This is also a good guide for finding teachers. People who like to razzle-dazzle with aethetic mystique of things are a bit of a red flag unless you see them rapidly go from that to very useful content and that they're using the aesthetics as points of contact with reverence. A good example of this is when I've seen genius mathematicians or top-of-the-field coding authors, instead of doing a really sleek presentation, get up in front of a room and use old-fashion overheads or draw on the chalk board, try to treat the concepts in a nuts-and-bolts way, and does what they can to demistify things. It's perhaps not the only grounds on which I'd trust a teacher but it's definitely a sign that they care about conveying effectiveness and practical capacity to other people rather than having people idolize them, which is the sort of altruism that reinforces that they're worthy of your time and attention.
I also think of the James Randy challenge, whether or not he was a hack, and how that still ended up working out. It seems like a lot of people in those tests legitimately failed them. There's the possibility that other people's beliefs have as much impact on what your trying to do as your own (perhaps why the 'to dare, to will, to know, and to remain silent' has the 'remain silent' in there. The other part of this is the possibility that the world either isn't as fungible to mind as people would like it to be (plenty of non-human conscious agents whose preferences would be disrupted) or that when it is fungible to one's own mental processes it's certain vectors of use at certain times, like dealing with the physical world whether what you're doing is leveraging the laws. All of these things I find fascinating and want to keep digging into.Kath wrote: ↑Thu Nov 26, 2020 6:40 pmI'm extremely happy with my results as pertaining to abnormal physical strength & sensory perception actually (two of your examples in the OP). There's some validity to the idea that how you approach things will affect your results though. I didn't approach things seeking those results. I was exploring many many things, and those cropped up as possibilities as a result. If i had started out trying to get to the finish line, instead of trying to explore the map, would I have arrived at those results? hard to say, but I think it's less likely.
Now if I say "oh i can boost strength or sense things" that sounds... well it comes off sounding silly. But I can draw that out into a deep essay on the science, theory, & practice of applying effects in those areas, which sounds "somewhat" less silly. Or I could (in person) just demonstrate my own sort of nejia-mushin-berserkergang homespun strength effect, and it would seem extremely not silly. That one's actually very easy. well, my tendons and ligaments might not call it easy, there are some structural limitations. but i don't find it hard to manifest.
(I have a serious lack of hard data on the immortality idea though. it's not something you get a lot of trial & error with)
Here's the other thing with having really precise phrasing - it's critical for being able to control your life on so many levels because having a fuzzy grasp of concepts means one can be manipulated just as readily by people in politics, at work, or anywhere else. Being resilient to and able too fight back against bad ideas really rests on one's capacity to be able to map their idea sets, then when they see BS in the news they don't throw it all over Facebook, get inordinately attached to it, fall into an echo chamber that sells them even more of it, and start drinking tribal / partisan kooliad.Kath wrote: ↑Thu Nov 26, 2020 6:40 pmInternally, I actually practice being very careful with how I word things. I don't say "I can't XYZ", not without a qualifying remark like "so far I can't XYZ", or "I have not yet XYZ". I try to avoid clipping my own wings, so to speak. And I generally loathe to tell someone they "can't" do something. In my family tree, "can't" was the only dirty word which would result in corporal punishment.
Out of many reasons I live listening to Daniel Schmachtenberger talk about sociology and complex systems, aside from having a lot of very good ideas, is the accuracy that he inflicts on his own thinking. Similarly when I first came in contact with Jordan Peterson's digging into Sumerian mythology, Egyptian archetypes, digging into Communism vs. Capitalism, Gulag archipelago (when he just started to blow up - maybe late 2016) he'd always wait for a while, only start to answer the question with great labor to define the space and make sure that he's detailing it in a way that gives each piece of the puzzle a lucid description and I've seen Daniel do that quite often when he's asked abstract questions. I've similarly seen Aiyshat Akanbi (someone else I can relate to a lot) always holding herself back in interviews and carefully framing the space of the question before then using that frame to unpack the question and how many different obvious and less obvious pieces the answer might have. Samo Burja - same thing.
So yes - being able to define spaces really well is critical and TBH defining spaces tends to be a verbal process, at least for me. The visual world gives you some information but quite often it's insufficient to keep other people from being able to rearrange contexts in all sorts of seemingly probably but specious ways. This is also why political authoritarians fight so hard to subvert and distort language, it's the closest equivalent they can manage to putting roofies in the water.
I'm having to admit - I think with that mentality and people who have, it could well be that this is the extent of their internal leverage. Some people might disagree with that assessment or say that they used to be like that until they found out 'x' and they believe that other people in that same spot are missing that piece, but there seems to be plenty of people - if not a slight majority - where they are what they are based on their own limitations. The trick is, when one finds themselves not being one of those people and having a leg-up on self-awareness, insight into how to learn or excel at things, is to use that to as benevolent or win-win ends as possible.