Rigel

Coming at this from the perspective of teaching normal people. This is only true to an extent. I have thought guitar & piano to many people & what you are suggesting is not realistic to a beginner. At the point where I am I can learn anything at speed but that is only possible because my mind & ear can keep up & know exactly what’s happening even when it’s fast. To play fast you need to imagine the music fast in your mind & then train your body to execute what your mind tells it to. So from high level perspective you are right. Newbies go at it completely backwards though. They see the fretboard, play something & then hear it. I agree that in theory it makes more sense to just go for fast because when you know fast it just comes out. When I think fast I speak fast. But how do you get a beginner to that state when they don’t know fast AND don’t have muscle memory isn’t straightforward at all. And even if they know fast! They could have been listening to bebop for 20 years & intimately know the syntax already but even then it doesn’t mean that their hand is able to execute at all. I think playing fast straight away is just the natural conclusion of learning slow & then speeding up. It’s like you are building your capacity for hearing & reacting fast. That shit’s not innate. But over time it’s easier to learn hard & harder things. You really can’t expect a beginner to play fast first. Remember where YOU started? ~ Malmsteen just has a nice story that reframes all the practicing he did as playing. Which is very innocent & sweet & I want to agree but the truth is no one is born with the capacity for playing what he plays & I don’t believe that his mind was limited to what his hand could immediately execute. You hear a line in your head & you want to play it but your hand just won’t be able cause you haven’t burned that in muscle memory yet. So you play it a few times until you can do it effortlessly & you move on with your playing. That’s how technique is built & that’s called practice. I guess we are just shuffling definitions for the word practicing but I think what he says is just a nice story for the camera. It’s a great story. It sounds cool.

Dirt transforms itself into psychedelics easily & cheaply all around the world. You don’t have to do psychedelics if you don’t want to but if there is a will there’s a way. It’s like you are asking how can I become ripped without eating & without moving my ass?

Breath holds are fun. In as long as possible. Out as long as possible. Catch your breath. Repeat.

There’s a book called “your body, your voice” by Theodore Dimon if I recall & it’s about the voice but there’s a good portion on breathing. Here’s the basic idea of the breathing with the voice aspect removed: Normal inhales & absurdly slow exhales. Pretty simple eh. I couldn’t tell you the first thing about the physiological observables but it’s a kind of breathing that I practice habitually all the time now not just for singing. It calms you down & grounds you. I don’t know there’s something about increasing your tolerance to co2 & having your default posture be a fully expanded rib cage & diaphragm. Doing “sss” or whispered “aaaah” during exhales is optional but helps to get the mechanics down. Most of the effort is in holding the exhales & letting them out slow. The inhales should be effortless & swift.

Terrence McKenna is a bit coocoo but he speaks beautifully.

100 CAD = 72 USD = 64€ So I pay 768€ for the year & I am student.

Holy shit what city is that? I pay 100$ a month for that in Montréal

Those conjoined twins are sooo cute I couldn’t hold back my tears. People take just being a normal functioning human for granted it’s crazy.

Hit the bell.

Sweet I’ll dig in tonight before bed!

I like to train less, more often. At least everyday. I don’t feel right if I don’t get my heart rate up each day. That being said I couldn’t care less about putting on muscles so don’t take your advice from me. I want ninja body & ability. Skill based training is most fun to me. I’m not huge but I am ripped. I don’t know how this shit works. For god’s sake please take your advice from someone else.

How does he adjudicate whether his own take is the shit he’s talking about or not? If his opinion is shit than he’s wrong & truth can be found inside oneself. If his opinion his not shit than that makes it shit cause his reasoning & argument came out of inside his own mind.

I’ve owned many pairs of ear buds. One of them the same brand (soundcore) & they all died within months. On top of sounding like ear buds. Ear buds just suck overall imo doesn’t matter the brand. Headphones are superior in every way except discreetness.

Thanks for the reminder. I can always use more gratitude.

Mark Manson recently updated his format. First 4+hrs episode is coincidentally about value.

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?

Unplugging internet & all distractions. I’ll be sitting on a Swiss ball/cushion/kneeling/standing staring at the wall 12hrs a day. Sleeping 8hrs so that’s 4hrs remaining for playing music, eating, exercising, showering & doing dishes. Of course I will be doing those as mindfully as possible. My intention with all of this will be to purge some shadow material. I am not in it for mystical experiences although I’m open to it. I want clarity & emotional release. I want to know what I want out of the next decade of this life journey I’m on. I’ve been feeling confused & down for a while now & I need something radical to snap me out of my usual thought & behaviour patterns. I expect this to be super difficult but my resolve is very strong. I’ve told this to my mom & cried over the phone with her for an hour earlier this week. I may or may not have a trip in the middle of the retreat. We’ll see. Any tips or things I should keep in mind going into this? Who’s done this in the past here? How did it go?

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.