesla also ran physics experiments in his working memory (which was huge, likely due to anesthesia with his visual field or spatial intuition).
This is a huge factor in what's called enlightenment. But isn't this just a function of the ego? It thinks it can control reality by rejecting parts of it. It even thinks that having negative thoughts against something helps protect against it or weaken it. That worrying about a family member helps in keeping them safe. But you can "let go" of all of this tension and just let things happen, and everything will continue as it did before, because you never controlled anything. The river flows all the same, and all your resistance amounted to was exhausting yourself. The truth is always bearable for you're already enduring it. What's false can ever harm you, as it cannot exist. It's realizations like this which helps people relax and approach the mindset of a sage. The brain wants to be correct, and to have what it already believes confirmed. It's like your memories and beliefs themselves are afraid of death, or like the brain sees the loss of a belief as the loss of a part of yourself, and reacts as if somebody tried to cut off your hand when somebody attacks a belief or a value you have.
And to generalize these contradictions: All splitting, multiple personality disorders, internal conflicts, etc. are caused by internal contradictions. Nietzsche wrote a lot about this, especially about how willpower affects our ability to control these fragments rather than getting swept away from them. But he also spoke of the positives of contradictions: "Because we forget that valuation is always from a perspective, a single individual contains within him a vast confusion of contradictory valuations and consequently of contradictory drives. This is the expression of the diseased condition in man, in contrast to the animals in which all existing instincts answer to quite definite tasks. This contradictory creature has in his nature, however, a great method of acquiring knowledge: he feels many pros and cons, he raises himself to justice-to comprehension beyond esteeming things good and evil. The wisest man would be the one richest in contradictions, who has, as it were, antennae for all types of men - as well as his great moments of grand harmony - a rare accident even in us!" By the way, if you try to solve all contradictions by taking the intersection of all beliefs and knowledge, you will likely end up with the empty set. Like I said in another comment, there's no one true worldview, you simply need to choose one.
I also want to point out that contrast between two things are required in order to feel much of anything. To feel your strength at the gym, you need to lift a weight which makes you use this power. To feel heroic, you need to feel like you're facing a great difficulty. Even the flow state requires a task with sufficient stimulation and resistance. Some people feel a lot of hate, but they don't want to point it at other people, so they ultimately point it at themselves. If they could just point this at a safe target, like "Poverty", then they could allow themselves to feel this emotion and even use it towards a constructive goal. In other words, be careful of removing any Yins as the Yangs will disappear as well. As I got less lonely, I found myself caring about other people less. As I got more confident, I started valuing compliments less. My Youtube feed is recommending a video called "How to never feel shy again", but it's considered bad to be "shameless" for a reason. Shyness is cute, I don't want to destroy it. I agree with everything you wrote here, though!
Haha, I might try this!
Looked him up now. His "insanity", so to speak, of letting go of memories is actually just letting go of the map and living in the territory, no? To live in pure experience, rather than living in cognitive models of the world. I found a quote saying "To live in the eternal present there must be death to the past, to memory. In this death there is timeless renewal". Earlier I wrote that the ego just wants its memories validated, and like you said, for its models to be correct, and to feel bad when there's a conflict between reality and ones model of it (the experience of cognitive dissonance). I too wish to experience life like I experienced as a child, and if possible, experience things as if experiencing them for the first time - but this means to erase ones memory, at least in a sense. I don't think this is "insanity". Do you know how some people lose faith in love because they deconstruct it to being mere chemicals? That is to overwrite life and experience by creating lifeless mental models and making them out to be actual reality. What sages tells us to do is merely the opposite of that. To deem reality and experience as real, and mental models as false, rather than doing the opposite and becoming excessively objective and robotic.
Interesting idea. I don't think it's false, but we have two models of thinking, system 1 and 2, in other words, conscious and unconscious processing. Ever felt down and then suddenly felt better with no explanation? I think that's what happens when subconscious processing resolves a conflict. So "thinking" is still taking place doing this, unless even the subconsciousness is calmed.
I found a book on libgen called "Mahamudra and Related Instructions: Core Teachings of the Kagyu Schools". Page 31 starts out by mentioning impermanence, but we already know that "Change is the only constant" and why getting stuck in the past is not a good idea. The book recomments letting go of this life (as it's not permanent anyway). By the way, this is probably for the same reason that one can't think clearly on topics that they're biased about. In order to see things as they are, you must not have beliefs about how they ought to be (resulting in that cognitive dissonance) so it makes sense that understanding these teachings is helped by being alright with any conclusion and implication, even when they suggest something that most people feel threatened by. Then it mentions the "ultimate bodhicitta" which is basically just letting your mind do its thing, letting things be like they are, and accepting what comes, as it's all there is. In the words of Werner Erhard: "Take what you get, for its all you get".
What's new to me is how Buddhism practices good and morality, rather than just complete indifference. This seems a little inconsistent of them, but I suppose they just assume that morality and altruism the true default which is corrupted by the ego and the brains self-survival medhanisms. There's 780 more pages than this, but I believe that I already got the general point of Buddhism, and I've come to like Samsara, and since I've learned to enjoy life despite my suffering, escaping Samsara would be a loss for me. If you can modify your perception as much as the Buddhists recommend, then you can certainly learn how to enjoy imperfection, in which case there's no need to escape anything. This worldview would probably offend a lot of gurus though.. If they're still capable of being offended, I'm not sure. And there may be more interesting ideas covering psychology that I don't yet know, I'm just very unconscientious/lazy. And sorry about my arrogance, I hope the information makes up for it.
I definitely get you overall. Though IMO, there's a danger of getting lost out in the weeds making neat discoveries, while you cease to make true, profound progress. What we've covered so far is documented more or less by the ancient sages and practiced in their faiths, but if that alone were enough, we would surely have a better world than we do now. Even if some unbelievable truths were unearthed and documented in antiquity which had the power to perfect our lives if only we knew of them, the error still lies in a failure to communicate those truths to us, and we'd have to restate them in such a way they wouldn't be lost again. But that's assuming some incredible thing has been discovered, which I'm fairly pessimistic/skeptical of. All the things we've covered are neat, but they fall within the bounds of conventional religion/wisdom, so nothing mind-blowing -- like pieces to some grander puzzle we have no reckoning of. Take Nietzsche's "new psychology" for example which tears down the old antitheses of good and evil or pleasure and pain. This new psychology does not exist, because every man with the sagacity to notice that possibility does not pursue it, because there is a more comfortable road of easy discoveries and insights open to him. But that road's been walked for millennia; they unearth the same truths, and get the same results. For example...
This is true, but why? There's clearly some rules in effect here -- like, just as Aristotle's says: "When humans think, there's a small set of axioms we assume like the principle of non-contradiction that are necessary for thought to occur". In the same way, there's a determined logic to the human mind and perspective, a set of rules to perception and feeling that we currently don't know. Why is it psychedelic/meditative experiences require a guru? Why is the parent/child relation so incredibly effective in religion? Is it because we have this deeply ingrained relation from childhood? Or (more likely) is it a natural part of the human mind? Which constructs of the human mind are innate, and which are constructed? Could we create a methodology to produce the perfect LSD trip? Could we eliminate the dark night of the soul from The Path? Could we create some environmental trigger that produces good dreams in us every night? These questions and more lie open, and they depend on strict and consistent rules that have yet to be found.
Society doesn't work in a way which supports human well-being. Advertisement for instance attempts to create a need that it then tries to fulfill. And it's possible that even if we managed to make all of a society enlightened, they would cease to exist in a single generation as they either renounced marriage, or became so uninterested in conflict that another country could easily conquer them. I also believe that Postmodernism has made society worse, even though it has correctly identified that some things are social constructs (and incorrectly made human nature out to be a construct). But yeah, Chesterton's fence applies here. Many bad things have good second-order effects, and maybe good things have bad second-order effects.
Teaching these things is difficult, but only because we're so corrupted by societies teachings. I believe that a child would grasp them more easily.
There's a small possibility that we all have weak reality-bending powers in that our subconsciousness can affect the universe, and there's a chance that one can make this power stronger. I once visualized that I got an A in a class that I had barely studies for, and I somehow did. How? My presentation was mediocre at best. The situation with my brother is also not understood by neither science nor old books (except those which cover mind-blowing things).
John Wheeler was an extremely intelligent scientist and won many awards, and he arrived at a "participatory universe theory". And the general ratio of highly intelligent people who believe in strange things is quite high. There's also some research by the CIA like the gateway process: https://www.vice.com/en/article/found-page-25-of-the-cias-gateway-report-on-astral-projection/
And it's possible that beliefs influences reality in a way such that reality is the superimposing of all beliefs, which means that the doubts of many can cancel out the beliefs of few (which may be why many cultures warn that one should not say their wishes out loud). Another theory of mine is that things cannot change state while they're observed (the Quantum Zeno effect?), which means that they need to be unobserved in order to be malleable. Lets again use Tarot cards as an example, but shuffling the cards while you're not observing them, you create unobserved states, and the cards become "undecided". Now, as you observe a card, it's decided, and your subconsciousness (or your past and future trajectory) somehow influences this choice. Some call the set of unobserved/undecided things "Chaos". For chaotic things, very small inputs can result in vastly different outputs, but this means that the energy of the human brain is enough (as the future trajectory of events can be altered by spending a few calories worth of energy). Related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kia_(magic)
But isn't it more fun to find these truths yourself? If you figure everything out, you will be bored (this seems a bit like your current problem actually) And if somebody discover a "mind-blowing" secret before us, and gets access to a higher power, we may be in trouble. Especially if some government gets their hand on said knowledge.
Your quote by Aristotle seems to be the same thing I wrote earlier about there being no true language and no true axiomatic system, but that "You must choose one". It's like when we talk - we have to choose a language in order to talk. Any language will do, but we cannot speak of anything which does not have a word in that language, trapping us.
There's a rule in effect, but it's difficult to construct a rule which explains all examples. I think that submission to a higher power vs making oneself out to be the higher power is the difference between white magic and black magic. There's many warnings that black magic can destroy you or make you go insane. It may just be that being humble has a lot of benefits for the psyche - after all, basically ever culture to ever exist has spoken positively about humility. It's possible that herd morality is to blame for this virtue of humility (an aspect of human nature in normies say "The nail which sticks out gets hammered down") but even non-conformists tend to come up with a saying similar to "Those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted." It's possible that "authorities" just have higher, well, authority over the programming of the mind. After all, most socities have leaders whose words are absolute. Just like humans crave external validation and overestimate the importance of others opinions, our brain may value the worldview of authorities very highly.
I know some of them. One is that contradiction works differently than you'd think. Trying to be positive, and trying not to be negative are not the same. You can be positive, but the more you try "not to be negative" the harder you will fail. This is related to "Do or do not, there is no try". Also sometimes communicated like this: "When you try to be happy, you reinforce the idea that you're not already happy, which makes you stuck in the unhappy stage". The Tao Te Ching also has a bunch of rules which are just the opposite of what one would expect.
I think I've seen something like that over at https://qualiacomputing.com While I don't think you can solve reality or human nature with mathematics, these are the guys who have come the closest to being able to do this so far.
Like the attempt to eliminate evil and the attempt to eliminate suffering, eliminating the dark night of the soul may be naive. The dark night could be an important step in reaching enlightenment, like how getting your pulse up is an important step in lowering your resting heart rate, and kind of like how nihilism can be a transitory state between belief in the external and belief in the self. You can eliminate bad dreams quite easily, but I believe that they're just reflections of your general situation in life, or even important messages from your subconsciousness. Anyway, if you want to eliminate bad dreams, you need to tell yourself that these dreams do you no good, and have conflicting parts of yourself agree with this. Hypnosis should work as well, as long as your subconsciousness perceive the person who hypnotizes you as an authority. But again, even so-called bad things exist for a reason. There's a duality principle here as well. Or perhaps this "bad" thing is a part of something bigger. We don't like having red lights in traffic, but eliminating red lights would be a terrible idea. We only know this because we know why traffic lights exist, but some things seem bad without us knowing why they exist, so getting rid of them is dangerous.
I'm not interested in truths, really, but results. Belief is cheap. So long as we're confined to the same outcomes as the ancients, it's hard to be optimistic.
That's a strong argument, I will give you that. We can only hope for something better if either of these are true:
1: We're more intelligent now
2: The ancients stopped progressing because they were content with what they achieved
3: Modern technology or circumstances makes it possible to go further (biofeedback and such?)
4: Having access to all of these different schools of knowledge thanks to the internet, and being able to combine them or pick the best parts of each, allows us to go further in some sense.
That being said, it's not an uncommon idea (and I discovered it myself independently) that we are god, and that we had to make ourselves forget that we were, in order to be able to live. If you wrote a book, and you were to enter the story you had written, then you'd need to forget that you were the author in order to enjoy it and immerse yourself in it. Being god is empty. "Against boredom even the gods struggle in vain". Even people who reach the peak in video games tend to get the urge to start over. Besides, limitation is important. Writers block is a result of having too many choices. "Everything" and "Nothing" have many things in common. I think they might be the same thing, actually. Things can only exist with limitations (Language can only exist because some combinations of letters and punctuation aren't allowed)
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