Thank you kind sir for answering and sharing your experience.
I'm only vaguely familiar with satanism and all the form it can take, I assumed it was about bringing the human back at the center of the Universe "as a God" at the center of its own experience, dismiss him from its function and raise the human to a realistic and powerful place : We're not Gods but we're not a nothing, and we have strengh. I did not know that my claims about a "rational symbolic magic" could find followers here, i'll take a look !
Regarding your disappointment and desillusion of what's real I can relate somehow, most of the time reality can appear boring when you realize there is no unicorn, no telepathy, no quantum therapy of vibration (Damn my head hurts just saying these words together) and no attraction laws. At this point we can conclude that we know things and that we don't know other things but it's just a matter of time, and it can be pretty boring.
I suggest you consider two (three) points :
-The inner beauty of what's already there. I'm in the middle of a heat wave here in France and butterflies are everywhere, go grab one (don't hurt him) and just consider it for a short period of time : Try to grasp the amount of complexity of it, the billions of billions of atoms that compose it, the millions of year of evolution that leads to it. These same atoms that compose this little moth, try to think about (you can't actually but try to create an idea of it) the travel this atoms made, from the core of a star to maybe the liver of Napoleon and then the cigar of Churchill, then try to picture yourself, your scale in front of the scales of the universe, Time, Space, Lenght Etc... And all of it is here in your hand.
this won't bring you a religious feeling but maybe something like a spiritual one, a vertigo and a strange feeling that you are dimensionless, a point on a line and that everythings unravel around you, and that you can't actually grab any of this, because a point can't reach his arms much further than the point itself.
-The strange nature of what we don't know. I just gave up on psychology for a simple reason, Every question is basically the same at the end of the "why" string. Every question if you question it as long as you can will end in a space when there's no word to describe things. There are still a lot uncanny abysses, think about what sleeps behind the door of consciousness, is it an illusion your brains simulate or is there something here we still can't grasp, think about what waits behind the big bang or at the dawn of life itself.
You seem to like math, think a bit about the Number and the Logic door, what we consider to be the bottom of math, what is it ? Why is this the bottom ? Because it is obvious ? Logic is obvious ? tautology.
There's another vertigo i can suggest. I have the sense that we have moved a lot on these questions since the dawn of humanity but that we can dig as long as we want there is still more to dig (kinda looks like Aquinas' argument)
-Finally, just consider you, your fellow humans and other living things being at a center (and not the center) of these two worlds, and here i'll let you do the job.
This is for me, somewhat of a spirituality in itself, and all these things makes me look at the world in a lot of different ways. Entering a Cathedral I don't think God I think about all the humans that have been in there, that have worked in there, about the centuries of symbols that show up to you here on the walls (Maybe this is thinking about God who knows). And after all i remind this story of a king who asked for perfect happiness, the magus give him a simple ring, but on the inside of it was an inscription : This too, will pass.
When i think about it i realize I could think all day about what "pass" can mean here, And this I love, This I contemplate... And this is close to magic to me.
Asperger is a strange thing really, I think we all have our wonders, The Autsim spectrum allows you to dig in your wonders till some depths neurotypic people won't even see but unfortunatly sometimes it closes some doors too yes... Maybe some wonders will stay mysterious to you forever, like maybe music, but in the end as a psycho student and a philosophical jester I believe we all have a wonder in common and this the ontology... And we find new ways to ask the question everyday.
Thank you again for sharing ! This means a lot.
Yes of course a year is a priori enough to see changes.
Yup, this was the conclusion of my first answer ! It would be wonderful, but I truly believe that a two weeks study won't show any valid result in terms of personnality. But yes i agree, what are they waiting to for to conduct a large scale study ?! :)
Yes, attention can be indeed mediated through general tiredness and general motivation but also a large number of other factors like cognition need. The idea is that all of these factors can be well modified by other things than your meditation routine (for example tiredness can be modified just by what you did the very same you make the test), making the measurement difficult implement, can be done but with a hell ton of stats...
No i don't know any, with a quick research i found this article in the NYT that maybe can give some hints
https://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/04/03/how-meditation-might-boost-your-test-scores/
Studies are linked but of course it'll cost you some money... But you might note that results needs a intensive routine in order to be significant. with a strong training, tests like Wais might be relevant after a few weeks but again i'm not sure these test are made for this purpose unfortunatly...
Good night !
EDIT : Testing bottom up process could be interesting in order to measure attention. A lot of tests are available for visual, auditory attention. Create your own items and make the passation randomized, measure reaction time. One or two weeek with no meditation at all and same duration for with meditation. Present results in term of Z-score and check for trust-interval with the standard deviation of you consider relevant.
But you're not supposed to see large changes in a personality test, Big 5's dimensions are theorically stable over time. Very large changes can be attributed inter alia to a Pygmalion effect due to self-evaluation (It can also be founded in hetero-evaluation). In these conditions it's common to see very large changes in Big 5, i'm agreed that it is a language abuse to qualify this as measurement errors but the result is the same, it do not measure real changes. Correct me if i'm wrong but this is why it is very common to confirm the fidelity of a big five with a test-retest process, because Big five is supposed to have a strong over time consistency.
Big 5 is a personality test. Personality is not supposed to change over a short period of time. All results should be measurement errors and random fluctuations from testing conditions. It would be interesting to see personality changes over a long period of time though.
It's seems difficult in a first place to measure... But why not. Validity and sensitivity won't be that big of a problem if you decide to use standardized tests. I'm more concern about fidelity.
It will most likely contain some error. Your test can give you some result that you might interpret when in reality it can only show random fluctuation. Understand here : There are standardized tests, so they won't show you random fluctuations but they're designed to measure a criteria IN GENERAL and not the part of this measure which is due to your meditation. Here there is kind of a blurring between sensitivity and fidelity...
Fidelity : I'm concern about consistency, there is so much things that can interfere with this especially when you're trying to measure stress (Stroop), attention and time reaction : tiredness, motivation etc.. And each of these factors are altered by your meditation routine ! It's kind of a mess. (Maybe Alpha Cronbach ?)
You would need a large amount of try to get some usable data out of it. You would also need to control general tiredness and motivation, who can have a large impact on your result (would be the first thing i'd measure in fact)... Well it seems difficult and I won't be the person who's going to stat this up !
I suggest you use standardized test used for meditation if it exists in pseudo clean condition (the cleaner you can)
Good luck
I'm from an occidental culture... It's difficult to understand and to adopt a spirituality from the opposite side of the world, codes and symbols are upside down (or downside up ! ) and it's easy to get "cultural interference" that mislead you in your path. When i think about it i thought about cultural appropriation before it was a cool hipster thing... Now i tend to feed on everything I found and make my own occidental mess of a spirituality. I guess everyone who's a minimum curious tends to mix up different ideas he can rely on.
Thank you very much it was a really good talk !
PS : again sorry for misspost my pc is a mad beast... sorry mods
Exactly, I think words are conforting, they give us something to rely on. As they are barely the only thing we can rely on, more than useful they're a essential. But I think it's indispensable not because the balance between word and wordless is the thing that makes us progress but because the word keeps us bounded to our condition. As we can't let us drown into the speechless and the silence we need some sort of rope to ride up the cliff afterward (or get down the moutain depending on your personnal and cultural orientation and symbolic). I think a balance can be found here, we need to loose words to approch some interesting "non-thoughts like things" and we need words in order to not loose sanity in the process and be able continue on living our human lifes after this.
Thanks again.
I'm not a budhist neither a Taoist. I make my own soup with all this really... but i'm really limited to the only few books i've read, i'm more confortable with vedantic and post vedantic cultures and spiritualities.
PS : Sorry for misspost
If the person cannot bring an argument for the unability of measurment then i guess it could fall under the arument of ignorance "I, and maybe we, don't know if, then either it's impossible or everything is possible". In this case "I don't know how to put a value in human life then it's impossible". This my best shot so far but it has some limits i guess, usually the argumebt of ignorance is used in a debate where facts have a important place as "Do Alien already came to earth" or "Do vaccines work ?". In this case the argument can take the following forms : "We cannot proove that aliens didn't land in ancient greece therefore it can be possible", "We cannot say for sure that nobody has ever died because of a vaccine, therefore we can't proove that vaccines are dangerless".
In this case (the value of a human life), i think that the debate deserve more than a fallacy accusation, the value of a human life brings so much ethical mindtwisters (for ex. The tram dilemma) that bringing the "ignorance fallacy" on the table seems a bit easy and lazy.
To answer this we would need to explain what the fallacy is here, and simply saying "I believe this is wrong" doesn't make it a fallacy.
I think you need time to develop what you think is wrong fundamentally wrong here, at a philosophical, ethical and utilitaristic level (i guess utilitarism is your path to claim that human life has a measurable value) because if human life has a value and if you find out that this is a fact ( which would make the opposite claim wrong and maybe fallacious ) you would have knocked out an entire field of philosophy on which brilliant mind have been struggling for years.
If you believe I'm wrong, then I would demand you to develop on where the fallacy is here, because in the end i steuggle to see any, i just see a philosophical and ethical ungoing debate (And it's rare to see a philosophical question solved by a final yes or no answer, it happens sometimes but it's rare).
Edit : I hear you saying that reducing uncertainty is a form of measurment, but for something to be a fallacy it needs to be fallacious regardless of anything, if you can bring a valid argument in favor of this claim in a different way it's not a fallacious argument, just a argument which can be discussed. A fallacy is always wrong regardless of how you see it " Vaccines cause cancer because my son got cancer after his shot " is a fallacy and is wrong regardeless of everything.
" We cannot put value on a human life " is not a fallacy because a valid argument could be raised to support the claim, the best you can do is saying "How lazy of you ! Let's put some value on it and see if we fail so much that i'll have to admit you're right. And if we succeed, then pay me a beer"
Good day to you