This seems like claims about reality? TBC I think the claims about suffering in Buddhism are claims about how our mammalian nervous systems happen to be wired and ways you can improve it. I also think nihilistic readings of Buddhism are probably mistaken.
I think it’s claims about the human perception of reality. We tend to aim for understanding, but it’s the lack of understanding which makes understanding so seductive. Understanding something tends to kill it of its magic, and what’s understood feels much smaller. I think that a complete understanding the world in a reductionist and mechanical sense would make you too sober not just for magic, religion and philosophy, but also for scientism and spirituality as well. You can even disillusion yourself to social reality if you deconstruct that (not recommended)
I also make claims about the nature of truth in relation to humans. I don’t think our perceptions actually aim for truth, I don’t think that truth is comfortable like spirituality is comfortable, and I don’t think truth is all that useful to us personally (but it’s great for scientific advancement)
Those who philosophize and meditate on things tend to be high in neuroticism. You don’t meditate so hard on the nature of things if you’re thriving in life, you only start questioning things when they don’t work, so I think all philosophy has a negative bias, that philosophers tend to have bad mental health, and that higher states of awareness may be psychologically unhealthy. For instance, oversocialization makes us self-censor by keeping track of what other people would think of us. Freddie Boer writes this in one of his posts: “Nowadays people have both their own anxious and worried mind and another mind that worries about how they’re anxious and worried and whether they should be. This is the part of the mind that’s concerned, bizarrely, with how the mind might appear to others, despite the fact that the mind cannot be observed by anyone but the self. And that’s a creation of the internet”.
I don’t think he’s correct blaming the internet, I think it’s the WEIRD society, political correctness, population density, and increasing simulacra levels (and most of the internet is this sort of environment now). Materialism and science are partly to blame too. I see many, many people who take a turn for the worse when they turn around 20 years old, and stop being able to truly be themselves. The exaggerated inhibition turns permanent, sometimes remaining even when that person is truly alone.
The relation between the socialization process, subjectivity, objectivity, social reality and meta-perspectives is too complex to contemplate here and this reply is already rather long
Aduashanti/Jed McKenna/Chongyam Trungpa would all agree that real deal spirituality is highly uncomfortable. Waking up out of the shared dream state can be highly alienating, especially at first as you learn new ways to relate to others who are mostly paying attention to their own projections and not what is happening moment by moment. Projections that lead us in a circle back towards comfortable, familiar thoughts. Fortunately, it also gives us the tools for working effectively with those feelings of alienation and loneliness.
This alienation puts you out of calibration with other people. Why avoid overfitting to specific, local beliefs, in favor of more ‘general truths’, when all your time is spent doing specific, local things?
That said—I recommend doing this to the extent that other peoples beliefs are poisonous and negative. You should not calibrate yourself to sickness. But calibration towards psychological health puts you in tune with yourself, the moment, and lived experience. If it’s uncomfortable, then I don’t think you’re approaching a natural state nor eliminating internal conflicts, and I wouldn’t call this “spirituality” at all. Spirituality to me, is to let go, and realize that you weren’t holding on to anything to begin wtih, it kept itself in place all along. It’s also a frame of mind in which everything has depth and hidden meaning and wealth, which I think is advantageous even if it’s only “true” to the extent that it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.
I wouldn’t focus too much on Buddhism. What about tarot, yoga, magick, visualization, and “fun” worldviews like the hermetic principles? “Everything is mind” is like stoicism on steroids, it helps you take back the ability to create your own interpretations (an ability that many of us lose thanks to science) instead of searching for it in other peoples theories and opinions. Spirituality is about rooting yourself in yourself, and expanding your own inner world. Science is about approximating something else at the cost of yourself, and reducing your inner world to rules and sterile/inert/objective models. Doubt leads to bad mental health, which is why belief, faith and confidence are so important. Whether these beliefs are actually true seems less important to me.
By the way, are you sure this alienation is necessary? Even if you can’t connect with somebody as you don’t share words, beliefs or ideas, I find that body language and more fundamental things still get through. If you have a pet, I bet you have made some sort of connection with it
Me, I’ve found that I connect much more readily with animals than I do with humans. I went into a local shop the other day, and one of the owner’s dogs approached me, so I let her sniff my hand. A few minutes later I was petting her head. He was utterly beside himself, said she was a rescue from an abusive owner, and NOBODY other than himself could touch her like that.
I simply aim to move into my center, and let the flow reverse outwards into the world, vs. trying to grasp at things and draw them in. I’ve also found that my energies put people off, incl. women I’ve tried to date; one, a coworker who developed a weird kind of crush on me, couldn’t work with me anymore because the energies were feeding back on her and making her sick.
Tl;dr trying to engage on that level with others usually proves futile. Animals don’t have all that egotistical crap blocking their spiritual arteries I guess. It’s more fundamental than just a mere difference in beliefs or a desire to socialize, or not.
That’s good to hear! But it’s a shame that it puts you out of sync with people. If it’s all people, maybe your environment is not very good? Maybe the rat race dominates? I can ‘vibe’ with people, which I think is a form of synchronization or communication on a deeper level than the verbal.
Getting close to people like this requires that both of us have some sort of inner peace, calm or firmness. Too much noise, anxiety, alertness, doubt and mistrust kills it. The cognitive overhead of internal conflict and noise is enough to distract us. Even a headache (which also hijacks your attention) can prevent ‘immersion’ in the moment / the situation / the people around you.
I simply aim to move into my center, and let the flow reverse outwards into the world, vs. trying to grasp at things and draw them in
Excellent put! This “drawing in” is a form of theft/greed anyway. It puts a burden on others. It tries to control things rather than letting them flow naturally.
It might be “trying” which is interfering with “doing”, or “the ego” which is interfering with “letting go”, but my favorite perspective here is that it’s system 2 interfering with system 1. Things which come naturally are graceful, and when we try too hard to control everything ourselves, things become stiff and awkward. Let me show you what I mean: you’re now breathing manually.
I am retired more or less, but aside from a bunch of financial loose ends that my late mother bequeated myself and my sister, no racing rats here. [Sunsets maybe, in my car] I have connected successfully with fellow wildlife volunteers and plan to start doing that again later in the spring (the key for me was birds and nature—a close encounter with a peregrine falcon got my all turned around, had 3 more subsequently, one where I could have reached out and touched it as it flew past me on a highrise balcony).
I like the “theft” angle, because in my case I know that is exactly what it was, when I was severely depressed. “Oh pity poor little old woe is me!”
That looks like a moral statement? Like you consider knowledge a virtue. I feel like this association has been dominant in the western world since Plato, but despite this generation being the least scientifically ignorant generation so far, hasn’t our conscience gotten worse? We only feel more ignorant, more imperfect.
I recommend a naturalistic approach to life. If even the best of us is ignorant, and humanity has flourished like this anyway, then from where do we draw the conclusion that ignorance is harmful? Or that we should feel bad about it? Perhaps holding ourselves to unreachable ideals might cause more harm than good instead? I think the judgement “knowledge = good” comes from an anxious state of mind wishing for more certainty and control, rather than being a logical conclusion to anything. And of course, it’s a popular belief that being humble is good, but I think this is mostly just a “the nail that sticks out gets hammered” conformity thing. Identifying too much with ones knowledge is bad, though, as it makes one afraid of being wrong and asking questions.
? TBC I think the claims about suffering in Buddhism are claims about how our mammalian nervous systems happen to be wired and ways you can improve it.
This seems like quite a western modern take on buddhism
it feels hard to read the original buddha this way
i just don’t see the buddha making any reference to nervous systems or mammalians when he talks about suffering(not even some sort of pali equivalent that points to the materialist understanding at the time)
This seems like claims about reality? TBC I think the claims about suffering in Buddhism are claims about how our mammalian nervous systems happen to be wired and ways you can improve it. I also think nihilistic readings of Buddhism are probably mistaken.
I think it’s claims about the human perception of reality. We tend to aim for understanding, but it’s the lack of understanding which makes understanding so seductive. Understanding something tends to kill it of its magic, and what’s understood feels much smaller. I think that a complete understanding the world in a reductionist and mechanical sense would make you too sober not just for magic, religion and philosophy, but also for scientism and spirituality as well. You can even disillusion yourself to social reality if you deconstruct that (not recommended)
I also make claims about the nature of truth in relation to humans. I don’t think our perceptions actually aim for truth, I don’t think that truth is comfortable like spirituality is comfortable, and I don’t think truth is all that useful to us personally (but it’s great for scientific advancement)
Those who philosophize and meditate on things tend to be high in neuroticism. You don’t meditate so hard on the nature of things if you’re thriving in life, you only start questioning things when they don’t work, so I think all philosophy has a negative bias, that philosophers tend to have bad mental health, and that higher states of awareness may be psychologically unhealthy. For instance, oversocialization makes us self-censor by keeping track of what other people would think of us. Freddie Boer writes this in one of his posts: “Nowadays people have both their own anxious and worried mind and another mind that worries about how they’re anxious and worried and whether they should be. This is the part of the mind that’s concerned, bizarrely, with how the mind might appear to others, despite the fact that the mind cannot be observed by anyone but the self. And that’s a creation of the internet”.
I don’t think he’s correct blaming the internet, I think it’s the WEIRD society, political correctness, population density, and increasing simulacra levels (and most of the internet is this sort of environment now). Materialism and science are partly to blame too. I see many, many people who take a turn for the worse when they turn around 20 years old, and stop being able to truly be themselves. The exaggerated inhibition turns permanent, sometimes remaining even when that person is truly alone.
The relation between the socialization process, subjectivity, objectivity, social reality and meta-perspectives is too complex to contemplate here and this reply is already rather long
Aduashanti/Jed McKenna/Chongyam Trungpa would all agree that real deal spirituality is highly uncomfortable. Waking up out of the shared dream state can be highly alienating, especially at first as you learn new ways to relate to others who are mostly paying attention to their own projections and not what is happening moment by moment. Projections that lead us in a circle back towards comfortable, familiar thoughts. Fortunately, it also gives us the tools for working effectively with those feelings of alienation and loneliness.
This alienation puts you out of calibration with other people. Why avoid overfitting to specific, local beliefs, in favor of more ‘general truths’, when all your time is spent doing specific, local things?
That said—I recommend doing this to the extent that other peoples beliefs are poisonous and negative. You should not calibrate yourself to sickness. But calibration towards psychological health puts you in tune with yourself, the moment, and lived experience. If it’s uncomfortable, then I don’t think you’re approaching a natural state nor eliminating internal conflicts, and I wouldn’t call this “spirituality” at all. Spirituality to me, is to let go, and realize that you weren’t holding on to anything to begin wtih, it kept itself in place all along. It’s also a frame of mind in which everything has depth and hidden meaning and wealth, which I think is advantageous even if it’s only “true” to the extent that it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.
I wouldn’t focus too much on Buddhism. What about tarot, yoga, magick, visualization, and “fun” worldviews like the hermetic principles? “Everything is mind” is like stoicism on steroids, it helps you take back the ability to create your own interpretations (an ability that many of us lose thanks to science) instead of searching for it in other peoples theories and opinions. Spirituality is about rooting yourself in yourself, and expanding your own inner world. Science is about approximating something else at the cost of yourself, and reducing your inner world to rules and sterile/inert/objective models. Doubt leads to bad mental health, which is why belief, faith and confidence are so important. Whether these beliefs are actually true seems less important to me.
By the way, are you sure this alienation is necessary? Even if you can’t connect with somebody as you don’t share words, beliefs or ideas, I find that body language and more fundamental things still get through. If you have a pet, I bet you have made some sort of connection with it
Me, I’ve found that I connect much more readily with animals than I do with humans. I went into a local shop the other day, and one of the owner’s dogs approached me, so I let her sniff my hand. A few minutes later I was petting her head. He was utterly beside himself, said she was a rescue from an abusive owner, and NOBODY other than himself could touch her like that.
I simply aim to move into my center, and let the flow reverse outwards into the world, vs. trying to grasp at things and draw them in. I’ve also found that my energies put people off, incl. women I’ve tried to date; one, a coworker who developed a weird kind of crush on me, couldn’t work with me anymore because the energies were feeding back on her and making her sick.
Tl;dr trying to engage on that level with others usually proves futile. Animals don’t have all that egotistical crap blocking their spiritual arteries I guess. It’s more fundamental than just a mere difference in beliefs or a desire to socialize, or not.
That’s good to hear! But it’s a shame that it puts you out of sync with people. If it’s all people, maybe your environment is not very good? Maybe the rat race dominates? I can ‘vibe’ with people, which I think is a form of synchronization or communication on a deeper level than the verbal.
Getting close to people like this requires that both of us have some sort of inner peace, calm or firmness. Too much noise, anxiety, alertness, doubt and mistrust kills it. The cognitive overhead of internal conflict and noise is enough to distract us. Even a headache (which also hijacks your attention) can prevent ‘immersion’ in the moment / the situation / the people around you.
Excellent put! This “drawing in” is a form of theft/greed anyway. It puts a burden on others. It tries to control things rather than letting them flow naturally.
It might be “trying” which is interfering with “doing”, or “the ego” which is interfering with “letting go”, but my favorite perspective here is that it’s system 2 interfering with system 1. Things which come naturally are graceful, and when we try too hard to control everything ourselves, things become stiff and awkward. Let me show you what I mean: you’re now breathing manually.
I am retired more or less, but aside from a bunch of financial loose ends that my late mother bequeated myself and my sister, no racing rats here. [Sunsets maybe, in my car] I have connected successfully with fellow wildlife volunteers and plan to start doing that again later in the spring (the key for me was birds and nature—a close encounter with a peregrine falcon got my all turned around, had 3 more subsequently, one where I could have reached out and touched it as it flew past me on a highrise balcony).
I like the “theft” angle, because in my case I know that is exactly what it was, when I was severely depressed. “Oh pity poor little old woe is me!”
I find looking directly at my own ignorance often uncomfortable but worthwhile.
That looks like a moral statement? Like you consider knowledge a virtue. I feel like this association has been dominant in the western world since Plato, but despite this generation being the least scientifically ignorant generation so far, hasn’t our conscience gotten worse? We only feel more ignorant, more imperfect.
I recommend a naturalistic approach to life. If even the best of us is ignorant, and humanity has flourished like this anyway, then from where do we draw the conclusion that ignorance is harmful? Or that we should feel bad about it? Perhaps holding ourselves to unreachable ideals might cause more harm than good instead? I think the judgement “knowledge = good” comes from an anxious state of mind wishing for more certainty and control, rather than being a logical conclusion to anything. And of course, it’s a popular belief that being humble is good, but I think this is mostly just a “the nail that sticks out gets hammered” conformity thing. Identifying too much with ones knowledge is bad, though, as it makes one afraid of being wrong and asking questions.
This seems like quite a western modern take on buddhism
it feels hard to read the original buddha this way
Note I didn’t say ‘the claims of buddhism’ as a whole.
i just don’t see the buddha making any reference to nervous systems or mammalians when he talks about suffering(not even some sort of pali equivalent that points to the materialist understanding at the time)