aftoprokrustes

As far as I understand a Hefeweizen is put into the bottle with live yeast, which continue the fermentation and create the characteristic thick foam. So indeed, in that case, you cannot have that effect without alcoholic fermentation.

But I am more of a Pilsener guy, and there are a few good alcohol free Pils which I am convinced would taste like the "real deal" with the added taste of alcohol.

I do not know. First, I take it just as a way to deny responsibility for any consequence of the advice in the article, the same way one starts with "I am not a lawyer" before giving half thought out legal advice.

But second and more importantly, your conception that before people used to talk about mental health issues seems very romantic and unrealistic. People from older generations, at least in the two cultures in my family, tend not to talk about emotions at all. The most striking example is that of my father's grandfather, who fought in the first world war and could not enter a forest for the rest of his life and get very pale and shaky in the vicinity of one (what we would today call PTSD). So what did his wife do when she wanted to collect mushrooms? "Just drive me there and stay in the car, if you do not want to man up. It's just trees, you idiot". You cannot talk about your weaknesses when you are expected to be strong and unbreakable. What a therapist can offer is a space where those expectations of society do not hold, and where the fear of looking weak or dumb can decrease a bit.

I would advise against this kind of "intellectualizing" of emotions, particularly if you are a "brainy" person. Decoding the emotion as an intellectual puzzle can feel comforting, because juggling with concepts and theoretical models is what a brainy person does, but it will necessarily obscure a lot. But an emotion is not a concept, it is physical. You should listen to it, but not in the head: just allow yourself to feel it, to permeate your body, to evoque images... And often an intuitive call to action will emerge. It might just be internal action, or it might be a growing desire to quit your job to go work in another field or do social service or whatever. The thing is that the conviction that comes out of repeteadly listening to the emotions in the body is much stronger than the one that comes from rational thinking alone. And it can often be something you would never have thought about just by pondering.

Take the example of grief. What is the rational interpretation? "My mother was there, and now she is not". Or worse, "it shows how much time I lost when she was alive, and now it is gone". Absolutely useless insight, probably just makes the pain worsen. Maybe it makes you feel guilty and intellectually decide to "engage deeper in my relationships with the living", but in the few cases of this decision I witnessed it did not really work, because this was just abstract and filled with guilt and shame.

But allowing yourself to feel the grief and be sad can open a sense of devotion and respect to the dead. This intense pain can feel like the universe paying respect to the person that is now gone. And out of it can come a new way of interacting with the world and others, and maybe a newfound perspective on life. But the important part is that this kind of happens by itself, as currents and sensations in the body, over time, bottom-up, rather than as the result of solving an intellectual puzzle and coming eith a top down solution a out how you ought to live your life and feel from now on.

Obviously, this is just my own conclusion out of my own journey, and YMMV and all that sort of things.

Actually, my impression is that the main driver of that "alcohol free beer taste" is the absence of the taste of alcohol. I kind of want to test this hypthesis by adding pure alcohol to an alcohol free beer, but pure alcohol is not really something you find in the supermarket. Germany has a non-alcoholic drink called "Malzbier" (malt beer), which is basically the liquid you would ferment to make beer. It is _insanely_ sweet. So I would expect that a lightly fermented beer would be much closer to a sweet drink than to what we expect under the name "beer".

Another formula I heard that fits your situation is "be hopeless, but not helpless". The idea ia that if you go into activism with the aim to move things and change the world, you will likely burn out fast. Because, as you mention, having a measurable impact is near impossible. So the idea is to give up the hope of making an impact, but try nonetheless. Focus on the fact of doing what feels like the right thing to do, but do not get attached to results too much. Obviously easy to say, but hard to practice.

Your emotional reaction to the saying makes me think that you know what you think is right, but maybe have difficulty not putting a lot of weight on your shoulders. This is rare and precious, so many of us find excuses for not making a lot of effort.

That's funny, I have exactly the opposite effect with meditation: in the last two years I have been following teachings with which I resonated a lot and helped my meditation deepen a lot, and I attribute my newfound sports skills to this deepening. I was able to run 20km 2 weeks after taking up jogging again after a few years break, which is a distance I never managed in the past. I can see how my meditative work helps me switch the perception of effort and push further than I ever thought possible. The work with pain, effort and strong emotions in boxing also has a lot of parallels with my seated meditation practice. There is definitely something to the stereotype of the martial artist meditating in a cave

Slightly off topic, but I recently started Kickboxing, and I finally have the impression that I start to understand the connection between martial arts/combat sports and spirituality as it is emphasized in e.g. Bruce Lee's movies. There is a strange wisdom operating in channeling rage to make a technique more effective while respecting (or even caring for) your opponent/partner. I tried Aikido in the past, in search for this kind of wisdom, even selecting a club of a mostly "spiritual" tradition, and did not find it in the few trainings I did - but started seeing it after one session of heavy bag training. There is something about training for actual fight (which I now aim for, at my own surprise) that shifts one view of oneself and others in surprisingly useful ways. I can only recommend trying this kind of sports, if one is interested but puzzled at the strange dialogues in Kung Fu movies.

I think that the interest in Sufism comes from the fact that people interested in learning about various religions tend to be of mystical personality, in the sense that they are interestes in mystery and contemplation. This is why we (I am definitely fit this description) tend to be attracted to traditions that are mystical/contemplative in nature: Sufism, mystic Catholicism, Buddhism, Daoism...

I personally think that it is fine, as long as one respects the right for others to be attracted to other teachings.

The way you use orientalist seems like a strawman to me. I am all about being careful of orientalism as a search for exotism rather than serious intellectual and spiritual inquiry. But using terms such as "wahabi" or "conservative" is not necessarily judgmental (maybe a bit in OP's message, but even there I would avoid overinterpreting) - they just describe a particular stance regarding the scriptures. While it is true that muslim literalism has bad reputation in the West, using the term can be done outside of a progressist normative framework.

My understanding is that Wahabism is a very important aspect of modern Islam, even in countries of Soufi tradition, auch as Morocco. As a mystically inclined person it rubs me the wrong way, but I am fine with anyone deciding to follow that path.

It seems however to be fundamentalist in the bad sense of the word to assume that the Wahabi doctrine is the only proper interpretation of Islam. Wahabism is a relatively recent (and human!) creation, and multiple and conflicting interpretations of the scriptures are part of Islam since its very beginning - just take the Shia vs Sunni interpretations as an example. Even assuming that the Q'ran is God's word and the ultimate truth, we are still only imperfect humans trying to interpret it. Any interpretation in itself can only be imperfect, and it is the sign of a healthy tradition when conflicting interpretations can coexist and cross-fertilize. The humility that is part of devotion should also allow to be humble about one's own capacity to understand the truth.

This trend is visible in more than Islamic poetry: any spirituality that is not "secular" is seen as suspect and potential brainwashing. One can also see this kind of effect in "secular buddhism", which is presented as "the true message of the Buddha, with the archaic cultural baggage of antique India removed" - which forces to jump through some hoops, as the goal of Buddhism itself (ending rebirth) is seen as cultural baggage. Unfortunately, more often than not, it is just a way to avoid questioning one's own preconceptions and cultural baggage - that everything is "obviously" reducible to matter, that consciousness is "obviously" produced by physical processes in the brain...

Interestingly this is a theme one can find in Soufi literature: in the Conference of the Birds, from Persian author, and precursor to Rumi, Farid Ud-din Attar, there is the story of Archangel Gabriel seeing Allah deeply absorbed in listening to the prayer of a human. But when Gabriel searches, he cannot find who is this saint. Only when he finally searches outside of the Muslim world does he see that the prayer comes from an "Image Worshiper" (a sin in Islamic doctrine). What I get from this fable is that though the author recognizes the possibility for a human not exposed to the "true religion" to be of spiritual value, it can only happen if this human has a strong religious attitude of worship, prayer and devotion - he might pray to the "wrong" god, but with the right attitude. Which is kind of the opposite of taking out the religious elements - you might replace Allah by "the One" or "God" if this helps you resonate, but not dilute it in a vague formula such as "that which is good" or similar examples as described in the article.

Also, for anyone interested in learning more about the various currents and authors of Islam, I highly recommend the youtube channel "let's talk religion": https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL1Y159eb4Y50VDguvrSANnn3o...

The author is a researcher in religion science specialised in soufism, and he makes very clear and respectful videos about various traditions and authors. It definitely opened a lot the breadth of what I understand when people speak about "Islam".

Being honest does not mean having no filter. I have a colleague who is brutally honest on work related topics. If he does not like something, he is not afraid to say it without wrapping it in empty polite statements. But if he likes something he also says it immediately. It makes working with him very refreshing and efficient. But on private matters or politics he remains rather silent (and a very direct "I do jot want to disclose this information to working colleagues" kind of way).

The awareness of the innevitability of death can actually be freeing and help give more depth to life. For instance Maranasati practices in most branches of Buddhism or the "Memento Mori" of the romans and middle age christians. I am actually even convinced that death, even with all the pain and despair it brings, is necessary for beauty and mystery. And I say this as someone who had several close relatives dying recently and went through grief and accompanying the grief of others.

Midlife crisis might actually be an example of that: "why am I waste my time? It is limited, I need to make something meaningful" would likely not be a common thought if we were immortal. You cannot waste what is in infinite supply.

(Note that this is a theme one finds in Buddhist cosmology: birth in the human realm is seen as better than birth in the heavenly realms, where life is so long it is essentially infinite, because it is human mortality that helps getting the drive to study the Buddhas teachings to end the cycle of rebirth. Very refreshing idea if compared to classical conceptions of the Christian paradise)

Totally agree. When he started saying "just write books and readers will come" I had to think about https://xkcd.com/1827/

Not to say that all he says is rubbish. "Pennyless beats bitter" is a good heuristic and shows that he does not claim that it could not have gone south.

> This strikes me so hard because I have been considering prayer in exactly these terms in recent months. I think we need to reconceptualize prayer and move away from the new-age conception of mindfulness. And I mean "prayer" divorced from any religious context.

I have had a similar journey in the last years, drawing more and more inspiration from Christian, jewish and muslim contemplatives, after years of mostly following a "secular Buddhist" path (basically buddhism without believing in rebirth. Which becomes quite thin, as buddhism is the path towards the end of rebirth...). I am not sure of what you mean by "religion", but what I am convinced about is that we need to allow for more "religiosity" than what the typical mindfulness/secular Buddhist movement allows. What often happens (or happened, as I do not pretend to be an innovator there) in those circles is that the rejection of religiosity means that a lot of assumptions underlying our culture (mostly the materialist ontology) goes unquestioned. There is actually lots of values in opening to religious interpretations of mystical experiences, and opening the range of possible interpretation. Without falling into a new fixed ontology, therr is something freeing in allowing oneself to think in terms of "the divine", "the ground of soul" or "the eternal present".

I use my e-reader a lot, as I only have limited shelf space at home, and like to be able to take my whole library with me in the train. For most books, I am fine with having them only available on my device. Bit once in a while, I wish there was some way to get the physical copy of the book for free or at a discount when one purchased the electronic version. Not being able to have the physical book to display on my bookshelf and lend to friends and family, although I essentially paid the same price, frustrates me again and again.

Without the need to agree or disagree with the ruling itself (which I cannot read about, as the article is behind a paywall, and I expect that the ruling is more nuanced than what the clickbait title suggests), the fact that a person was condemned for saying something for some reason (provocation to hate I would assume) does not mean that a mastodon server would be liable for relaying the information. Actually, politicians get condemned on a regular basis for diffamation or hate speech, but I never heard of any TV channel or newspaper being sued for having reported on the discourse of said politicians.

I have to say that I expected a bit more, as you mentioned "most content on the internet".

I am genuinely curious: can you give examples of illegal content a EU based server would not be allowed to display/link to but a US based would?

Re politics: it really depends. I work in a field tightly linked to policy, and have contacts in other fields linked to the ecological transformation. Lots of them post politically loaded posts related to their area of expertise (some even selfies in demonstrations), and I think it actually serves them. Basically, it gives trust in their commitment to their topic, and that they are not only there for the paycheck.

What I really "like" about the footage of the launch is how the commentator says "every parameter nominal" literally as the thing is blowing up. This is a great illustration of how fast the system failed.

So much of how difficult suffering is comes from how we relate to it. I have one close relative diagnosed with incurable cancer, just one year after we lost his wife to another type of cancer, after a difficult 2 years long fight. I learned a lot about relating to death and suffering in the process. I am very influenced by buddhist thought, and used to be of the idea that the beat way to react to a relatives death was to meditate on the lack of independent reality of the self, and on the inevitability of death. I also used to think that the "skillful" reaction would be equanimity, total and calm acceptance of what happened. But when trying it, it felt very wrong. What changes a lot is to learn to accept the suffering, and learn to relate to it from a position of humility and openness. What I found is that, if suffering sometimes lessens in the process, it does not need to be, and even when it stays stable or grows, the shift in perspective can be incredibly freeing. For instance, one might feel powerless and angry at the world that made a relative sick, and at the medical system that failed to give an appointment on time and thus allowed the cancer to grow too much, etc. Just trying to be equanimous, to "letting it go", to see it as delusion feels very disrespectful and unhelpful. But by opening to it, sometimes the pain and anger are not "my" anger anymore, but universal love expressing itself through me, an expression of something bigger.

Here is some material that guided me through this process:

"A Buddhist grief observed" by Guy Newland. Pretty much describes the confusion I describe above.

"Being with dying" from Joan Halifax. Here, it is a buddhist hospice worker who explains how Buddhist teachings help her in her relation with the dying.

Finally, the teachings of Rob Burbea. He was a buddhiat teacher whom we lost in 2019 to cancer, and whose philosophy shifted over the years from a very interesting take on insight meditation towards a spirituality of reenchantment and meaning searching/making. Hearing his latest talks, which he was recording for hours from his bedroom between chemotherapy sessions, where he describes how he relates to his own dying is incredibly inspiring (and I am pretty much in love with the whole of his teachings).

This is funny, I come from a different angle and see almost the opposite of what you see (being overly caricatural on purpose):

- where you see the dropping of an old cynicism, I see a lot of capitalist cynicism: where spiritual masters would spend years in prayer and meditation before teaching for free and providing help to all, we now have "life coaches" who ask absurd prices to guide you, because they had a "breakthrough" after two months of psychotherapy

- where you see modern spirituality without the traditions of religion, I see the form of religion (groups organized around a particular dogma, with churches organized around trademarked psychotherapeutic methods) without spirituality

Spirituality and mysticism are all about metaphysics: we got physics to an absolutely awe inspiring level of sophistication, but we still pretty much ignore completely what consciousness is (and we might forever). Spirituality is, according to me, entering into that mystery and poking at it. I personally think metaphysics is an essential part of meaning making, and as such of well being. But this means that I need to be able to discuss it with someone who cares about it, not someone who just sees it as a story that helps holding it together.

Actually, I do not think that a strong secular education makes it more difficult to achieve your two goals than a strict religious education. Just pointing at the fact that one of the extremes you want to avoid is framed with religious vocabulary (holier) kind of shows that religion is no antidote to the extremes (as one saw quite a lot in history).

One of the main things I practiced in the last years is to increase my "ontological flexibility", both by rational consideration of the limitations of my mental models, and by actual meditative practice of developing different "ways of looking", including theistic and animist ones. What this kind of practice does is (i) to reduce unhelpful attachment to fixed views (because I now experience a few of them, incompatible with each other but internally consistent, in a regular basis), and (ii) to open to a range of beauty that I did not suspected, and which is hard to put into words (and even harder to not make sound super cheesy). I am mostly following this kind of teachings, though I read texts from religious thinkers of every religion and time in history: https://hermesamara.org/teachings

What I wonder, though, is how much influence this had on my behavior. Even if my experie ce changed quite a lot, it could be little, as related in this article: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/10/21/the-pnse-paper/

As you mention Buddhism, there are actually a few things both in the Pali canon and modern teachings that come to mind and illuminate the present discussion:

- in the Pali Canon (the oldest recollection of "discourses" attributed to the Buddha), the Buddha teaches very different things to different people. There are very technical suttas about advanced meditation practices for monks, but there are also suttas that are very down to earth and centered on "earthly" concerns. There is for instance a touching one where the Buddha teaches to an old couple how to accumulate merit in order to be reborn in a life where they could meet and mary again. - clinging and attachment are two of the "three poisons" in Buddhism. Stopping to cling to things and get attached to them is a big portion of the goal of Buddhism. This is why most teachers repeat to "let go, let go, let go". This includes letting go of concepts (such as the "three poisons") or attachment to experiences (such as calm born from meditation). This can be confusing. A Theravada Abbot named Thannisaro Bikkhu has an interesting twist: he compare the path to a ladder. Obviously, once you are at the top, you should let go of the ladder. But on your way up, you need to cling to the steps of the ladder, otherwise you fall. So he advocates "skillful clinging": cling to the teachings, cling to meditative experiences, get attached to them, this is fine. This will give you the motivation to practice and progress. Just be ready to identify when this is not useful anymore, when you can let go of that step of the ladder to reach for the next.

The main take away is that teachings, in particular in psychology or spirituality, are aimed at persons who are at a particular position on a path. Part of the misunderstanding might be that one fails to see that one is not at the point of understanding that allows to actually get what is expressed. This kind of participates in the beauty of learning and teaching, but also means that one will likely never really understand deeply anything anyone communicates to us. We are just left to experiment on our side, and see if what we understand kind of fits the imperfect descriptions from others, and use those to inform back our search.

as an addedum, here is an article that I found well written about the equilibrium between formulaic and "freestyle" interaction with inner images: https://inthewilderless.substack.com/p/inner-wilds-alchemy-c...

This does not mean that therapists offering guidance or following a particular framework are chalatans, but it is an encouragement to avoid, as much as possible, to hammer definitions on phenomena too hard. Those frameworks exist, at least in part, because they have proven useful to some people, but none of them is "the answer".

Good advice, though in the end ot still boils down to "accept yourself", which is the kind of advice she said she found unhelpful at the beginning... I think this is kind of a "Monad tutorial situation", were the important part is not the words, but the intuitive understanding... And once one finally achieved some intuitive understanding, one wants to help the world and spread it, without realizing that the only way is to use the words one found unhelpful for so long... But sometimes the 101st reformulation is what makes someone's understanding make "click", so why not.

Anyways, this is not a critic to the author as such, just a recognition of the phenomenon. I am actually tempted to bring in my own words there, in case my particular reformulation can help someone. I am familiar with the kind of "vision" (for the lack of a better term) the author describes, and they can be extremely healing. However, I think it is a mistake to overinterpret those: oh, ok, this village is actually the set of my personality traits, and I need to show them love to integrate them and blabla... I mean, it can be a valid interpretation, but in my experience it is not useful. Much better is to develop a sense of what feels useful in the moment, and let the image develop on its own agenda. It feels like it would fit to kneel and ask for foregiveness? Try it. Or maybe what feels good it to let the Smurf Army crawl under your skin and break you to pieces. Let it happen. But most often than not, trying too hard to interpret what is happening (or worse, what is "right" or "wrong") according to some theory just gets in the way.

Good luck to all.

My understanding is that a lightning rod can only protect a maximal radius of 60m (see https://what-if.xkcd.com/16/). This would mean a mximal distance of 120m between rods in the areas you want to protect completely. I can imagine this is difficult, in particular if the rods need to be so high that they need support cables to avoid falling at the first wind gust.

I would expect that modern airports already offer the maximal protection attainable with lightning rods. Any parts of the airport currently not protected probably does not make sense to protect with this technology.

Addendum: I now read the article from which the citation comes, and the similarities with "imaginal meditation" and "soulmaking dharma", both in terms of experience and in terms of insight are striking. Pretty much every paragraph I thought "yes, I experienced that". Obviously, the experiences one gets by meditating 30 minutes a day are far from being as dramatic as what one gets under the influence of ayahuasca, but by getting them almost daily, I am not sure that the long term effect is lower. It might even be greater, because by meditating one trains to cultivate those ways of perceiving, rather than being "forced" to experience them.

If you are curious I definitely recommend checking out rob burbea's talks, e.g. here: https://hermesamara.org/teachings

Do you have any references about this "repeatability"? Is it repeatable for a given person, or across persons?

Regarding the possibility to do "experiments" or the usefulness of standard materialist epistemology to study consciousness, I recommend reading the galileo report: https://galileocommission.org/report/

It is a report from scientists worldwide, that calls for opening the field of what is considered "acceptable science" when studying consciousness. They mostly center their arguments around near death experiences and recall of past lives, but I think their arguments apply here.

What I got from them is that there is room to include more first person experiences in scientific research. We might never reach the same degree of certitude and precision as in the material sciences, but thsre is a strong argument to be made that consciousness is likely not just emerging from matter, but might be of a different nature. Continuing research about how could consciousness emerge from material processes is legitimate and important, but it should not be seen as the only possible explanation, and researchers should not be shamed out of making wildly different assumptions (as long as they are rigorous and honest).

I am curious to see what will come out of this DMTx project. I am not yet sure what to think about them from their website, but I will definitely try to remember to check them out again in the future!