Spanish climber emerges after 500 days in cave
cbc.ca
cbc.ca
This will probably make it not a record previously held by an Ucranian on 465 day mark but still very impressive
Also there will be a documentary coming out from her team
> For the first six months of her captivity, Kampusch was not allowed to leave the chamber at any time, [...] Afterward, she spent increasing amounts of time upstairs in the rest of the house,
> In later years, she was seen outside in the garden alone
Seems she wasn't underground for the entire duration.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritzl_case
Disturbingly, also Austrian...
Even though I’m usually against moves towards longer sentences, reading this was actually quite disturbing.
Right, which is why I said, "to TRY to be the first to ascend certain summits via certain routes, well into his late 80's and early 90's". I never said he succeeded, just that he was an older gentleman still putting forth as much as he could to accomplish a hefty goal, which happened to be a lot more than most at that age could do.
Edit: https://youtu.be/mc1sqxXSMZ4 at about 9 minutes 20 seconds in, they show him traveling to China at 83 to try to be the first to ascend Haizi Shan.
Look, I realize he has a bit of a name brand that resulted in lots of people trying to do things with him in his old age that he really didn't have the ability to do at that point. It's also unclear if anyone ever tried to bring him on a FA after that expedition.
I realize that stoke for climbing never died for him, but the limitations of his body caught up with him, as they will with all of us. I don't think there were any serious FA attempts of his in his 80s, even if people liked to advertise an expedition with him as such.
Even getting to base camp of an alpine expedition is a remarkable accomplishment at his age.
But since you brought up Fred Beckey, I thought it was worthwhile to correct an inaccuracy about him. People on this forum tend to value accuracy of claims after all, and the man has accomplished enough that we don't need to go making up additional things.
This thread could have ended 6 comments ago with "my bad, he was maybe attempting first ascents into his early 80s, though probably not seriously past his 70s. I remembered wrong". Claiming it's an "ackshually" about your original point just seems like a mischaracterization of the whole thread, and honestly, we should be OK just taking ownership of mistakes instead of getting defensive.
I don't see what is inaccurate about what I said. Coaxed or not, he still got out there and tried for that first ascent, even getting to base at 83 which, to your point, "is a remarkable feat at almost any age". I never claimed anything inaccurate - he tried, and that's the truth.
But alright. I'll sit with this for a bit and maybe I'll end up understanding my inaccuracies.
Enjoy your weekend.
And aside from that, my response about him not making any FAs in his 80s was based on initially misunderstanding your comment to be claiming otherwise, adding to a bit of miscommunication here.
You have a great weekend as well
Keep the prosecutions coming. We should all cheer whenever some Nazi thug goes to jail and their family gets to deal with that terrible embarrassment.
These trials are a fools errand anymore. The youngest any possible defendant could be is about 95, and the youngest any potential witness could be is probably somewhere in their mid 80s. It is literally not worth the time and effort anymore to put one of these show trials together -- and that's what they are, is show trials. The sentence a 95 year old man receives does not matter. It's not even a meaningful punishment, and he most likely will not serve a day of it. Meanwhile, we have real problems affecting people today, and the next generation, such as climate change, that are much more urgent.
You are not going to talk me out of this position, even using ad hominem like "arrogant."
You will not talk me out of this.
There are several reasons to imprison criminals:
(1) To physically prevent them from harming the public again.
(2) To discourage them from committing crimes again in the future.
(3) To punish them because punishing criminals is morally just.
Reasons (1) and (2) are what you are thinking of when you say it’s useless to keep an 88-year-old in prison. (3) is your “appeal to morality”. However, there is also:
(4) To discourage others from committing similar crimes.
That last reason is just as important as the others, if not more so.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-11944009/Monster-...
> the imprisonment and degradation of his own daughter — is described thus: ‘At first it was just a mind game I played. But I got used to it. The idea, which had previously seemed so absurd, so monstrous to me, took shape.
> ‘One day I knew what I had to do. All that remained was to wait for the right opportunity. On that rainy Saturday morning the time had come. The thought had become action.’
> ‘It wasn’t easy, because the thoughts of what I had done were constantly circling within me,’ he says. ‘I was constantly energised. There was no one I could confide in. I had to look ahead and continue on the path I had chosen.’
Similarly, I generally believe in giving people the opportunity to rehabilitate themselves and get on with their lives and don’t think that people should have to permanently live with the stigma of crimes they committed in the past. However, I don’t think that records of violent or similar criminal behaviour should be completely expunged; they should still be available in certain situations.
A single year for something like this just seems bizarre to me. No wonder the late 60s had so much violent crime..
It takes a special kind of person to volunteer for that and follow through with it.
I don't think I could stay alone in a cave for 100 days and emerge with my sanity intact, forget about 500.
No chance to survive, hard radiation, rescue would need at least a year.
She can still be the kind of person you want to send to Mars.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2023/apr/12/nasa-texas-h...
For better or worse we're seeing a resurgence in privately funded space exploration which may be the key to making it happen this time.
Private companies can also go bust or be bought up by competitors only to be shutdown.
Just recently Virgin space (or whatever it was called) closed its doors. There wasn't a public debate beforehand, it was just announced. Sure insiders knew about it but not the broader public.
I'm not implying that spaceX is going shut its doors but it even less incentive to be transparent than a governmental organisation.
They flew something like a handful of missions in 20 years with an unscalable platform and to my knowledge they never once received money to put a payload into orbit.
They are totally incomparable to SpaceX, the company that is putting more tonnage into orbit than any other entity, corporate or governmental.
What they are doing now is cool but they are still a business which offers a launch services at a competitive price and a satellite internet provider themselves. How does an exceptionally expensive (especially in this financial environment) Mars mission fit into that.
I highly doubt Space X could ever realistically get to Mars before NASA. Artemis seems way more promising than SpaceX as far as manned space flight is concerned.
Personally I’ve gone a week without sunlight and rather enjoyed it.
Not taking anything away from yourself or others. Just making a point that’s it’s not that unusual for people to live without the sun for extended periods.
Personally I severely underestimated the effect of large periods of time without sunlight, before going through it myself
I’m not suggesting that SAD isn’t a real thing either. Clearly there’s even a lot of research into it. In fact I have a few friends who suffer from it. But SAD was never my point.
the point behind my post was just stating that plenty of people do live without the sun for extended periods and thus this article isn’t an isolated incident.
And literally the only reason I made such a point was because the GP seemed surprised that someone might live that way.
Edit: By the way, I’d love to see some statistics to back up your “blight” statement. Because there’s plenty of stats that rank Nordic counties highly in happiness and good mental health despite them having longer and darker winter months.
Eg https://www.psycom.net/depression-central-html/depression-ce...
I don’t dispute cases of SAD would be higher in such countries (I haven’t personally run the figures) but equally I suspect your actual statement isn’t a fair reflection of the real situation either.
I do enjoy sunlight, but a lack of it isn't the end of the world for me. The world keeps on spinning, I don't become dysfunctional from a lack of light, though my mood is elevated by it like anybody.
Thinking about it for a few hours, yes, I would happily go and live in a cave for a few years. Wouldn't want to spend my entire life there as I feel I'd miss out, but yes, wouldn't bother me much. I'm very comfortable with being on my own.
I suspect this is something that researchers would be interested in regarding the person in this article as well, given their statements.
But regarding those communities which do have extended periods of missing sunlight, they do have bars and other places where they meet and feel some warmth, and will always have the thought of this state being over in a couple of months. I guess they mostly do it because the nature imposes it on them.
Some go early. They're not suitably skilled to get food of they quickly figure out this isn't for them (one guy quit once before the first night.) In later seasons this group is very small.
Around the 30-50 day mark the emotional part comes into play. Quite a few quit for emotional reasons.
Once the hard-cores are left, then it comes down to food. At that point it becomes a race to see who can out-starve the others, without getting pulled for medical reasons.
They could see satellites, overtime, and figured what those were. Understanding that rocket tech had continue to advance. Plastic wrap, however blew their minds.
https://amp.theguardian.com/world/2015/nov/12/russia-recluse...
It’s quite amazing what the human mind can do. Especially when you’re crazy.
At what point do we consider this a mental illness rather than some higher ascent?
It doesn't seem too wild to use irrational belief in something (faith) to make oneself happier through tough times.
It does seem wild to spend your final days in a pit alone until you starve/dehydrate to death painfully.
These monks aren’t impulsively killing themselves, they seem to be towards the end of their lives anyway and are choosing how they want to go out. I don’t see what’s wrong with that. I might prefer to be in hospice hopped up on drugs when I pass, but I won’t claim to be morally superior for it.
Religion is basically always a socially acceptable mental illness that we not only tolerated but encouraged because it has been a part of civilization since before we formed the basic premises for what constitutes a civilization.
That doesn’t make it an illness, unless it produces massively negative outcomes.
If someone wants to amputate their own hand, for example, it seems hard to argue that they shouldn’t be allowed to. But it does depend whether they’re mentally sound; you wouldn’t want to let someone who’s clearly suffering an illness do that.
It’s… tricky. I try to err on the side of personal freedoms though.
Where we draw the line on "mentally sound" is a social construct, right? I can't really wrap my head around somebody wanting to amputate their own hand and at the same time being considered "mentally sound" by the people around them.
> If someone wants to amputate their own hand, for example, it seems hard to argue that they shouldn’t be allowed to
I just don't get this. I suppose it hinges on what you mean by "allowed to". Maybe there's an argument to be made around personal bodily autonomy, that as a society we decide we don't want the government to compel us not to do things like this? But if someone I loved expressed to me that they wanted to harm themself I would do whatever I could to convince them not to. If one of my kids tried to chop off their hand for no good reason I would do everything I could to prevent it.
usually when the patient complains or harms someone else, and not before
There are just too many times you read through people doing horrific things throughout history, and if you read enough you can understand the viewpoints and the cultures that drove those people do to those things, but at the end of the day, I can't help but feel like: "why can't people just, from time to time, take a step back and think: really though, do I think this is right?" and then truly be willing to make the changes necessary to their life's choices if the answer is: "No".
It doesn't matter if it is something as obvious as being a member of the einsatzgruppen, or just realizing that you're spending too much time at work when you need to be home with your family (or vice versa).
People don't seem to do this nearly enough, and I've found that generally, its a more important moral signifier than the deep and complicated ideologies we mentally build for ourselves that gets us into these situations.
So no. Even if the moral ideology of these monks is crystal clear, perfectly logical, and rationally perfect, at the end of the day, they've chosen suicide over finding a way to enjoy life. They've failed the kindergarten morality test.
- Why is suicide bad?
- Why is there a presumption that this is your one and only life?
- Why is there a presumption that life is made to be enjoyed?
- Why is there a presumption that consciousness ends after life ends?
- If death is inevitable, then couldn't suicide be broadly construed to pretty much ... just living?
Believe it or not, these are thoroughly explored by monks and philosophers. Ironically, I think perhaps, you should take a step back and examine some of your own frame in looking at this.
I'll start with this: there are more than one kind of motivation for ending one's own life. The most common one, which we call suicide, is usually done after giving up on life because there is overwhelming pain. There is a lively debate about this going on with regards to assisted suicide, including certain countries having passed legislation with state-funded assisted suicide. It's not that I agree with this kind of suicide, but rather, I think you are construing suicide far too broadly, conflating what the monks are doing with suicidal people overwhelmed with pain.
What these monks are doing are not an attempt to kill themselves, because things are more difficult. If that were so, there would be no tradition of self-immolation.
To give you a contrast, look at say, a modern -- still living -- teacher named Adyashanti. In the past year or so, he took a sabbatical from teaching due to his health condition, where he silently attends and lets his partner lead the teaching. And it may not seem like it when you hear him speak over the years, but he has been experiencing significant pain for years due to his ongoing health condition.
It's the same realizations he has that allows him to carry on with his teaching despite experiencing that pain, as it does with the monks going through mummification or self-immolation.
> Why is there a presumption that consciousness ends after life ends?
Because there’s no evidence to the contrary and Occam’s Razor as applied the plain observations of life and death suggests this is a reasonable base assumption. “The simplest explanation is usually best.”
(and by the way, you only picked two out of many questions to answer)
Theism in itself is a simpler explanation for existence than atheism, and yet many rational people are atheists. Is it because they weighted all the possibilities or because they discarded the option a priori?
We are all way less rational than we would like to believe.
We could also explain computers as magic and it would be simpler than explaining it with electricity and math.
No religions are based in any observable facts* and thus being naive explanations, indistinguishable from magic.
* More like they are based on deprecated observable facts, at first the sun and nature, later man and it's dramas. Now we now the sun is just a big ball of gas and man is just a big brained mammal.
That being said religion is just one area of many and you could be very rational in lots of them but be religious for whatever reason.
A belief in natural emergence relies not only on endless untestable hypotheses, but even still results in the exact same sort of frustrating unanswerables. For instance if one believes that the initial matter, which would culminate in the Big Bang, whisked into existence through a quantum fluctuation, then it immediately leads to the question of what created this void, rich in quantum interactions, or the nature of quantum interactions themselves? And for that there's not even a hypothesis, untestable or not.
Maybe there will be one day, but also maybe not. To me the simplest answer is to simply acknowledge of our own inability to offer any compelling answer to this question. That's not to say an acceptance of such inability, but assuming the nature of a destination (one way or the other), in a journey we've yet to even scratch the surface of, seems neither simple nor wise.
If the self-mummifying monks took this approach, they would probably take a vacation from monking after their trains of monkish thought arrived at suicide, instead of going through with it.
I mean, I don't know a whole lot about Buddhist, but I suspect that you don't either (please correct me if I'm wrong). And really, is dying in peace during a religious ritual really so much worse than desperately clinging to life in hospital for the final before death, maybe ruining and exhausting your closest family in the process? Don't get me wrong, I prefer our way of life, but I believe you think your (our) culture is the only correct one, and for example refer to it as "gut-checking" or "childlike simple thinking". I don't think it's as universal and obvious as you think.
So no, to answer your question, I don't know much about Buddhism. I don't know much about mathematics, either, at least not when compared to how much there is to be known. And yet, if I heard about a subset of mathematicians who believed in a proof that one was equal to zero, I'd still dismiss it (and them, to some extent). The same is true of a subset of philosophers (these particular Buddhist monks) who arrive at the conclusion that they should let their own functioning bodies die. I'm sure they've thought a lot about it; certainly a lot more than I have! But there's a thing that sometimes happens when you think about a problem too much, to the point of obsession: You can end up even further from the truth than you started.
Just look at the hardcore utilitarians. Look at Ayn Rand. All of them know more about ethics and philosphy in general than I do. Doesn't mean I can't dismiss them with a heuristic, which I do. Why is there reverence for suicidal Buddhist monks in this arena, but not the equally-kooky Western utilitarians?
I don't want to derail the conversation, but there are many pretty weird and diverse ideas in mathematics, including finitism and ultrafinitism (where people just don't believe in some very large numbers), various subsets of peano axioms (where 1 != 0 may not be provable), or modular arithmetics (where 0 = 2 may be true).
> The things you feel before you get taught to feel anything. The things that make us feel kinship with dogs and gorillas.
I'm not convinced I should listen the Things absolutely. The Things often tell me to hit someone annoying in the face, eat exclusively very caloric and fat food, and seek sexual gratification with every female of age around me. I don't think the Things are as smart as you give them the credit for.
> (...) who arrive at the conclusion that they should let their own functioning bodies die.
What about:
- Medieval old people, who just left for the woods when they felt they're getting old and are a burden on the family.
- Mothers sacrificing their life for their children
- Strong and healthy males on Titanic who, despite their physical superiority, decided to let women and children first
- People fighting in war/guerilla for their country or their beliefs
That's not really what I'm talking about. I'm imagining somebody who is so sure of their own mathematical reasoning skills that upon proving to themselves that the number one, in its simplest sense, was equal to the number zero, they started behaving as though this were the case. Perhaps going mad and (in good service of the analogy I'm making) killing themselves.
> I'm not convinced I should listen the Things absolutely. The Things often tell me to hit someone annoying in the face, eat exclusively very caloric and fat food, and seek sexual gratification with every female of age around me. I don't think the Things are as smart as you give them the credit for.
FWIW I think everything you're listing has some amount of instinctive conflict. Violence requires you to disable empathy. Chronic gluttony eventually requires you to turn off your ego and hate yourself. These are conflicts that (apologies for leaning heavily on this point, but it's kind of central) pretty much everybody, from a very young age, learns about and has to work through.
The red flag is when you arrive through cold reasoning alone at a conclusion that makes no sense to any of your instincts, as evidenced by the fact that the average person off the street is completely bewildered by your conclusion. Like the idea that you should starve yourself for no other reason than that you have freed your spirit of all desire.
> What about... [four moral case studies]
Moral conflicts are still moral conflicts. Killing to avoid killing, violence to avoid violence. In the more difficult cases, perhaps even killing to avoid non-lethal violence (e.g. slavery), or even suicide to avoid extreme pain or the moral paralysis of your family members. Yet again, the sorts of decisions that people actually have to make with some regularity. The sorts of things we feel we need to teach children about, as they become adults.
Suicide for purely ascetic reasons is not a moral conflict. From an unlearned perspective, it's just wasteful and bizarre. It seems to be the ethical equivalent of the mathematician going mad after incorrectly proving to himself that one apple was equivalent to zero apples.
An NGO volunteer working with that community found out about an elder doing that walk. She went off looking for the elder, and found her. Sobbed and begged her to not do this.
The beauty I see in this story isn't one where it ends with the NGO volunteer somehow convincing the elder to live longer. But rather, that of an elder, knowing that the time has come, and all those loose ends have been tied, the words have been spoken, resolving all the regrets and longings, at that last moment of stillness as profound as witnessing a birth, the elder took the time to comfort and guide a stranger to their ways. A child born in a culture who have lost the wisdom of death. And this elder, passes one more wisdom as a gift. The NGO volunteer thought she was saving the elder, but it was the elder saving the NGO volunteer.
As a contrast there is this story that took place here in America, something I'll never forget. My wife and I visited my wife's grandmother when my son was about 6 months old. My grandmother-in-law was in bad health, having survived some major medical interventions where she is now on a highly restricted kidney diet and constant pain. We took the trip so that my grandmother-in-law has a chance to hold her great-grandson, and my son has a chance to connect with his great-grandmother, even if he will probably never remember it.
I remember when my grandmother-in-law, spoke in a voice on the verge of breaking, that she didn't know how long she could keep going. And I remember my wife telling her, to hang on for a few more years, because we were planning on raising another one. And my grandmother-in-law then said to herself, "ok, there will be another one ..." She continued living to see another two great-grandchildren from the extended family, and if things work out, another one this summer.
You just never know, just poking at the surface. It's easy to try to fit things in our comfortable narrative frames. Dealing with and surviving the death of another is no easy thing, and yet, there's great wisdom within those experiences.
I do not understand this mummification thing, but I do understand the concept that death is a transition to other worlds. A common goal of most spiritual traditions is to purify the person so that when they die they can ascend to the best possible next thing in their evolution. The Toltecs talk about cultivating “fire” inside one’s system such that they can use it to propulse themselves straight up into what’s next - and not get lost wandering into their attachments. The Buddhists talk about letting go of karma so we can stop reincarnating due to our attachments. It’s all very similar. My sense is these monks aren’t trying to escape life, but rather maybe felt ready to propulse their souls back into the cosmos with intentionality. I don’t understand it, but I can’t have the audacity of judging people who I know nothing of and who, if I met, would likely read me like an open book.
I do believe that Harry Potter is accurate when it separates magicians from moguls, and that as one reaches much higher levels of consciousness - their perceptions and abilities become unfathomable to the uninitiated. It doesn’t mean they can’t be wrong, or become twisted in their perceptions. But it means I’m not going to pretend I know better than them.
While there is wisdom in that kind of innocence, in this case, the best we can say is that this gut check points to a course or action is right for you. However, it is inadequate for assessing whether it is right for anyone else, much less in an universal sense.
If we are going to make this about listening to intuition, then sometimes, that gut check — or in the case of those monks, it would be a heart check — the answer for them, in that moment, is “yes”.
As a note, the Meiji-era government thought the practice was anachronistic and depraved. They criminalized self-mummification. The last successful practitioner of that particular sect in Japan accomplished it illegally. https://allthatsinteresting.com/sokushinbutsu
GP is merely pushing their own belief that suicide is not OK. Their line of logic belongs to a self-righteous person that uses cheap rhetoric to claim moral superiority.
> ~everybody
Debatable...
> who isn't clinically depressed or "galaxy-brained"
...And there comes the no true Scotsman.
It inflicts massive suffering to everyone around you and is frequently driven by incorrect perceptions of how bad things are which can be treated.
> - Why is there a presumption that this is your one and only life?
It might not be, depending on how you see loss of consciousness every night. Are you even the same person you were before sleeping last, other than that you believe you are?
> - Why is there a presumption that life is made to be enjoyed?
We seem to have some instinct to enjoy ourselves, though it can go wrong in many ways. Also, we like it.
> - Why is there a presumption that consciousness ends after life ends?
It really looks a lot like sleep, except that there are relatively few people who say they've ever observed anyone waking up from it.
> - If death is inevitable, then couldn't suicide be broadly construed to pretty much ... just living?
I mean, if we're going the kindergarten route, you'd tend to look at it as "just dying" ... except that many people have experienced it and it's generally horribly painful for everyone who was near you.
Tell me you’re vegetarian without telling me.
Let's say you travel for work for a week. If you analyze just that week, it appears you are living your life completely out of balance. Don't get to see your family at all. No time spent with close friends. No opportunity to deepen ties to your local community.
But if you only travel for a week and are otherwise home, and the career affords you the ability to take care of your family and community, then this is a reasonable trade-off. So you have to look at a larger timespan. But how large? A month? A year? What chronological scope is the right one to evaluate one's actions?
Now consider the much harder scope: number of people. Humans are social creatures and almost nothing that we do can be evaluated in isolation. Willingly dying in a knife fight certainly fails the kindergarten test. But not necessarily if doing so protects your family from the attacker.
But what kinds of sacfrifices do you consider reasonable and for which groups? Many jobs have some level of physical danger. Is it reasonable to take those risks for the benefit of the company? What harm would you accept to yourself to benefit your community?
What about your country? Flying a thousand miles to a foreign country to shoot someone in the face who did you no harm certain fails the kindergarten test. But what if your country is at war with that person's country? How does the kindergarten test handle this scenario when it's a member of the SS during WWII versus someone in some other conflict?
Morality is hard.
We're on a forum that is largely composed of engineers, business strategists, and other types of work that encourage and reward thinking deeply about their respective topics.
So I wanted to point out that human cognition is faulty. It is an important skill to be able to think 10 steps ahead in a chess game, but you have to remember that as much as we desire to be rational, we are imperfect rational creatures, and there's a percentage error on every one of those steps, as a result of our being human. To continue the example, its part of why chess is fun: you try to think X moves ahead, and realize that you miscalculated at step 3 when your opponent does something you didn't expect.
The same thing applies to life in general. We build up ways of thinking about things over lifetimes of thinking deeply on subjects. But each layer of learning is built on a previous layer, and each layer has a percentage error.
So it is important, from time to time, to stop and reassess. Is your current view of the world faulty? How might I be wrong? What if I am wrong? What would be the repercussions? Is my current way of thinking leading me to live the type of life I want to live? Is my way of viewing the world a positive or negative, for myself and for the people around me?
If the answer to any of those answers is no, that's a good indicator that the compounded errors in your way of thinking have lead you down a bad path, and you should stop and reassess.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hn1VxaMEjRU
And the thing is, that's not something that you can notice, unless you really take the effort to take a step back and re-assess, in part by asking such questions. We get so used to our current mode of thinking, whatever it is, that even if it has led us down dark and dangerous and self-destructive paths, it will feel normal at the time, unless one makes a conscious effort to re-asses from time to time, and really, genuinely, consider that our world outlook might really be deleterious or even outright wrong. Its what David Foster Wallace was talking about when he talked about his 'default human viewpoint', or 'this is water'.
And one last thing, if you do do these re-assessments, then you have two options. You can stop and reassess your way of thinking, and look for the mistakes in your thinking and evolve (which is always a good thing to do, always, regardless of whether or not you are wrong to begin with, this is how we grow as people).
Or you can choose to radically change your life outlook and philosophy, _even if you still believe your initial one was correct_, just because you think a different viewpoint might be beneficial. Because there are a wealth of different life philosophies that have been developed over the years, many of which have been deeply developed by myriads of intelligent people and refined throughout the ages. It turns out life is complicated, and the human brain isn't really capable of 100% understanding all of it, the best we can do is choose which lens we want to view it through. Learning how to view life through a different lens, if carefully chosen, is never a bad thing.
So I don't know much about the self-sacrificing monks in the original post. Maybe such self-sacrifice was the right thing for them to do. And I am not trying to come out against suicide, there are plenty of times in life where such self-sacrifice is warranted or a downright honorable thing to do. But I sure hope that each of those monks, before they did it, took some time to really consider that even if this was the right move for them to take, they could still choose not to do so. My suspicion of the average person, is that once they get in that deep, they tend not to do so, even when they are facing their own death, or the taking of another's life. And I think that's a tragic flaw in humanity.
This is just "What if the people in mental hospitals are the sane ones, and we're all crazy?" with fancier words.
It's well documented that this can end in severe depression (existential dread) or even suicide.
If you don't have a firm grip on yourself to begin with, I could see how it could end in insanity just as easily. Probably a little different cause and effect model though.
Someone could just as well believe that typing letters into a machine and waiting for more to appear from someone else you've never met on the other side of the world is a form of mental illness, or a type of spiritual suicide.
Some people may believe the entirety of modern life and many of its trappings are a form of mass insanity. And who's to say they're wrong?
Or putting other people's words in your brain could be considered somewhat icky ...
or brainwashed.
Besides the big one, some other positives:
- Lack of a single time zone means I can participate in international work/online communities regardless of location
- Jet lag is mostly not a thing, since my schedule is independent of where the sun is
- Plenty of quiet time while everyone else is asleep. I live in a very safe area and love going on 2am walks in the park with the entire thing all to myself.
And some negatives:
- My social life suffers a lot. I can only attend events if they happen to fall on a day of the week where I'm awake at that time. Right now this is mitigated somewhat because I'm living in Australia but working at US working hours, which means my weekend schedule lines up with "local time". So I tend to see local friends mostly on weekends.
- Requires flexible working hours, as it's not possible to be awake from 9-5 for 5 days in a row no matter what start point you pick for your schedule. From my coworkers perspective, I come in early on mondays (ending around their midday) and late on fridays (starting around their midday).
- At larger companies where they may want to do a "follow the sun" on call rotation (so you're only on call during your waking hours), I don't fit in anywhere because my waking hours aren't always the same.
- During winter, the lack of sunlight (since you're sleeping through it half the time) can get to you after a while.
- Anything that you're meant to do "daily" you either need to stretch to doing every 28hr instead, or have some complex accounting to do to ensure you do it once per 24h period (I mostly opt for the former).
(edited for formatting)
I wanted to improve this, but going to bed earlier would make me restless, and have even worse sleep. Forcing myself to wake up earlier was torture - be exhausted during the day, only to feel energetic at evening again, and not being able to sleep earlier.
So I "rotated the day". Each day, I went to bed 3 (or 4?) hours later, slept 8h, and woke up. This was a bit tiring, but not more than the other alternatives! It worked for a few weeks but later I went back to my old habits.
After 2 rotations, I went to the doctor and got calming medications and the the recommendation to go to sleep 1h earlier each day. This was much easier and I didn't get dependent on the medication.
Later, having a job with a schedule (not that rigid but also not super flexible) helped me get on track, and things haven't gotten so bad.
When on a standard cycle, I'd lie awake in bed bored out of my mind for _hours_ upon hours, fall asleep with only time for 0.3 to 2.5 sleep cycles, wake up in sleep-deprived pain and misery. (X_X)
In recent years, I deal with the standard cycle with the various in-vogue things like scheduled bluelight blocking, zero-lux bedroom (cities at night are so fekking bright compared to when I was a child), and sometimes morning-only caffeine sources.
I miss my 21/9.
Everyone is built different, I think I would have done good in a similar situation. I'm already an introvert, but having kids, a wife and bills to pay sometimes just gets overwhelming. I have a friend that has been in and out of jail for the last 10 years or so. We talk a few times a year (at my expense) and I hate to admit I sometimes get jealous. Every time he gets out, he goes right back to his old self: smoking, drugging, and missing parole meetings until finally a warrant is issued. I would think I would emerge from a jail cell full of newly gained wisdom. I'd reenter the world a master plumber, HVAC tech, CPA, and maybe even psychologist. Heck might even have some wonderful startup ideas. But in the current grind of things, I feel I have no room for self improvement or learning.
It took me years to become self-aware enough to understand who and what I am.
I love my daughters to death, now grown up, but I wish I could have been older and wiser when we had them so I could have done a much better job raising them.
Living in a small house with 3 other people, two of them noise-making children, on top of working from home (I was self-employed for 15 years) was very difficult for all of us and nearly killed me (literally). Had I understood why noise bothered me so much, why I needed time and space to myself, and why my anger issues were likely autistic meltdowns I think we could have made things work so much better and found a way to give our daughters a much happier and less stressful childhood.
This is one of the great things about the Internet. I was able to discover what introversion is, what high-functioning autism/aspergers is (no, I've never been diagnosed but even my mother tells me that it would explain my entire childhood), that other people go through this too and how to have these types of conversations with the people closest to you.
I'm very lucky to have a wife as patient and understanding as I do. We were high-school sweethearts and she went through the learning and discovery process with me.
I can't help you with how to make the time for self improvement and learning, but do know that it's not just you.
"To enable us to continue to be a part of thousands of personal achievement journeys, we can only provide access to use services such as an official adjudicator through our fee-based Consultancy service."
My guess is that both your old life as an attorney and current life as a IT/IP consultant involve some kind of "fee-based Consultancy services"
Lol. If you are going to get personal, at least read to the end of the bio. I am 100% definitely not any form of IT consultant.
But "longest record" is usually shorthand for "longest documented record", and indeed documented credibly.
To read the article I had to wait for the Play Store install an "instant app" that looks exactly like the website.
But when I tried to watch the video embedded, it told me that I needed to install the "full" app.
Why go through all of this when a good ol' website would've been more than enough?
I wonder if maybe I disabled something that caused the behavior you saw.
I clicked on the link, the page was open in Chrome for a split second before a new screen labelled Play Store took over.
Of course I could've just cancelled it during the 10 seconds or so it took install this "instant app" but I was curious about this new thing. I genuinely expected and wanted to test what I assumed would be an improved experience.
I was wrong.
So it's safe to assume that at her personal camp she had a tent and other provisions. Flies can get into the tent, of course, but it would keep most of them out. I think the worst part would be feeling "trapped" inside of the tent while waiting out the infestation.
She said she almost left when flies put larvae on her hair and she woke up basically surrounded to flys.
Honestly the lady is a professional sports woman, and she did seem a bit off when coming out and talking to the reporters, like nobody spends 2y solo and be like yeah im fine
"The Kogi people are an indigenous tribe living in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta mountains in northern Colombia. The Kogi have a strong spiritual connection with their environment and practice a number of rituals and ceremonies.
One such ceremony is the initiation of young boys into adulthood, which involves a period of seclusion in a cave. The initiation process varies in length, but it can last anywhere from several months to around nine years, depending on the specific role the boy is being prepared for in the community. During this time, the boys receive spiritual teachings and learn about the history, traditions, and values of the Kogi people. The initiation process is an important aspect of the Kogi culture, as it helps maintain the tribe's connection to their ancestral beliefs and practices."
Sounds like they live in a cave, but are not alone?
People throughout history just use caves as temporary shelter and dwellings enroute to a permanent destination.
EDIT: Bat is an exception to this but bat is the only mammal that fly
Most of the survivors moved to the US after the war. The story was only fairly recently recorded and turned into a documentary film, "No Place on Earth".
I wonder what the previous record for longest time spent in a cave in an experiment closely monitored by scientists seeking to learn more about the capacities of the human mind and circadian rhythms was?
> with no contact with the outside world
> Flamini was monitored by a group of psychologists, researchers, speleologists — specialists in the study of caves — and physical trainers who watched her every move and monitored her physical and mental well-being.
The knowledge that somebody is out there watching you changes the whole thing completely. What exactly was this study supposed to find?
On mobile (android, chrome) the linked news site forces "full screen" and somehow prevents the native browser address bar and options menu and native share icon etc from appearing. Even scrolling up or down doesn't show browser controls like it does on other sites.
Surprised this behaviour is possible and allowed by a website (full screen take over)
> in an experiment closely monitored by scientists
well, which is it... can you not contact them if they're monitoring you on IP cameras constantly?
> I had to learn how to absorb the powerful energies flowing through me. Thus, I decided to enter strict solitude for a hundred days. I needed this time to absorb the vision.
> I informed Pradeep about my plan and his meticulous management made it possible. I changed my routine and began meditating from 7 p.m. until 4 a.m. If, once or twice a month, the villagers passed this way for hay, Pradeep would tell them to keep absolutely quiet. They maintained both distance and silence. During this period, I neither met nor saw anyone. Pradeep would wake up at 1 a.m., take a bath, say his prayers and prepare my meal before 4 a.m. He would come to the little temple near my hut, ring a bell and hide behind the temple wall so that we did not see each other. I would then step out and go to his hut for my meal. Eating would take me nearly an hour because it was nothing short of a ritual for me. It was an opportunity to express my gratitude to Mother Nature, to the farmers who produced the grain and to Pradeep who cooked it. The digestive fire in the stomach is called vaishvanara. I would offer every bite to this fire, akin to the fire offering in a yajna. I still do, for that matter.
> While I was gone, Pradeep would wait for me quietly or refill the water bucket in my hut. He’d also fix the tarpaulin on the roof in case a storm had blown it about at night. If I needed to communicate something, I wrote a note and left it in his hut.
> Towards the end of March, I felt a shooting pain near my kidney. I was startled because I had already perfected my posture and wasn’t expecting any more pains. I’d already been through excruciating knee pains, severe backaches, a tired body and aching arms and shoulders. What was this new pain? The middle plank of my bed had completely sunk, making it an uneven and unsuitable surface to sit on; perhaps my posture was the cause of the pain. I placed my pillow on the plank but this didn’t help. I took an hour out of my sleep time and did some yoga asanas to stretch my body; this alleviated the pain just a little. It was becoming impossible for me to sit still for hours at a time, which is what I needed to do. I wasn’t going to give up on my 150-day meditation though; I had to get rid of this pain. Reflecting on the pain, it occurred to me that I hadn’t seen the sun for nearly two-and- a-half months. I took my morning meals when it was still dark. I used to step out occasionally during the day, but I hadn’t been out at all in the sunlight for nearly ten weeks now. I had been living in an extremely cold hut and didn’t use a fire to warm myself. The next day, instead of yoga, I spread a mat and sat outside with my back towards the sun. That night the pain subsided to a large extent. I repeated the process for the next few days and the pain disappeared. I would never know what really caused it, but sitting in the sun relieved it.
> Enjoying the sweetness of solitude, diving deep into the ocean of a still mind, I passed my days in deep meditation and crystal-clear awareness. I was acutely aware of everything around me: the sounds of hornets and wasps, a spider crawling on the wall, every drop of rain that fell. Any thought that emerged in my mind would not go unnoticed. This was truly an extraordinary level of awareness. My intuitive faculties entered a new dimension. No matter what question I thought of, an inner voice gave me the answer. One day, during meditation, the same inner voice instructed me to visit Kamakhya temple. I would get sarvoch tantric diksha, the highest tantric initiation there, it said. I was reminded of Bhairavi Ma who had foretold this in Badrinath. I decided to visit Kamakhya after the completion of my sadhana. But, right now, I simply lived in the present moment. I was the a boat sailing in an ocean of bliss; actually, I was the ocean of bliss itself.
> The silence within me was beyond description. Just as you churn milk and it turns into butter, and that butter can never become milk again, my mind had reached an irreversible state of peace and joy. I felt that to remain unaffected, no matter what the circumstances, to be unmoved by someone’s birth, death, acceptance, rejection, praise or criticism—this sense of dispassion and detachment was arising from within me, without any effort. I opened my notepad and scribbled in it: ‘Self-realization is not an instantaneous act. We may have an aha moment but it is mindfulness that allows us to navigate the world with the utmost awareness of our verbal, mental and physical actions. It is one thing to grasp that we are not just the body, but it is another thing altogether not to react when someone hurts us. We may recognize that anger destroys our peace of mind, but to remain calm, no matter how strong the provocation—that is real realization. Why did it take the Buddha six years to achieve liberation? If it was an instantaneous thing, he could have had it in the first month. It took Mahavira ten years and Ramakrishna Paramahamsa twelve years. The experiences, lessons, insights add up, finally bringing one to the point of realization. Water boils at 100 degrees Celsius but it takes a little while to get to that temperature. The flame that heats the water already holds the potential to burn as powerfully as the sun, but it is the water that needs to come to a boil. The soul or consciousness is ever pure; it is the conscious mind that needs to reach boiling point, while the subconscious has to imbibe the insights and the learning.
0: https://www.amazon.com/If-Truth-Be-Told-A-Monks-Memoir-Om-Sw...
It sounds like everything had been taken care of for her, which simply means the person was "crazy" enough to commit herself to an experience that a lot of people either wouldn't want to do, or didn't have the time to do. The article does not mention it, but I am sure this person has her life structured in a way where she was able to (financial and responsibility wise) do this without a second thought because "being quiet" is also part of her personality.
Not to discount her record or anything, but it's nothing more than a record.
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I don't mind the downvotes btw, but let me just point out that Yogis live in caves for 30 years at a time, and good luck earning their trust to let some scientists monitor real changes in the mind.
And these Yogis do so without any assistance from the external world. That sounds a bit more impressive to me.
And if you read the article, there is no mention of any conclusive research or any insight at all. But I guess it must have been _exactly_ 500 days for her to be in that cave for the scientists to finally start drawing some conclusions.
How am I supposed to respond seriously to an assertion like that?
I really don't understand why you felt the need to respond at all considering that I have my argument well under control.
You just spent the previous paragraph and opening line literally discounting it.
Feel free to enlighten me if it is something else. The article does not mention it.
Yogis well known to leave their caves in order to gather picnic baskets.