Rigel

Never thought of myself as particularly funny but I was having a course about stage presence last year & I was asked if I think I have a good sens of humour. I said « well I do laugh a lot » & that made the room laugh. What I am getting at is to find things funny & to laugh at things. Do you laugh at yourself when you’re alone? For instance, the other day I made a protein shake & started shaking it with the lid cracked. It made a gigantic mess all over my kitchen for the 10th time at least(I always do this). I couldn’t do anything but to roll around on the floor suffocating from laughter. Those things wouldn’t win a comedy award but that’s my point. Comedy is how you look at things & what’s in your heart when you look at them. If you wanna make others laugh now is a different story. You gotta cater to your public somehow. Humour works based off shared cultural expectations & the subversion of them. Just like musical meaning.

Hi my name is not Leo . Think of it like your diet. Eating an apple is not bad for you. It’s actually good for you. But it’s a bad idea to start eating only apples. No one has it 100% figured out on their own. No one method or way of doing things works all the time in all contexts & circumstances(that’s silly, life has nuance). If your goal is to be smarter than yeah of course reading & synthesizing 100+ books/perspectives is better than 1.

Green beans raw yum 😋 Potato raw evil 🥔 Cucumber raw yum 😋 Eggplant raw evil 🍆 !!!!!! Am I foolish to let my mouth tell me which vegetables are good raw?

Why do behaviours like meditation, psychedelics, yoga, breathwork, etc seem to increase consciousness whereas addiction, lying, eating unhealthy foods, etc seem to decrease consciousness? It doesn’t make sense to me that consciousness would limit itself to specific behaviours but at the same time it is my experience that some behaviours work to increase consciousness while others do the opposite. Why aren’t addicts awake & why do supposedly awake people act like very limited sage-like characters? Only exception to this I can think of is Alan Watts. Could consciousness just awaken to itself in the most dysfunctional humans or even animals spontaneously?

Is there a light at the end of the tunnel? I was hoping for it. I was expecting it. I talked to my friend who has quite a bit of experience doing vipassana about all this & he pointed out that that might have been a mistake.

Ego Backlash After day 4 I went out & bought a fat joint. Numbed myself with internet & weed for a few days. I am not proud of how the retreat ended. I am ashamed of it to be fully transparent. Which is the reason I took so long to come back here & write about this. I know my vices & have been battling them for years. When I stopped the retreat I was so cognizant of how dysfunctional & foolish it all is. The course of action is to drop them. There’s absolutely zero doubt in my mind that it has to happen at some point but I think I’ll have to pace myself more. Cause my inner child is emotionally retarded. Which is a funny way to talk about something that has tormented me for years. And I am doing it to myself. How twisted. The tragedy is they don’t even work to numb the suffering. I was still suffering, I was just looking the other way. All the insights from higher states fly out the window during ego backlash. Memory of an insight is worthless without the state of consciousness that accompanies it. Got thoroughly disillusioned with the theory. I have enough theory for the next 10-20 years at least. It’s all a distraction as well to me at this point. Distraction, distraction, distraction. That’s all it is. There is something that requires my attention here & I look over there. Even though I was having a huge backlash there was still a degree of detachment from the retreat. It was very obvious that every behaviour I was indulging in was a mistake. I wasn’t fooling myself that I did 4 days & so deserved a reward for my hard work. Distraction is no reward. It’s like I go running a marathon & to reward myself I cut my own foot at the end of the race with a rusted saw. It makes zero sense. I am a slave to my own mind. Most of my life has been reactive not proactive. I am no longer in the thick of this backlash but I’ll need a bit more time to report how I clawed my way out of that. I am pretty much at baseline right now. I’ll write the third part soon. Thanks for reading you guys. I like this place. Appreciate y’all. This work is no joke. The mountain is huge.

You might be right about that. The weird thing about psychs tho is I don’t crave them. I was craving other bs during the retreat. I don’t fully grasp how it’s an escape mechanism. All it did was amplify the stuff I was dealing with. It definitely did not feel like a distraction. I think I just bit off more than I could chew with that trip. Even though it was very weak. But I am fully open to being wrong here. I guess the only way to find out is to try 7days sober.

Thanks I was about to tag you but got distracted. You were right. Would you trip at all during this kind of experiment? Or keep it to the last day? I’ll try again & also trip again during the next retreat just to be stubborn😅 I feel way stronger now I can do it.

Hi forum people. Took me way more time to bounce back from & make sense of what happened to me than I was expecting. I am still piecing this together actually. Anyhow, I’ll break down my report in 3 parts: Retreat, Post-retreat ego backlash & snapping out of ego backlash. Retreat: It was pretty difficult. Extra difficult. In fact I wasn’t able to do the full 7 days. I did 4 days. First two days I was only playing pretend. I thought I was doing serious work but I wasn’t. I was being intellectual. Trying to formulate what it is I was seeking into linguistic constructs. That was valuable in a way but I still felt lacking & fundamentally unsatisfied with what my mind was coming up with. I went over my values & solidified them. That was good. Day one felt like good old rest & recovery more than deep inner work. I had small clues where I would get inspired by one of my intellectualisations & where I would crack a tear but my mind was so dense that I wasn’t able to go into it fully & get a good taste of it. Ex. I started balling when I asked myself “what do I want?” & came up with “I want to see beauty everywhere, all the time.” Which made me realize how far from that vision I am. How much I am not embodying it at all in my day to day. That was sad but fleeting. Day 3 I started to experience pretty intense withdrawal symptoms & suffering. I started to get kundalini activations at night & I had a very hard time to handle them. As soon as I laid down it would explode & get stuck in the gut, heart, throat & forehead. I tried to let go & allow it to happen but I wasn’t able to. The only way I could manage it is either shake like I am having a seizure or squeeze every muscle I know while flooding my system with rage. Didn’t sleep more than 40min at a time that night. I was thinking of my insights from the first two days & realized it’s all stuff I was already thinking. Thoughts I’ve been thinking for a long time. Thoughts that formed in light of change of consciousness using psychedelics. Thoughts that point to an actual change in state. Thoughts that are not that state. I felt like a rat spinning in a hamster wheel. See what I really want is transformation at the level of state but it feels like there’s a gigantic mountain of suffering in front of it. Becoming that means that the way I am right now will cease to be & I am terrified to let it go. Day 4 I suffered more & had a low dose mushrooms trip. At this point I pretty much stopped trying to inquire & contemplate. I was suffering. My mind was just spewing nonsense so I just decided to do absolutely nothing about it. I would cry & then close my apathetic shell again. Took the mushrooms pretty early I had periods of inspiration where all my visions of this fully alive being I would be if I dropped all of my pretending were right here & were me. But then I would close up, look back up on it from memory & feel like I was still faking & pretending because I am not like this. I am a dysfunctional, addicted, unwise, flawed human. My mind just would not be satisfied. It all felt pointless. I wasn’t resolving anything. Too much suffering. I gave up. I needed something to stand in the way. A distraction. A numbing agent. A vice. That’s the retreat part. It sounds pretty awful when I read it back but there is a silver lining. I’ll write it later in the rest of my report. I have a school assignment due in 2 hrs I gotta go.

This is it. I am unplugging my router in a few hours, going to sleep & starting my retreat tomorrow morning. see y’all on the other side👋 I’ll write a report in the following week. Would have never grown the balls to do this or even thought of it as a possibility without Leo & this community. Thanks !

Those sandals are terrible for your biomechanics. You can’t clench your big toe & walk properly. It trickles up the chain into the knees, hips & shoulders. Terrible for your health.

Great food for thought! Thanks A lot of what I had in mind aligns with what is in your doc. 5 days before my retreat. I have trepidations & excitement. I am running over my intent again & again. I am also in the process of preparing food for 7days. No cooking at all during the retreat.

Such a rewarding process! Are you using agar or liquid culture to isolate genetics or just going straight to grain with the spores?

Cheers! And use a scale. It’s impossible to eyeball mushrooms accurately. Some are more or less dense. Anyone who pretends to know the weight of what’s in your bag from the picture is full of doodoo & shouldn’t be trusted.

I always end up removing the blindfold when it becomes wet from my tears. It’s annoying to have that soaked fabric over my face at some point.