Federica wrote: ↑Sat Sep 03, 2022 7:20 pmAshvinP wrote: ↑Fri Sep 02, 2022 7:53 pmFederica wrote: ↑Fri Sep 02, 2022 5:23 pm I was thinking that this forum has come to look like a strange thing, hasn't it? I am really afraid to shake the ground this way, because I am getting enormous value from this forum. Still, someone has to say it, eller hur? (=or how? in Swedish - so much more powerful than “isn’t it?”)
Out of xxx, we are basically four active members, Ashvin, me, Lou, and Cleric. Soul_of_Shu has disappeared. Other members I see appearing regularly in older threads have also disappeared. Contributions from members other than the four afore-mentioned are quite sporadic - at least since I’ve been here, it’s been 3 months now - for example there’s this guy called Anthony, who seems to be very much into biblical reflections, or this other guy Lorenzo, whom I have a real hard time grasping what type of mind space he’s sending in his writings from. That’s about it... Strangely, it looks like a men-dominated field, as it seems. One could wonder why. Well, this is more of a curiosity, not so relevant.
Occasionally newcomers pop in just as I did, with a BK question, then they get quickly scared off by the Steinerian vibes, and never recover. Sometimes oldies throw in a reflection, either randomly, or in the spirit of ‘while we’re at it, why not post it on that forum too’. They also usually become quickly exhausted.
And what about the view count? That’s another puzzle. It seems to show that someone is reading from time to time. But then it remains a passive endeavor for some reason, and I have come to suspect that it’s mainly Lou clicking n-times on posts, hoping to get some more contemplative yield out of all his both/and playing cards. Does it all make any sense to anyone? You who are silent, be it as it may that you are reading this, am I misinterpreting you? And you who are active… alltså Ashivin, Cleric, Lou, are you not getting the same awkward sense that I am getting? Again, I don’t have any problem whatsoever with that, but I am curious. Is anyone having any thoughts? And if yes, why are you not saying anything.
When I used to play poker, there were two main games which people would play. The first was Texas Hold Em', where every player gets two cards face down, five cards are successively placed in the middle for the community, three after the first betting round (flop), one after the next betting round (turn), and the next after the last betting round (river). The player with the best five-card hand at the end, or whoever gets everyone else to fold their hands during the betting, wins the pot in the middle.
Every new game which starts up first begins with THE. It's easiest for average players to learn and for people to casually play, not needing to pay too much attention to what's going on or take the whole thing too seriously. Although there is technically "no limit", meaning there is no cap on what can be bet on any given betting round, the pots remain small because no one wants to bet their entire stack if it's 100x the size of the pot. People keep the bets small and someone who bets bigger will only get action when another player has a great hand. There is only one winner per hand, so things are kept simple. Eventually some of the more serious poker players turn to a new game called Omaha High-Low, which is 'pot limit'.
Each player gets four cards dealt face down this time, five community cards, and the max bet on each round is the current size of the pot. It's much harder to bluff people out of hands because the bets are small on the initial rounds, but if there are a couple active players with good hands, each round can get exponentially larger. Now players can win by either having the best five-card hand or the worst five-card hand. If one person has the best hand and one the worst hand, they will split the pot 50/50. If two players have the same best hand and one the worst hand, the former gets 25% each and the latter 50%. You can imagine how the strategic dynamics change because of all this. If you don't want to lose a lot of money quickly, you need to be paying close attention to every hand and also be decent at calculating odds on each round. People who are just there to casually play around will get wiped out.
Whenever Omaha is added to a game, the Texas game quickly dies out. All the interesting action is in Omaha. The stakes are higher and the actual strategy of the game is much more interesting. People have very little interest in the plain old Texas game anymore. Yet the Omaha game narrows down to a set of regular players who take it very seriously. Other people who are not so serious about playing occasionally jump into the action, but they go broke quickly and have no money left to buy in. Other players are just scared of buying into such a serious game and watch from the sidelines or lose interest in playing in the poker game altogether. They go searching for more THE games where they get back to the old two-card, high-hand routine. So I think this is a decent analogy to what has happened here.
THE is abstract metaphysical and religious speculation. You don't need to be paying too much attention to the world of living experience and ideas to buy in and play. You don't need to be too logically rigorous - after a minimal amount of reasoning through the world content, you can just jump to whatever preferred conclusion you like and say, "who knows, maybe this is the truth! no one can say otherwise". You can have a smoke, drink a beer, chat it up with your friends, have a good time, and that's the real purpose of joining the poker game in the first place. Once the stakes get higher and the game gets interesting, then one needs to pay much more attention and refine one's thinking skills. Then the original purpose gets sacrificed to that of seeking the objective truth of the matter, with precise, scientific, mathematical reasoning. If a person has no interest in making such an investment, and/or squanders all their thinking funds on various intellectual pursuits, they simply won't buy in and play. Little do they realize that one's interest in the Omaha game and meaning mined from the four-card, high-low dynamic will greatly increase after they gain a firm conviction to keep an open mind and make the sacrifices necessary in pursuit of the Truth.
Clear, fine metaphor, Ashvin, thank you! It really brings forth the idea that ‘casual’ is the least fitting word to describe the intuitive thinking path. I only hope the poker metaphor is not fitting to the point that being a bad card player means being disfavored on the path, because if that’s the case, I am clearly in trouble : ) The best game metaphor to capture my way would be one where it’s not required to be very strategic with thinking funds, more like a roulette game where I just put all the funds in bulk on one number! : ) If chance can be forced this way, that’s freedom : )
There is a saying in poker, 'play the player, not the cards'. In other words, intuition always trumps calculating the mathematical odds. I have no inclination to try and take people's money at the poker table anymore, but I imagine someone on the spiritual path who gained deep insights into the human psyche and thinking spirit could clean house by simply paying attention and playing the players more than the cards. It's all about recognizing the various patterns people naturally fall into over time, especially their betting patterns. Of course it wouldn't hurt to also develop mathematical thinking skills. In fact, the latter is integral to imaginative cognition and will come naturally as we develop it more.