The day I lost faith in Veeky Forums

What I'm sure about is that it's some kind of bizarre (possibly incoherent) blend of the notion of the self as discussed in Buddhism, the self as discussed in post-Cartesian philosophy, and the ordinary English idea of "having a big ego."
Everybody in the modern West believes that you shouldn't be "selfish" and it's good to be "selfless." Then since the 1880s (with Theosophy) and especially since the 1950s (with e.g. Alan Watts), Buddhism started making inroads and becoming fashionable, and its doctrine of "no self" started being popularized surreptitiously along with meditation trends, as well as getting support from the resurgence of Western esotericism in the form of '60s counterculture and New Age. It probably also functioned as a part of the rejection of Westernism and boring old Bible religion for the largely liberal "spiritual but not religious" demographic, because of the connection between modern philosophy, Descartes' "cogito," and Christianity. So within this pop-philosophical climate it was easy for the idea of the self/ego to morph into a generic anathema and root-of-all-evil type thing (which is almost literally what Eckhart Tolle said about it).

>Veeky Forums
> isn't complete shit

It means understanding that whatever your base your identity on is bound to cease to exist, of course some people take it to the extreme, but the notion of ego loss means basically realizing that whatever you think you are is just a fragment of the universe, it's a way of thinking that violently destroys the old Western idea of the self as something eternal and thus separated by the rest of the universe forever, an idea which was born with Platonism and reinforced by Christianity, that some people still retain someway despite being atheist/agnostic as a cultural heredity.

With ego loss you realize that your memories, your current personality and everything that defines you is bound to disappear sooner or later.

Veeky Forums is a horrible meme ridden board that only produces one truly "academic" thread maybe once a week

I'm a level 5, I was a level 2 for awhile though lol.

>It means understanding that whatever your base your identity on is bound to cease to exist
The idea of an "identity" which you can "base on" something is not clear at all.
As far as I'm concerned, the identity of something is that which it is. That's the old sense of the word, which metaphysicians still use. But it seems you use this new sense that basically means "self-conception" or "view of oneself."
In that case, is it true that "whatever you base your identity on is bound to cease to exist"? No, because you might base your self-conception on some eternal feature of metaphysical reality, which has some part in your existence: God, the nature of being, etc.
But even if it were true, how would that substantiate any of the profound claims that people make for "ego loss"?
>the notion of ego loss means basically realizing that whatever you think you are is just a fragment of the universe
But what I think I am is not just a fragment of the universe if what I think I am is the whole universe, which is what many Hindus, spiritual believers, and mystics believe.
If you instead meant "realizing that whatever you are is just a fragment of the universe" then that is a trivial thing to realize, basically everybody believes it, and so in that case having lost your ego is completely ordinary and insignificant.

There's also an inconsistency in how people talk about "the ego": Is the ego (a) something you have but should lose, or (b) something you think you have but really don't?
Only in case (b) is it true that "the ego is an illusion," which is something people say; but only in case (a) is it true that you can "lose" your ego, which is something people say you should do.

> No, because you might base your self-conception on some eternal feature of metaphysical reality

No one bases his identity on God or some other metaphysical concept, if you do that you have trascended the ego of course

This is a very well-researched and valid chart.

Typical lvl 2 fedora normie redditor OP.
Try to broaden your mind and meybe you will reach lvl 4 if you are lucky.

t. level 6 soon to become 7

/thread

I can't get over how fucking retarded this picture is.
Almost every single level agrees on skepticism or relativism about knowledge, meaning, value, and God. The only real disagreement is that levels 0-2 are epistemic realists, and even that isn't completely true since level 0 is skeptical about reason.
And then on the final level it just suddenly fucking explodes into absolute realism about knowledge, meaning, value, and God, plus literal schizophrenia ("the world isn't real," "you are Jesus").

That contradicts this: , which said losing the ego is realizing that whatever you base your identity on will cease to exist. Now you're saying if you base your identity on something that will not cease to exist, you have lost the ego, implying it's possible to base your identity on something that will not cease to exist.

Anyway what about the rest of my post?

this b8 almost got me but i realized at the last minute that nobody can be this stupid

Level 0 here, you atheist faggots are ruining society.
>Lol let's have alternative philosophy
>Even though religious traditionalist values got us to where we are today and atheist values eg the USSR collapsed within 70 years
Also, once you realise that the main tenant of most legitimate religions is to be good to others, you'll understand why religion is necessary for society.

>mfw it is backwards.
level -1 is most enlightened, because it is willing to admit that "i don't know everything" whereas the others all try to claim that they know everything.
Paradoxically it is the people who claim to know the most that know the least.

>life is suffering

he never said that

>remain analytical

analytical concepts are illusion

If you identity with god you identity with all of existence, so it's not contradicting anything I have said at all, of course by anything I mean something finite like your personality, your relationships, which are finite and just fragments of the whole "being"/apeiron/god

So by "base your identity on" you mean "identify yourself with"?
This is part of why this notion of "identity" is so pointless, it just creates confusion.

>tfw tier 4 ;)

>it's another 'dude my baseless assertions are more valid than yours lmao' thread

There's also the fact that the "self" or "ego" is in fact an "illusion", meaning it's not who you are, it doesn't define you, it is just an algorithm your mind runs most of the time and that's mostly causing suffering if not understood and checked. It that can be more or less malign, but rarely has a mostly positive influence. It's on the same level as your desire to fuck. Just another instinct. But elevated to a higher plane of meaning, because it is less understood. I've never seen a person who understood ego and didn't become a more happy, calm and overall well adjusted person as a result.

The only practical way to learn this truth is either through prolonged meditation, or through the shortcut of psychedelic drugs. I think it's no coincidence that the interest in Buddhism, which contains many useful tools for self exploration and the improvement of one's state of mind (marred by nonsensical bullshit, but at least the core is there, which can't be said about abrahamic religions, for example, which have nothing if you strip away mysticism), increased rapidly following the introduction of psychedelics in the west.

pseud

>tfw these don't contradict each other and am every tier at once

just getting in to level 6 here

>i don't know everything
it should be "I can't know anything", so your worng

Veeky Forums is fucking horrible. Also fuck STEM

...

it's reductionist horseshit.

Every message board in existence has shit threads that you have to sift through to get to the gems. Just appreciate the fact that Veeky Forums is nobody's hugbox and has its share of decent threads, and try not to let your vagina get so chafed just because there are idiots continuously posting retarded shit on Veeky Forums like there was the summer that you found it.

how is nihilism a baseless assertion?

Tell us the true ways OP.

>Veeky Forums
the board where people read the first 40 pages of a book then pretend they read the whole lot. Also they read way too much fiction to be relevant.

no thank you,

Patently false.

I feel like 6 makes some rather sweeping claims about epistemology, and the jumps from 5 onward are exponential in difficulty.

>the "self" or "ego" is an "illusion"
So there's no such thing as "ego loss" or "ego death," because nobody has an ego to lose or kill in the first place.
>the "self" or "ego" is not who you are, it doesn't define you
Then it is not the self or ego. The only reason philosophy (East or West) discusses "the self" is that it's supposed to refer to whatever it is that you are. It's just a technical term that's useful in discussing the question "What am I?" or "What is this thing that is me/myself?" The term "the self" in English is an exportation from reflexive pronouns like "myself" and "himself."
Buddhists answer the question "What am I?" with "Nothing." Buddhists deny the existence of the self in the sense that they deny your existence; they say that you do not exist. (Buddhists have an extreme metaphysics of impermanence, they think everything is an ever-changing process, so they think there are no persons, no such thing as you or me.)

So there are at least two self-contradictions in this modern Western quasi-Buddhism about the self:
1. You want to say at once that the self does not exist and that you should lose the self (undergo "ego-death" etc.).
2. You want to say at once that the self does not exist and that you do exist ("you are not defined by your self," etc.).

Finally:
>There's also the fact that the "self" or "ego" is in fact an "illusion"
>The only practical way to learn this truth is either through prolonged meditation
You're adding this to my explanation of what the confused quasi-Buddhist idea of the "ego" is and why it's become popular, and your explanation is essentially that "it's correct."
That is just bad history of ideas.

heres a you, feel better about yourself

Fixed

> stale New Age horseshit
You just say that it is bad to be contrarian.
I see zero arguments why it is bad from you.

So you're agreeing with us

there is nothing wrong with being level 5
and definitely nothing new age about it

Who is "us"? What are you talking about?

Holy crap I am literally saved pill.

Woot woot.

Brother whoever made this I would like to meet you.

I wrote these: But anyway let's look at what "Level ∞" actually says:
>You are literally Siddartha, Laozi, Jesus
This is schizophrenia.
It's also based on a clichéd as fuck perennialism that conflates the ideas of all different religions based on extremely shallow or downright hallucinatory readings of all of them.
>detachment from mortal desires
This is just a bit of Buddhism. You're not special or edgy if the way you achieve your ultimate spiritual enlightenment is just switching from the Western religions you're bored with to some Eastern religion you barely understand.
>delusional dream which we call 'existence'
This is schizophrenia.
It's also just poorly formulated external world skepticism, which is stale even in mainstream Western philosophy (poorly formulated because as written it's actually ontological nihilism, but that would straight up contradict the rest of what it says). And the person who wrote this obviously has no ability to engage the literature on it. Plus it's a blatant reification of consciousness.
>ego-loss
Dealt with this in the posts above.

The main point is just that all of this is unjustifiable, it's clearly based on almost 0 familiarity with the philosophical issues it pronounces on, peppered with random selections from some vague understanding of Eastern religion, and nobody can offer any remotely informed arguments for any of it. And to top it off, it makes for a literally psychotic worldview.

Also even Sam Harris preaches "consciousness" and "transcend your ego" at this point, so you're basically still in the orbit of New Atheism if you believe this stale-ass New Age horseshit.

The chart as a whole is New Age because of what it puts at the top of the hierarchy.
Level 5 itself isn't particularly New Age, except that it buys into the standard liberal half-baked existentialist subjectivism about meaning that pervades popular culture, and which a lot of New Age builds on.

What if you believe in open individualism or the similar ideas?

Why would you?
But anyway there's no real difference between that and this pseudo-Eastern-religious schizophrenic mess. It's just more Hindu than Buddhist. Still "Alan Watts youtube videos" stoner tier.

> Why would you?
If the mind is a byproduct of matter than there must be one mind broadly speaking like there is only one universal gravity field, something like that, there should be more formal justification.

Lost chill out bro I know you have no arguments but still

Yeah, it's bizarre to think people will grasp at arguments like that. I mean, they would never attempt these metaphysical or nature-philosophical arguments in favor of traditional Western religion, that would just be apologetics. But when it's in the service of some exotic Eastern religion you've been vaguely introduced to by Alan Watts and Terence McKenna, suddenly this feeble kind of apologetics is enlightened. Probably has to do partially with weed and psychedelics.

shitty b8, doesn't work when you're responding to posts full of arguments

>they would never attempt these metaphysical or nature-philosophical arguments in favor of traditional Western religion
because there are none

Chill out bro I can sense a great anger inside ofyou

Do you have ultimate knowledge?

Sorry, I just came back.

I don't know a whole lot about Buddhism spiritualism. I come at this from an atheist materialist perspective (I grew up in a completely areligious society, I don't hate religion, it's just not something that has ever been relevant for my life or the people around me).

When people say the self, or ego, is an illusion, that usually means, that the conception that your ego is you is an illusion. The ego is not where thoughts or ideas come from. It isn't the summary, let alone the entirety of your mind. The best description I can come up with is, that it's a kind of interface between the world and the mind, that is fed everything meaningful by subconscious processes it does not know or comprehend. It is useful for the conduct of your day to day actions, but easily confused due to its nature as a kind of administrator or executive.
You can completely strip away your ego and your mind will still function.

I can't speak about hardcore Buddhists, but few normal people say the end goal is to completely lose the ego. It serves a function. But it is useful to understand it, soften it (make it flexible) and calibrate it, so you can be in control of yourself, know and pursue whatever truly satisfies you, rather than be a slave to primitive algorithms and heuristics that are not based on understanding, but on past experience alone.

>That is just bad history of ideas.
I think that these very real experiences underly the ideas you were discussing, and it matters whether you look at the evolution of the discussion of something wholly fictional (eg angels), or a real phenomenon that can be experienced by anyone who cares to. In the second case ideas will converge. People who certain buddhist meditations, and people on LSD have similar ideas, because they have similar experiences, because there is a universal structure of human minds that is discoverable.

There is nothing sadder than a western person trying to be a oriental monk. We still wonder why our society is broken into pieces, huh?

Get a load of this level 2 guy!

"Self" refers to originality. Everything we do is based on what we think, and every bit of what we think is an agglomeration of shit we heard elsewhere.

We are each a crazy quilt made up of pieces of other people's crazy quilts, which are made up of pieces of still other people's crazy quilts.

Nothing is original but the Tao.

>When people say the self, or ego, is an illusion, that usually means, that the conception that your ego is you is an illusion.
But I'm telling you, "the self" refers to you. If you deny the existence of your self, that can only mean that you deny the existence of yourself, your own existence. This is what Buddhists do. This is the sense of "the self" that Eastern and Western philosophy use.
Like I said here: , it looks like you're using the term "the self" or "the ego" in some way that incoherently mixes the philosophical sense and the ordinary English sense in which we say someone "has a big ego" or "wants to protect his ego."
You're saying that there is this part of the mind, "the ego," which normal people falsely think they are identical to. But there's just no reason to say that. People think they exist and that they are identical with themselves. And they are right, because the Buddhist metaphysics that says people don't exist is false.

>[the ego is] a kind of interface between the world and the mind, that is fed everything meaningful by subconscious processes it does not know or comprehend. It is useful for the conduct of your day to day actions, but easily confused due to its nature as a kind of administrator or executive. You can completely strip away your ego and your mind will still function.
There's just no reason to think what you're describing here exists, or that normal people believe it exists or that they are identical to it.

I've read Sam Harris and Eckhart Tolle and other of these New Age neo-mystics. They attack an imaginary target and mischaracterize their own position out of philosophical sloppiness or ignorance.

It sounds like the final level is just -1 except deluding yourself to think you know something others don't.

Besides, what is the point of this, anyway? Is it just to wave you dick around and say how "enlightened" you are?

>But I'm telling you, "the self" refers to you.
I'm telling you that definition is not on point. It doesn't properly map what the people you were talking about think. I explained my definition so there wouldn't be more ambiguity than necessary.

>This is the sense of "the self" that Eastern and Western philosophy use.
But not the one counterculture people in the 60s did, nor people who use psychedelics today. If there is such a difference in how the term is defined, you shouldn't have glossed over that. Of course you're going to find contradictions if you use inaccurate definitions.

>There's just no reason to think what you're describing here exists
People can reliably induce a state of mind that makes them perceive the workings of their mind in such a way. I'm not saying this is how it actually is, but if the same state can be induced in different people from different cultures, then there's likely some kind of biological basis for the perception, and I don't think it's valid to just dismiss it altogether without further research.

I also wouldn't characterize Sam Harris as a neo-mystic. Mindfulness and (and potentially metta) meditation do work and confer very real benefits on people even after being stripped of religious fluff, and that's the only "spiritual" thing he advocates, as far as I know.

Why are you so opposed to this kind of thing? It seems you reject it harsher than the facts warrant.

>>This is the sense of "the self" that Eastern and Western philosophy use.
>But not the one counterculture people in the 60s did, nor people who use psychedelics today.
Sometimes it is (they clearly mean their discussion of the self to be continuous with the one in Eastern and Western thought--i.e. to be about the self), but like I said in a few posts, their concept is a confused mix of what "the self" actually means and some other debris, which causes self-contradictions.
But let's say the topic is actually not the self but instead this "executive/administrative deceptive mental interface" (EADMI) you described.
Then the claim is that (1) normal people have an EADMI, (2) normal people think they are identical to their EADMI, but (3) you are not identical to your EADMI, and (4) you should strip away your EADMI.
I am saying there is no reason to believe 1-2 (and without them 3-4 fall away).
I think what you're saying here is an attempt to give such a reason:
>People can reliably induce a state of mind that makes them perceive the workings of their mind in such a way.
>if the same state can be induced in different people from different cultures, then there's likely some kind of biological basis for the perception
People in this popular spiritual culture do have a range of experiences on meditation or drugs that they describe as "realizing that the self is an illusion" but given their confusion about what the self is, it's easy for this to be a mischaracterization (in fact it is, unless the experience is one of realizing that they themselves do not exist). There's also no guarantee that these are experiences of 1-2 (or 3-4) or the EADMI you describe. But even if they were, they would not be good evidence for these things, just like any "realization" in an altered state is not itself good evidence that it is true. Of course, if the experience really was about the EADMI it would not really have profound consequences for the discussion of the self anyway.

>I also wouldn't characterize Sam Harris as a neo-mystic. Mindfulness and (and potentially metta) meditation do work and confer very real benefits on people even after being stripped of religious fluff, and that's the only "spiritual" thing he advocates, as far as I know.
I would characterize him as a neo-mystic. He spends a lot of "Waking Up" militating explicitly for "spirituality", he speaks in favor of a lot of Buddhism and mysticism, his argument is essentially Buddhist (once you strip it of the frankly irrelevant neuroscientific bits), and he picked this philosophy up doing meditation and psychedelics with gurus in India. He's a Gen X New Ager and a naturalizing neo-mystic. He resembles AP Sinnett from the Theosophical Society of the 1880s quite a bit in that regard. He also uses the mystical language of "waking up" from the "dream" of ordinary waking life and of stilling discursive thought, he says that this is what happened to the Buddha, and he heavily implies that this is what is involved in realizing the meaning of life, etc. Other than his anti-religious scientism he's basically Eckhart Tolle.
I also strongly doubt the supposed "benefits" of this meditation stuff. We're in the throes of this fad right now, it's not trustworthy.

>Why are you so opposed to this kind of thing? It seems you reject it harsher than the facts warrant.
I have several years of intimate personal experience with people who believe this stuff, and in my experience it is not only bad philosophy and bad religion like I've described, it's actually involved with insanity and delusion in a really sinister way, like I mentioned here:

Yes, many hippie kind of people are idiots, and will not be able to argue their point or even express it properly, but that's the same with any idea. You don't listen to the lowest proponents to judge its merit. I don't see why you keep insisting that everyone who has such ideas must use an inconsistent definition. I certainly didn't come up with what I say on my own.

Your characterization of Sam Harris' ideas is straight up wrong. He doesn't advocate Buddhism, except perhaps as a lesser evil. He embraces meditation techniques that have been proven to work, and stripped of all supernatural aspects of the practice.

>I also strongly doubt the supposed "benefits" of this meditation stuff.
There's plenty studies that show that mindfulness is conducive to mental well being. At the very least it is invalid to dismiss it at this point.

Based on these things, it seems to me that you are motivated by some kind of personal trauma, rather than a desire to understand.
The evidence for what I say is more or less weak, but it is there. Its unreasonable to completely reject every aspect of it. With matters concerning subjective experience it's hard to get anything nailed down.

If you really want to contest this, you should try to take a good dose of LSD, experience what hippies refer to as ego death, or the dissolution of the self, and then come up with a better interpretation of these perceptions.
What you think on LSD isn't inherently bullshit. But it's not possible to communicate that to someone who has no experience with psychedelics. I know exactly where these smelly dumb hippies come from. All their stupid delusions. I've seen and felt the basis. And I didn't go down that path, like many other people. Half of silicon valley and many entrepreneurs and scientists took LSD at some point. You only end up seriously delusional if you a) abuse LSD or b) lack the capacity for critical thinking to begin with.

>You don't listen to the lowest proponents to judge its merit.
There aren't really any high-level proponents of the "no self" idea in its New Age pseudo-Buddhist sense. Maybe Sam Harris? He's a kind of semi-academic. But he's just an example of what I've been saying all along. If you read him very charitably (smoothing over his vacillating on whether denying the self means denying his own existence--he does say he is denying the existence of what "I" refers to), his notion of the self is that it's a regulative center of a basically Cartesian consciousness, "like a boat bobbing on the stream of consciousness." All my criticisms apply there.
>Your characterization of Sam Harris' ideas is straight up wrong. He doesn't advocate Buddhism
That's an oversimplification of what I said. If you re-read I don't think you'll find any actual statement to disagree with. I'm very familiar with his work, I was a Harrisite for years.
>There's plenty studies that show that mindfulness is conducive to mental well being.
Well, that complacent attitude is what I expressed skepticism about.
>If you really want to contest this, you should try to take a good dose of LSD, experience what hippies refer to as ego death, or the dissolution of the self, and then come up with a better interpretation of these perceptions.
Two things to say about that: 1) I've done psychedelics, been a New Ager, and had "no self" experiences. 2) Even if "experience of no self" is the correct characterization, having such an experience is weak evidence for the doctrine.

im not the other guy and I havent followed the convo but you sound like someone who has been "there" and came back traumatized and so you've told yourself this narrative to cope.

I was like you too. I had a trip that absolutely mindfucked me (way to high of a dose, I was irresponsible). It took me like a month to recover. After like 5-6 months, I had kind of rationalized it and brushed it off like it was not a huge thing. That was until maybe a year after where I went to that same "place". Then, during the experience, I remember the feeling from before, and I realized that for the past year, my crafty ego (that word is overused but ya know) had constructed the "its no big deal" narrative as a mechanism to cope with that trauma.

Anyway, I dont particularly care for Harris myself; I find his understanding of religion in relation to this stuff very shallow. I also agree that hippies are kind of a cancer. I think there is a reason why certain Hindu schools advocate for delaying exploring this stuff fully until old age. I almost lost my real life myself so I learned it first hand. I now only micro-dose mush every now and then

Ah, now I understand why you are emotionally invested in opposing this and why you might confuse yourself.

I really do not have any investment into any of this. I'm coming at this from neutral perspective. I never had to fight religion, or was hoodwinked by spiritual charlatans.

This perception I described could be complete bullshit, but you haven't demonstrated why that should be case, and you keep conflating definitions and saying weird things, ultimately acting as if my position is untenable when it's actually yours that is unjustified in its certainty and looking more and more unreasonable.

>If you re-read I don't think you'll find any actual statement to disagree with
I challenge to find quotes to back this up:
>he speaks in favor of [...] mysticism
>He's a Gen X New Ager and a naturalizing neo-mystic

A known after effect of LSD is a suggestibility and giving serious consideration to all kinds of ideas that would usually be dismissed without much thought. If the drug is abused, or the person is not a critical thinker, this can lead to all kinds of problems with people believing outlandish things.

This shit man. You get accused of not having the requisite experience, then when you say you actually do, you get told the experience must have traumatized and biased you.
I didn't stop believing in New Agery or egolessness as an emotional coping mechanism, I just learned some philosophy. This pop-spirituality ideological shit is pretty easy not to get trapped by if you have some grounding in actual theory. But trying to deploy that here is apparently like talking to a brick wall, except worse because at least the brick wall doesn't make obtuse misunderstandings, force you to keep repeating yourself, and then act like you haven't answered its simpleminded rebuttals.

You're "arguing" like someone who is mentally disturbed or at the very least confused. I thought maybe you simply never experienced anything like it, but if you did and still don't understand it, and you add that to the general weird style of discussion, you come across as unwell.

No the user is arguing perfectly well and making coherent points which may or may not be sound.

You're trying to pull some dimestore psychoanalysis passive-aggressive shit to skirt the substance of their claims. In my personal experience this is a common tactic used by charlatans who want to dominate.

Well, your perception is wrong, but I think you're lying anyway.

Veeky Forums is fucking bullshit
>it's full of math jokes and memes that are either boring or make no sense
>even fuller than this board with /pol/ crossposters asking something about racial differences and/or IQ
>young anons asking what to study
>arguments about what the best field is
>constant bashing of CS people
>engineers vs scientists fight
>people asking other people to do their (math) homework
>???
>a little something related to science and math, like new publications etc.

What would you do then, divide all philosophy into more than 7 parts? How can I pretend to be superior in a field I don't understand then?

You realize level -1 and fideism IS THR EXACT SAME THING, right? The list is retarded.

We have retard over here!

>Are you all secretly retarded?
>secretly
I think Veeky Forums is quite openly retarded.

>plus literal schizophrenia ("the world isn't real," "you are Jesus").
Die Juden wants more people on meds.

Christianity with its deeply entrenched idea of thought crimes perfectly synergies with OCD.

>literal schizophrenia

I don't think it's literally claiming that a person who has reached that "level" is simultaneously themselves plus all of those spiritual figures, it's saying that the only people who have achieved that level were the listed spiritual figures.

How is this post not worse than the post being referenced?

Saged with prejudice