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... (read 677 more words →)
Hello Guys,
This post will act as a bottle thrown in the sea, a "Is anyone like me anywhere ?" as well as an occasion, i hope, to discuss a more serious topic with you. Some claims made here might push on your "pseudo-science" button, please read until the end.
Please allow me to start with a brief (not so brief) testimonial in order for you to grab the topic.
I'm a 21 baguette french person.
I consider myself as a rationalist, i believe in demonstration by facts and I believe I don't have any superstition like telepathy, parapsychology or flat-earth BS. I love all kind of science and deductive/inductive thinking in general. I'm basically passioned... (read 928 more words →)
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... (read more)
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... (read more)
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... (read more)
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