Intelligence, Awareness and the Internal Compass

[Eulenspiegel]

I've recently reflected on what exactly expands our awareness and ability to navigate this reality without falling prey to propaganda and subjectivity. The kind of internal compass we all need.

I've noticed that raw intelligence and being well-read doesn't cut it, on its own. Take public intellectuals, for example.

Jordan Peterson is a smart individual who saw through the transgender dystopian vision that was being forced on him. But his critical thinking skills somehow failed when it came to the Covid crisis, until he had his own rude awakening and started questioning things.

Bernardo Kastrup is a modern philosopher who, as some of you might know, wrote a lot on the philosophical problems associated with scientific materialism and makes a solid case for objective idealism. Like Behe's books on Darwinism, his books are good reads that will dispel the spell of materialism for interested readers. He's very articulate and runs his own blog. With his kind of analytical mind, you'd expect him to have the awareness to see through both the Covid crisis and the Western propaganda on the Ukraine.
But surprisingly, he wrote a very ignorant article on both:

Evil abstraction: the psychology of totalitarianism

How do we begin to make sense of the mentality of a person, even an entire political regime, that equates complete annihilation with 'libera...

www.bernardokastrup.com

How is it possible to turn a blind spot like that? Here are some of the worst bits:

Make no mistake, it is now patently clear that Putin is evil. He is destroying not only the real Ukraine, but also the real Russia. He is bringing devastating, incomprehensible suffering into the only reality of any people, any state: the experienced reality of its individuals. For the sake of impersonal geopolitical abstractions, he has lost sight of the fact that individual experience is the only carrier of reality we can ever have.

Then came COVID, which laid bare the shortcomings of consensus-seeking democracies: while China reacted promptly and took all necessary (and hard) measures, we, in the West, were initially paralysed by discord, marred in nonsensical conspiracy theories and entertaining hysterical fake news on social media; what a circus that was. That caused me to have doubts about the long-term viability of Western democracy: if the vote of a thoughtful and responsible citizen counts the same as those of hysterical idiots out to create havoc just for the heck of it (yes, these people exist), where are we going to end up? If fringe nonsense amasses popular support comparable to that of hard science, what are we to expect of our future?

I think Putin, who is now turning 70, is in a desperate search for meaning in his life. He has bought into certain historical, sociological and geopolitical abstractions about Russianness, about the glory and role of the Russian Empire, fantasies about land powers like Russia—in contrast to maritime powers such as the UK—being the guarantors of family values and traditions. As someone deeply anchored in the so-called maritime powers (Portugal, Denmark and the Netherlands are all maritime powers), I know from empirical experience that family and traditional values are as much a part of maritime cultures as they are of land powers. But as nonsensical a fantasy as this stuff may be, I do believe Putin has bought into it, so to place the meaning and purpose of his existence in a greater historical context. His desperate attempt to cement the meaning of his life before his personal death is as intrinsically human as it is dangerous, when it unfolds within a totalitarian context.

Obviously, all their training and analysis done over the years did not expand their awareness to such an extent that they'd be able to resist propaganda and think on their own. But what would? Are we entirely dependent on networking to escape from the problem of having only tools fit for one purpose but not the next? It is scary to think that one's training and methods simply fail when presented with another scenario.
I recall being astonished when my anthropology professor, who is very meticulous about de-constructing "narratives" and ideologies when it comes to his own fieldwork or that of his students, one day quipped to me how he trusts the BBC as a reliable source of news about the world.

Networking could theoretically pull us out of this rut, under the condition that each individual really investigated things and also became an expert in their own fields, so that the network could put together "the complete picture", or something near it, to expand the awareness of all of its members to the point that they no longer had major blindspots. However, any group or institution also tends to suffer from a consensus that may not necessarily be based on taking in all data, but rather their favorite data, which leads to what we see in universities as faculties like sociology, anthropology, psychology and so on, that generally don't share their findings with each other and are busy intensifying their own tunnel vision(which creates tons of blind spots). Hyperspecialization. Furthermore, there is the problem of authority and hierarchies in groups/networks, where one person or a few individuals become trusted leaders whose opinions generally outweigh that of their followers, which again can only lead to blindspots. People love relying on some source of authority and are often not even aware of how many of their opinions rely on some external guru/authority figure. So even networking may not necessarily expand one's awareness to the point where one doesn't encounter one blindspot after the next, unless we are working with an absolutely ideal scenario.

What are your thoughts on this?

 

[Steph_rivers]

I completely agree with that assessment. Jordan Peterson being a strong prime example. It appears that networking (to a very high degree) puts us in the position of “looking into the mirror” amongst the groups. Even that in itself could be dangerous because the peer group itself could be saturated in ignorance. I feel like there are just countless factors that are just like snares waiting to be stepped on. I think that the true desire for objective truth amongst a network helps diminish the egos amongst us, as long as we are aware of it consistently, because it feels like a never ending battle. You put it in a very good word: hyperspecialization. A tunnel vision, i focus so much on one thing that I’m now a horse with blinders on, a perfect meal for a predator. It’s almost like we need people to call us out on our hastened conclusions in order to get a different perspective. But will our ego let us at the moment of reflection? I find myself in that position more times than I would like.

 

[psychegram]

This is something I've thought about quite a bit over the years, as I've watched colleagues and friends possessed of high intelligence succumb to one nonsense propaganda narrative after another.

The conclusion I've come to is that pain tolerance is a key attribute.

Cognitive dissonance and social pressure both exert their own kind of pain, one by violating deeply held expectations, the other by placing one in the dangerous position of being potentially excluded from the group. Relentless commitment to the truth requires that one be able to discard one's own beliefs (which hurts), as well as violate the beliefs of the group (which also hurts).

There's also the necessity of remaining in the gray zone of uncertainty when one cannot yet know the truth; since the left hemisphere strongly prefers certainty (see McGilchrist), uncertainty is unsettling and therefore painful.

Now, take Peterson. If you watch him in conversation, he's actually quite conflict averse. He also took solace in drugs following his wife's death, rather than deal with that pain head on; 'take your meds' is one of his 12 rules. So while he has a certain capacity for independent thought, he also seems to be rather pain averse.

Low pain tolerance also seems to be a general feature of those of my colleagues who keep falling for everything: like many in our society, they're comfortable, physically lazy, and unaccustomed to physical hardship of any sort.

On the other hand, gym bros of my acquaintance, who are used to regularly hurting themselves in the temple of iron, are much more likely to see things a bit more clearly.

Another contrast is between western and eastern Europeans. The economic privation and political oppression of decades of communist dictatorship has left them relatively more immune to the sweet lies of the western regime media.

I don't think this is 100% of the answer; networking is clearly very crucial as well, since it facilitates information gathering and confrontation of assumptions with novel data and interpretations. But I do think it's a big part of the answer. Those who shrink away from pain ("I couldn't believe that even if it were true, it's too scary!" How often have you heard this?) rather than moving forward through the pain or even deliberately moving toward the pain, will have a much more difficult time learning the necessary lessons.

 

[Mike]

Interesting questions and thoughts Eulenspiegel.

I guess when someone is very, very competent, maybe even a thought leader in one field, such as Peterson, there can be a type of trap that you describe. The trap being to apply the feelings and thoughts of competence developed from mastering one subject to other subjects and topics without actually doing the work necessary to build that competence for oneself in those other subjects. I'd like to emphasis just how much time plays a role in this and the difficulty of time constraints as a limit to how much a person by themselves can really dig into and understand as an expert.

In Peterson's case, I believe that he has talked about having a trusted circle. A circle he used when he was under heavy attack and to lean on for other topics. But the question then becomes how good and aware is that circle you trust? If the circle or network does not have awareness or can't see, then the person that trusts it will obviously be lost as well within that trust.

Another trap, it seems almost no one outside of the Cass forum understands, that Laura and her work describes well is the very real possibility of hyperdimensional interference to lead a person astray who IS seeking to understand various things and topics. This gets back to the competence I mentioned earlier. If a person feels very confident and competent, then they are unlikely to question their very thoughts and possibly have a weakness where they don't question themselves to the full extent possible. And hyperdimensional influences could lead them very much down the wrong path, even if they are seeking, due to this.

I think one answer to what can start to help a person overcome all of the above are shocks. Peterson has had multiple shocks - a life filled with depression and struggle, the 'system' going after him for his views that started his popularity, his learning about diet and health in terms of his and his daughter's health, the physiological addiction and problems from benzos, his wife's cancer, and, if I remember right, his problems from the Vaxx. All of those shocks have led to him to wake up to certain things and to a certain extent, but has he reached the point of bankruptcy where he understands to a large degree that he really doesn't know anything about large swaths of reality and can't trust himself to think he is competent on so many subjects and can't trust the circle in which he has depended on in the past? That that circle is like him and his overall awareness.

The shocks I describe could lead him to continue to seek after such realizations and then his ability to learn and master something, like he has done in psychology and counseling, and his drive could be a very powerful tool for him to advance.

Finally, I'd like to emphasis just how daunting it is to wake up and then not get lost again when started on the path and that I hope what I wrote above is not taken as judgement of Peterson and his life and efforts. This school is not easy. Some lessons are very advanced and not easy to learn. We here have a great opportunity that few may realize and/or forget just what a gift it is. I know I do at times...

 

[luc]

From my experience, the opposite is true actually: the more "intellectual" people, as part of the middle to upper middle class, seem to fall for the nonsense the most. The "lower classes" seem to have more common sense (although that correlation is in no way perfect), and tend at the very least to be somewhat more suspicious of the peddled narratives. Part of the reason I guess is that those who are entrenched in the system, profit from it and have built their lives and identities around it, have much more to lose by "waking up".

As psychegram mentioned, I think McGilchrist's ideas play a part as well: we must learn to tolerate contradictions and different viewpoints, and resist the temptation to "close the case". There really is no other way. Otherwise, we'll just jump to one conclusion or the other based on what other people think, our dispositions etc., but are completely lost if we need to figure things out for ourselves. Sometimes it takes some time until you finally see it and get it; and during that time, you must be comfortable looking in many directions without blinking. It is also often the case that two seemingly conflicting viewpoints are both true, for example that yes, the Covid is by no means a black plague, but also yes, it's not just your average flu. Or yes, the vaccines are dangerous nonsense, but also yes, they are not the black death either. If you can't tolerate these nuances and just fall in line with your camp no matter what, that is not good. Withstanding the temptation to close the case, or to look at everything from one perspective only, is also a form of pain tolerance.

Getting better at it is a long process, and I think a network is crucial for that, at least in my experience. It's not just that the network can correct you where you go wrong, because that still means you rely on others. This is just the crucial first step. But being part of a network like ours over many years, you finetune your BS detector, your intuition, your peripheral vision in line with your visceral personal experience of the process and as it relates to your own life, not to mention your research skills. After going through one BS narrative after the other, learning to see through them, being wrong at times and then correct your take etc., you can really get better at it, even in situations where you are on your own. However, I think we all have our blindspots no matter what, so a network is always helpful or even necessary if we want to avoid falling for that one thing that comes along and gets us. And one thing is all that is needed to take you down!

(BTW, I saw that Bernardo Kastrup thing and was stunned by it as well. Unbelievable. I guess this again proves Gurdjieff's point about knowledge being worthless, or even harmful, when not coupled with Being...)

 

[psychegram]

From my experience, the opposite is true actually: the more "intellectual" people, as part of the middle to upper middle class, seem to fall for the nonsense the most. The "lower classes" seem to have more common sense (although that correlation is in no way perfect), and tend at the very least to be somewhat more suspicious of the peddled narratives. Part of the reason I guess is that those who are entrenched in the system, profit from it and have built their lives and identities around it, have much more to lose by "waking up".

This is also consistent with my thesis that pain tolerance is an important factor. Intellectuals, being generally more economically comfortable, are relatively sheltered from hardship; the lower classes, by contrast, most certainly are not.

In Gurdjieffian terms - Knowledge and Being as equally necessary traits - it would then follow that the lower classes tend to be deficient in the former, the upper classes in the latter. It's probably no accident that the most capable of independent thought tend to be those who rose from very modest beginnings by their talent and struggle, as this group has the largest quantity of both.

 

[Steph_rivers]

This is also consistent with my thesis that pain tolerance is an important factor. Intellectuals, being generally more economically comfortable, are relatively sheltered from hardship; the lower classes, by contrast, most certainly are not.

In Gurdjieffian terms - Knowledge and Being as equally necessary traits - it would then follow that the lower classes tend to be deficient in the former, the upper classes in the latter. It's probably no accident that the most capable of independent thought tend to be those who rose from very modest beginnings by their talent and struggle, as this group has the largest quantity of both

Yes, I agree. In my experience, tolerating viewpoints different from your own, first you have to cross your pain barrier. The pain that you might be wrong or that there’s something that someone else knows that you also know “better” because you’ve decided it so based off your own analysis and conclusions. But first I have to become aware that the pain barrier is there. If not I avoid it in order to be in the “comfort” of being correct and having the answers. Whether it be physical pain emotional or logical pain. Most people near and dear to me that I have developed around prefer comfort over critical reasoning or thought. You may have a “network” but the BS detector may have also become cynical instead of balanced, because of Pain! Very interesting take! I never thought about it that way.

 

[Eulenspiegel]

On the other hand, gym bros of my acquaintance, who are used to regularly hurting themselves in the temple of iron, are much more likely to see things a bit more clearly.

Another contrast is between western and eastern Europeans. The economic privation and political oppression of decades of communist dictatorship has left them relatively more immune to the sweet lies of the western regime media.

Those who shrink away from pain ("I couldn't believe that even if it were true, it's too scary!" How often have you heard this?) rather than moving forward through the pain or even deliberately moving toward the pain, will have a much more difficult time learning the necessary lessons.

From my experience, the opposite is true actually: the more "intellectual" people, as part of the middle to upper middle class, seem to fall for the nonsense the most. The "lower classes" seem to have more common sense (although that correlation is in no way perfect), and tend at the very least to be somewhat more suspicious of the peddled narratives. Part of the reason I guess is that those who are entrenched in the system, profit from it and have built their lives and identities around it, have much more to lose by "waking up".

I guess that the familiar saying of "complacency breeds contempt/failure" might as well say "complacency/comfort decreases alertness/awareness". You get comfortable and let your guard down.

• West Germans and their descendants are much more naive/trusting of political acts than East Germans due to their different history. I grew up in Western Germany and can attest to this. There's just so much more optimism here regarding "our politicians", even when facts suggest otherwise. People want to believe in "democracy" and "Western values"(it's right there in Kastrup's article as well) and don't like that comfortable house of cards crumbling down. That impedes any change in awareness and incoming information bits are fitted into a pre-established set of assumptions about reality, which precludes any deeper dive into what reality might actually be. However, having lived in China before, I can also attest to the opposite: Working-class people there are much more likely to fall for state propaganda distributed through the media than the intellectuals, who have also been historically the ones that instigated uprisings. This underlines the idea of not absolutizing one position to the detriment of another.
• Are gym bros/working class people in the moment with their body, finely aware of their sense input and not lost in an intellectual forest like the absent-minded professor? The correlation is indeed somewhat problematic, given that in my trips to the gym, I felt like people were often spaced out, just in a different way (headphones on, blending out the environment while working the sets) and not necessarily sharper in their awareness. You are alert in the gym because of handling heavy weights, which makes you pay more attention to your five senses for your own self-preservation, but does that translate to your overall awareness? While it would be convenient to explain that the gym bro exercises his moving centre while the uni prof neglects it, it unfortunately doesn't check out all the time, as there are sharply alert professors who don't seem to have done anything different than their absent minded colleagues; they simply "are"(same with the problem I've seen with many professors have huuuge egos, but then encountering some that are quite humble, despite being highly competent in their field and beyond). The question is what they did differently and if it can be explained through anything else than different soul development.
• In Annemarie Schimmel's "Mystical Dimensions of Islam", we find the common scholar/yogi divide that many religions have pointed out over the millenia, embodied by Rumi's conversion towards Sufism, having been a legalist scholar before. The legal jurists are depicted as being mired in scholarly knowledge, unable to perceive reality directly, while the Sufi breaks through- this theme is everywhere, you can find the same idea in Hinduism with the Brahmin priests versus the wilderness yogis. Gurdjieff's Knowledge versus Being divide correlates with that, and might be inspired by what he picked up in the East. Schools that bring up this argument are notoriously tight-lipped about what exactly leads to palpable changes in being/awareness and not just deeper entrenchment in their favorite ideology. This leads me to the next point:

As psychegram mentioned, I think McGilchrist's ideas play a part as well: we must learn to tolerate contradictions and different viewpoints, and resist the temptation to "close the case". There really is no other way. Otherwise, we'll just jump to one conclusion or the other based on what other people think, our dispositions etc., but are completely lost if we need to figure things out for ourselves. Sometimes it takes some time until you finally see it and get it; and during that time, you must be comfortable looking in many directions without blinking. It is also often the case that two seemingly conflicting viewpoints are both true

Monist religions often identify the dualism as the main culprit of imperfect knowledge and suffering; their solution is often to simply reverse the nature of things(alchemy) so that the division between subject and object dissolve in naked awareness. Daoist alchemy and Indian schools of Yoga do this. The Daoist Taijitu shows their conception of the creation of the world. The work of the Daoist alchemist yogi simply reverses this process, turns the tree upside down. The same with European alchemy.
They do seem to have a point, given that the aforementioned Sufis often made fun of legalist scholars stuck in dualistic thinking and "closing the case", just getting hung up on some favorite category/viewpoint they had in mind. However, the question they often neglect to bring up is the purpose of existence if in alchemy, we just reverse creation to get back to the godhead/brahman(i.e. if you have to suspend thoughts to get to a direct perception of reality, of what use was critical thinking/intellect in the first place?). The idea of "all there is, is lessons" is particulary useful then, as it presents existence as a holographic school of sorts, where individuals go through a long series of lessons to evolve their being/knowledge so that they can understand.

No doubt, if you follow the idea of left-brained dominance, you'll have lots of crusaders unable to go beyond the wish to be right and certain about the one true view(tm). I have to read McGilchrist's two books before I can comment on this in a more informed way.
I've seen the argument that monist schools of meditation simply reverse this monotheistic desire to be right and true by going all the way into the right hemisphere, where they suspend all judgement and discrimination in pure awareness. This is necessarily a gross oversimplification, given that Mircea Eliade already discussed the problem of the coincidentia oppositorum, or the paradox in which all human categories of logic and dualistic thinking dissolve in a higher mode of perception, also discussed by Nicholas of Cusanus in his de docta ignorantia. Both of them are not talking about simply tolerating contradictions intellectually though, but rather about the third man theme entering the perception of a monist yogi type.

Before I drift off too much, it all comes down to the problem of how knowledge becomes awareness that actually protects one from being misled, right?

If knowledge has to be accompanied by being for it to be useful, the central question becomes how exactly these changes in being are produced that create this reliable internal compass and what is precisely meant by "knowledge" as opposed to mere information. Gurdjieff was quite oblique about it, and it is reflected in the less than stellar disciples he produced ("In Search of P.D. Ouspensky" is certainly disturbing in how G. treated Ouspensky and Ouspensky own frustration at the end of his life).

I added Peter Kingsley's work on the pre-socratics and Pierre Hadot on the original purpose of Greek philosophy to Laura's work to investigate this problem and it seems that since Plato and his goons, the concrete development of being has been mostly cut out and replaced with Aristotle's scholasticism which leads to "useless information" and concept overload. However, in his books, Dr. Kingsley also curiously leaves out the details on how being is developed and how it correlates with knowledge; aside from vague allusions to incubation, where the practitioner places himself in a grave like pit and goes silent in his mind, awaiting visions. This correlates with Castaneda and the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali to a certain extent.
But where does information in the form of concepts and critical thinking enter into this? There must be a reason why we are equipped with this abstracting mind when we come into this world.

1. We have senses that provide us with information, whether we want to or not. We go through experiences, whether we want to or not.
2. Sense data is interpreted by our mind, which can be wrong(e.g. rope mistaken for a snake) and tends towards pattern recognition, which is particularly useful for physical survival, but not necessarily the best for perceiving higher realities, which is why especially Eastern systems of knowledge tend to bypass it in search for more direct modes of perception. Western philosophy, since Plato at least, limits itself to intellectual speculation only and has few concrete exercises.
3. We can and do organise information along conceptual lines, which helps us communicate useful concepts to ourselves and other people around us. The immediate danger is hyperabstraction, where we become the classic absend-minded professor incapable of seeing practical reality. The existence of coincidentia oppositorum and the famous difficulty of mystics to put into words what they experienced strongly point towards higher realities existing far beyond simplistic dualistic thinking that seems limited in its usefulness to subject-object related tasks such as building technologies and survival. As luc pointed out, we have to tolerate different viewpoints that may often seem contradictory, if we are to progress in knowledge and being.
4. Critical thinking and conceptual frameworks help us "weigh" what is being presented to us. There are two immediate dangers that I am aware of: 1) "Thinking with a hammer" that is not quite in line with Fulcanelli but rather with fundamentalist mindsets that systematically hammer out whatever nail they don't like, filtering facts out of their reality to conform towards the set of assumptions they've chosen to accept. This happens especially with groups that share a common purpose or ideology. When I first read Mouravieff's trilogy, I asked myself where co-linearity and shared esoteric understanding ends and groupthink begins. Note how, for example, anthropologists generally love to see themselves as "unbiased and scientific" observers that are looking through the lense of shared enlightened understanding while the "natives", those they observe, are stuck in "narratives"/ideologies. These same anthropologists will teach their students what they understand to be consensus science(read: groupthink rooted in postmodernism and the materialist assumptions of modern sociology and the natural sciences) and critical thinking(read: de-constructing the narratives of others but not their own) while it never seems to occur to them that there is no such thing as an unbiased incarnated human, since growing up in a human society will inevitably fill you with cultural assumptions which remain unexamined 2) Getting strongly attached to one's conceptual framework/not dropping the tool after the work has been accomplished. Common trope in Eastern religion but a good point, nonetheless. The idea is that your critical thinking/conceptual tools help you navigate reality by not getting trapped by what does not serve your best (spiritual) interests. However, your best spiritual interests lead in the direction of a complex reality that is beyond what the C's call "3D thinking", which I understand to be human dualistic and conceptual thinking useful for surviving in our 3D world, but not much else. From that perspective, the tools you used to see through misinformation and traps was a human construct, and must therefore be dropped if it is not to become your new favorite prison. This seems to be one of the hardest 3rd density lessons, given how many great religions still seem to be stuck with the "right view" trap that turns them into fundamentalist ideologies.
5. Critical thinking shows us that not all information is equal(going against postmodernist relativism) and that certain bits of applied information(knowledge) synch and build on each other and produce greater states of awareness, which we then use to find more relevant bits. This is the inner compass.
6. "Weighing" conceptual frameworks(which are mere information sets until applied) that are most useful for us leads us to glimpes of a higher reality, which changes our being for the better(direct perception thus coincides with what we call "awareness", but also being and light), and in the end, we drop the framework for reality itself. Knowledge has thus served being.

This is a rough sketch of what I've come to understand how information correlates with knowledge and being.

Yes, I agree. In my experience, tolerating viewpoints different from your own, first you have to cross your pain barrier. The pain that you might be wrong or that there’s something that someone else knows that you also know “better” because you’ve decided it so based off your own analysis and conclusions. But first I have to become aware that the pain barrier is there. If not I avoid it in order to be in the “comfort” of being correct and having the answers. Whether it be physical pain emotional or logical pain. Most people near and dear to me that I have developed around prefer comfort over critical reasoning or thought. You may have a “network” but the BS detector may have also become cynical instead of balanced, because of Pain! Very interesting take! I never thought about it that way.

Castaneda's works seem to go in that direction, for why else would they use the figure of the warrior? A warrior endures in the face of challenging threats. However, as with Gurdjieff's and Kingsley's works, the books are rather vague about this, for how else can we explain that the various Fourth Way and Castaneda groups around the world seem to be notoriously bad at producing insightful people that reach the heights of their founders or what I believe Gurdjieff called "imitation" groups.

However, it has also occured to me that tolerating pain might not be the main initiator, but rather the drive/passion towards truth that initiates and justifies why we would want to endure all that suffering in the first place. The C's once pointed out that passion for knowledge(of the liberating kind) is unique and not like the other passions that limit. But it cannot be taught, can it? This inner drive seems to be the result of getting to a certain point in the development of one's soul.

If this is so, then a public intellectual who's not "there" yet will not be able to summon that kind of inner drive and willingness to endure pain, no matter what one says to them. Thus they would run into blind spots as an initiator of their necessary lessons. This correlates with the Eastern motive of the master only being able to "point towards the moon", because no matter the system, it cannot be taught directly through mechanical means.

I've been thinking about setting up a substack/blog like luc did and elaborate on these problems in more detail, but I am unsure how well this would work, given that this is the only place here where I can assume that people generally have read Castaneda, Gurdjieff, Mouravieff, Chittick, Kastrup and the like. A benefit of a certain level of co-linearity, right?

 

[psychegram]

Are gym bros/working class people in the moment with their body, finely aware of their sense input and not lost in an intellectual forest like the absent-minded professor? The correlation is indeed somewhat problematic, given that in my trips to the gym, I felt like people were often spaced out, just in a different way (headphones on, blending out the environment while working the sets) and not necessarily sharper in their awareness. You are alert in the gym because of handling heavy weights, which makes you pay more attention to your five senses for your own self-preservation, but does that translate to your overall awareness? While it would be convenient to explain that the gym bro exercises his moving centre while the uni prof neglects it, it unfortunately doesn't check out all the time, as there are sharply alert professors who don't seem to have done anything different than their absent minded colleagues; they simply "are"(same with the problem I've seen with many professors have huuuge egos, but then encountering some that are quite humble, despite being highly competent in their field and beyond). The question is what they did differently and if it can be explained through anything else than different soul development.

That misses the point I was making, which was nothing to do with moving centres or increasing awareness or being in the body or whatever. I think we've all known enough space cadet yoga bunnies to know that ain't it. My point was simply that pain tolerance may be a factor in one's ability to re-evaluate beliefs and, therefore, come closer to truth. If you want to put it in Gurjieffian terms, his concept of intentional suffering is probably more relevant.

Note also that I wasn't saying this is the sole sufficient, determining factor. Obviously, there are other pieces to the puzzle, e.g. knowledge, network, etc.

 

[Eulenspiegel]

That misses the point I was making, which was nothing to do with moving centres or increasing awareness or being in the body or whatever. I think we've all known enough space cadet yoga bunnies to know that ain't it. My point was simply that pain tolerance may be a factor in one's ability to re-evaluate beliefs and, therefore, come closer to truth. If you want to put it in Gurjieffian terms, his concept of intentional suffering is probably more relevant.

Note also that I wasn't saying this is the sole sufficient, determining factor. Obviously, there are other pieces to the puzzle, e.g. knowledge, network, etc.

Was just thinking of those space cadet yoga bunnies when I replied. Great wording.

And no, I am not going for a reduction to a sole, determining factor, either. It just occured to me that there are too many counter-examples and that I wanted to bring in the moving centre, as at the end of my last post, I came to the problem of the inner drive.

Pain tolerance would be a factor for those aforementioned middle class/upper class intellectuals too, given that many of them were willing to go through the endless pain that is getting through a PhD program of 5-8 years, which often feels like voluntarily entering an iron maiden on a daily basis or until you lose all interest in your field. Many of those I know have taken up weightlifting to better deal with it.

Another trap, it seems almost no one outside of the Cass forum understands, that Laura and her work describes well is the very real possibility of hyperdimensional interference to lead a person astray who IS seeking to understand various things and topics. This gets back to the competence I mentioned earlier. If a person feels very confident and competent, then they are unlikely to question their very thoughts and possibly have a weakness where they don't question themselves to the full extent possible. And hyperdimensional influences could lead them very much down the wrong path, even if they are seeking, due to this.

Yes, and the "general law", as outlined by what seems to have happened to the two authors of "The Dark Gods", seems particularly sinister to those who touch on these realities. If you add this to what the C's have stated about 4D being able to arrange evidence in your perception field to coincide with misleading assumptions, then it paints a grim picture of human "freedom" or free will in general, if it can be abridged like that on a consistent basis. It would not leave much room for any chance a human might have of "escaping". Castaneda's Don Juan seemed quite pessimistic about this, in any case. We know how we interfere in the free will of 1st and 2nd density, but I suppose it is difficult to transpose this to how 4D may or may not enslave 3D beings, since the development in awareness does not seem to be entirely linear and we don't know exactly what 4D is truly capable of.

 

[psychegram]

Pain tolerance would be a factor for those aforementioned middle class/upper class intellectuals too, given that many of them were willing to go through the endless pain that is getting through a PhD program of 5-8 years, which often feels like voluntarily entering an iron maiden on a daily basis or until you lose all interest in your field. Many of those I know have taken up weightlifting to better deal with it.

Where are these weight-lifting doctorate holders? I'm in academia, finished my PhD several years ago, and I'm one of the only ones I know who lifts. Most of the academics I know seem to prefer endurance cardio.

 

[mkrnhr]

Where are these weight-lifting doctorate holders? I'm in academia, finished my PhD several years ago, and I'm one of the only ones I know who lifts. Most of the academics I know seem to prefer endurance cardio.

As one academic told me once, there are two types: "fat academics, and skinny academics".
In addition to pain (physical, intellectual, emotional) avoidance, there is also the very prevalent intellectual laziness. After having a title or a position, working in one's own field/specialty is very easy. However, knowing about anything besides one's field is difficult and requires a great intellectual effort. I know many academics who have never read a book in their lives! It's easier to pretend to know everything and follow the factoids disseminated by the establishment. After all, most academics are the children of that same establishment.

I would also add that academics, or what people usually perceive as "smart", have high IQ's, but that doesn't make them intelligent. Intelligence is a concept that is so ill-defined, it usually looses any useful meaning.

 

[BHelmet]

Yes, I agree. In my experience, tolerating viewpoints different from your own, first you have to cross your pain barrier. The pain that you might be wrong or that there’s something that someone else knows that you also know “better” because you’ve decided it so based off your own analysis and conclusions. But first I have to become aware that the pain barrier is there. If not I avoid it in order to be in the “comfort” of being correct and having the answers. Whether it be physical pain emotional or logical pain. Most people near and dear to me that I have developed around prefer comfort over critical reasoning or thought. You may have a “network” but the BS detector may have also become cynical instead of balanced, because of Pain! Very interesting take! I never thought about it that way.

The opposite (as is often the case in this dualistic world) can also be true. I feel no pain or doubt when I hear a contrary opinion that seems obviously skewed by what I perceive as a false narrative. I feel annoyance and often make the snap judgement that this person is FOS and/or misguided. There is also built in human tendency to feel defensive about sacred cows being part of the equation.

Regarding cynicism: there are a lot of devils in the details of that word. Classical or philosophical cynicism is quite a bit removed from the standard modern connotation of Joe Bummer/Debbie Downer negativity. The original cynics seem to have a lot of similarities to some of the early Christians.

 

[psychegram]

The opposite (as is often the case in this dualistic world) can also be true. I feel no pain or doubt when I hear a contrary opinion that seems obviously skewed by what I perceive as a false narrative. I feel annoyance and often make the snap judgement that this person is FOS and/or misguided. There is also built in human tendency to feel defensive about sacred cows being part of the equation.

I would submit that the reaction to a narrative one knows to be false, or to the demand that one agree with demonstrable falsity, has more to do with disgust than pain. Then again the two are related: how do you know it's false? Considering something you believe false, rather than immediately rejecting it, is the painful part.

 

[BHelmet]

I would submit that the reaction to a narrative one knows to be false, or to the demand that one agree with demonstrable falsity, has more to do with disgust than pain. Then again the two are related: how do you know it's false? Considering something you believe false, rather than immediately rejecting it, is the painful part.

Well this is the central issue with this thread, I think: “how do you know it’s false”? EG, with the vaca scene I immediately “knew” I wanted no part of it and that the narrative was garbage. I am not sure what kind of knowing that is; but I also know that I felt this worth staking my life on it. I could feel it viscerally. It wasn’t just a mental gyration. On some level it was an animalistic type of knowing or reaction. Interesting.