TheAlchemist

Why bother when there's an effective and safe vaxx available? I looked into this when it was being glorified by all the right wing conspiracy theorists online as the miracle cure for covid. The clinical evidence for this stuff even treating covid is weak to say the least, very small sample sizes in randomized clinical trials, and the antiviral effects have only been observed in vitro, you would need to basically bathe the body inside out in this stuff to affect the viruses. It's possible that it works, but that's not a real option at the governance level to a pandemic where the futures of whole countries are on the line. There you need strong evidence within the framework and with the standards of the current medical paradigm. And the evidence within that framework is strongly on the side of the vaccine.

The UN's impartiality to genocides and wars in the world is precisely what keeps it functioning. It's the largest human institution atm, really the only thing connecting almost all nations at this time, so it can't afford to take sides. The UN has bigger fish to fry, there is a powerful vision there, and I think many people are oblivious to it.

This is it! This is enough. This is where it all happens, right here, right now. To any emotions/sensations that arise: Welcome home. This is complete perfection.

All these new technologies will totally change how we practically live our day to day lives, I am optimistic in regards to that. But I don't have a lot of hope for the near-term restructuring of the economy, all these new technologies and the wealth surplus generated with them will still likely end up largely in the pockets of billionaires. The reformation of the economy will not likely come from these World Economic Forum billionaires at least. So as long as the current economic system is not addressed, these developments will just increase existing inequalities and the billionaires will continue to posture with these statements, with not much walking of the talk. The UN on the other hand in general is a very smart organization, it works at the edge of what is acceptable with the values people currently have and ensures continuing global cooperation and coordination thanks to that. The UN is our future, a couple centuries down the line as it continues to develop, we could possibly have some kind of a global democratic government thanks to it. Edit: A related, interesting piece on naive technocapitalist optimism: https://consilienceproject.org/the-case-against-naive-technocapitalist-optimism/

Can vouch for this, incredible book! At least as juicy as all the Spiral stuff

Stumbled upon this gem of a man, it seems he has some very clear nondual insight, in the spirit of the hardcore Christian mystics. Here he speaks on the point of God as Nothingness.

I just mean deaths occur outside the medical care system more commonly and even inside the medical system testing is not done, it's expensive as hell. For a year Tanzania had basically zero cases according to the stats and life seemed normal, but that was just because testing wasn't being done, and facing the reality of the situation would have been too costly. I'm not saying the chill strategy is bad, in some countries it is the only possible choice, the economic burden for lockdowns would be simply too much to take. That doesn't mean, and there's no reason to believe Covid isn't still spreading there just like everywhere else though. And I mean in 3rd world countries in general, not the country or area you are in specifically.

Make a 5 minute video every day about any random topic that comes to mind, it could be a pencil, or some abstract philosophical topic. Just speak nonstop with low expectations (at least at first). Be enthusiastic about the topic, even if it feels fake at first. I did this pretty much every day for over two months and it made a big difference.

Could it also be that those who were more depressed, stressed and psychologically distressed were more likely to skip breakfast, since it is just association/correlation? Edit: from the study discussion section: "The majority of studies included in this systematic review and meta-analysis were cross-sectional, which cannot provide a causal link between skipping breakfast and psychological disorders. As this meta-analysis was conducted on observational studies, it is not possible to rule out the possibility of residual confounding having affected the results in each study and/or the pooled estimates in the meta-analysis." https://sci-hub.se/https://doi.org/10.1080/1028415X.2020.1853411 It's an interesting study nonetheless, I'm not trying to poke holes just for the sake of it, I will actually look into this more and reconsider my breakfast skipping habit.

Depends how sensitive your body/brain chemistry is to psychedelics, and how much you have primed yourself with meditation and contemplation for those types of insights.

Many developing countries in Africa and elsewhere have very significant proportions of young people compared to Europe/North America, so it won't be as deadly on average. Also, there is an obvious lack of testing and medical facilities, the hospitals won't get overwhelmed with ICU patients if there is no real ICU that almost any citizen could access. People just die in the villages and streets, as they already do at a way higher rate than in first world countries due to other more common and deadly diseases, so it's not as much of a contrast. You need an actual working medical infrastructure that people can access for it to be overwhelmed (like India and Brazil and the west ofc, 2nd and 1st world countries). The country needs to be at a certain threshold and standard of wellbeing for covid to be a significant contrast to the current state of things. If people are already struggling to stay alive, covid won't make much of a difference in the grand scheme of things within that country. So in the first world countries it is understandably causing much more alarm.

Yeah, it won't actually solve the problem even if 100% of Americans were vaccinated, since new vaccine resistant mutations could likely keep popping up in areas that lack vaccinations. The only real solution is a global one, the local solution (every country for themselves) is not really a solution at all, and this pandemic is forcing us to take note of that.

The thing is, although tempting, these problems aren't gonna be solved on a case by case basis, since they are so strongly interrelated; they need to be looked at from a larger whole, more holistically, a solution upstream/at the root is required. So the solution to climate change, if thought of holistically, will likely be the solution to tons of other problems that result from unsustainable practices. And it seems like humanity collectively is now agreeing upon climate change being the most urgent and important environmental problem to solve, so that is the best avenue to make those structural changes that are necessary to ensure sustainability. I'm not saying all humans agree that it is the biggest environement related problem, but it is gathering the most force out of the different environmental concerns. Arguing about the details of climate change is missing the point, this movement has something far more powerful at its core: a new set of values that is emerging in culture at a large scale, and these people with these values no longer accept some of the bullshit that has been fed to them, they demand structural changes, they demand actions and they strongly desire sustainable solutions to ensure the continued thriving of the human race. This is because they have an intuitive sense that what we are doing now is dysfuntional, and will produce problems down the line if nothing happens.

@impulse9 I would err strongly on the side of caution with this one. As a species we are long overdue to take a look at and reform our unsustainable (like infinite gdp growth) practices anyways. So shifting towards sustainability won't be a lost cause no matter what. Let's say climate change is no big deal like you suggest, what now? You get a nice big pat on the back for being right, but we are still stuck with unsustainable nitrogen and phosphorous cycles, ocean acidification, chemical pollution, atmospheric aerosol loading, biodiversity loss along with unsustainable land and freshwater usage. This is a much deeper problem, a problem deep in the roots of how we funtion as a species and how we relate to our environment; debating about some consequences of the infected roots wont be productive, we need to look at the causes behind this all.

@impulse9 weather is chaotic, not as much climate. Climate is much less chaotic and patterns in regards to how CO2 and other greenhouse gas levels have impacted average global temperature are quite well understood. We know and can make quite reliable models on how changes in greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere will affect the climate. At least that is very well established, unless you suggest tree ring and ice core measurements are not reliable indicators of historical climate around the world. The models that are the the basis of the scenarios have been refined throughout recent decades and have become quite accurate in predicting general trends in climate. Weather predictions one week ahead are chaotic and way less accurate than general scenarios about how different levels of greenhouse gases will affect the global climate decades or centuries into the future. General larger-scale trends are quite orderly and much easier to model than small-scale events, which are increasingly complex and chaotic the smaller the scale is. This applies to pretty much any system.

"If you get the message, hang up the phone. For psychedelic drugs are simply instruments, like microscopes, telescopes, and telephones. The biologist does not sit with eye permanently glued to the microscope, he goes away and works on what he has seen." He is simply referring to the importance of integration; for a serious explorer to never go back would be as ridicilous as a biologist glimpsing a cell through a microscope and never looking through it again because he "got the message".

Cognitive deficits in people who have recovered from COVID-19 (Study) https://www.thelancet.com/journals/eclinm/article/PIIS2589-5370(21)00324-2/fulltext https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2589537021003242 Frequent neurocognitive deficits after recovery from mild COVID-19 (Study) https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33376990/ Can COVID Cause Brain Fog and Cognitive Deficits? - A new study suggests COVID may cause cognitive deficits for some. (Article) https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/mental-mishaps/202107/can-covid-cause-brain-fog-and-cognitive-deficits

I was raised up a Christian, went through the usual route of questioning and becoming atheist because the literal interpretations seemed too magical and simplistic. Now that I have had some spiritual and nondual insights, some of the biblical stories have started to make a lot more sense. Not in the literal sense, but as metaphors that represent mystical states of consciousness. It's really exciting to hear or read about some biblical story I had almost forgetten about, and then having it make a ton of sense from a totally new perspective. For example, the Garden of Eden. Adam and Eve live in a paradise created by God, in bliss, basically in heaven on earth. Then along comes the snake boi (satan) and convinces them to eat from the tree of good and evil (duality). They take the bite and suddenly feel separate from their surroundings, they become aware of their nakedness (ego mind, identification with the limited self). They become capable of feeling shame/imperfection. They enter the barren lands of suffering/imperfection and there starts the story of man. But in the background, even in the traditional Christian worldview, there is the one source (God) of everything, including Satan. So the separation was just a single mad thought (as ACIM would state). It popped up in Gods mind, and that created a dream, an illusion of being separate from the source. Although from Gods pov, it never even happened as some event, because it is still happening within the oneness, and isn't seperate from it. Satan=separation/ego/scarcity/fear God=oneness/perfection/love Christians say it is blasphemous and even satanic to call yourself God, but from this other interpretation the only satanic thing would be the belief in being seperate from God, since that idea of seperation is the source of all evil and it is what Satan (ego) represents. So perhaps awakening is just becoming aware of the whole (God) and seeing that no separation ever even happened, just an imagination of it. I'm still not totally sure why these stories are so sticky in human minds though. Is it because a) they simply have survival value for the ego or b) people gravitate towards them because they have deep intuitions that they are pointing towards some truth, like their infinite Self. Perhaps a bit of both?

A lot to reflect on here. Thanks. This is great. Insightful analogy. Who says what is the "right" interpretation though? Consensus? Biblical scholars? The bible didn't come with a manual of interpretation. And if there's consensus about some interpretation, it's not a real sign of its truth, rather it would more often be a sign of its falsehood, since most of us are very much engaged in survival and would choose the interpretation that best helps us get by in day to day life, regardless of its truth. I don't find your interpretation necessarily inconsistent with my understanding, I don't really see where you see it differently. We were with God = Oneness --> fallen sate = separation (self created/imagined, still happening within God) --> suffering --> end of suffering = recognition of mind that is one with God. The fallen realm is still "happening" within God, it can never have a true ground of reality of its own since God is everything and infinite. So maybe you are saying that humans actually split off from God and created their own reality outside of God, I'm considering that the split never even happened, the apparent "split" was just an imagining of a boundary that is still actually inside the largest whole. But you also suggest that hell is a state of mind, so perhaps you also see that a state of mind is always happening within a mind, which could be seen as Gods infinite mind. The other option would be that there would need to be two separate minds, the mind of man and the mind of God. This would mean that the mind of man is as real as the mind of God. I would interpret this belief to refer to Satan. In the biblical stories Satan thinks it can be as powerful/real as God, which would be like the human ego mind thinking that it can be as real and powerful as God. God talks about how it will banish Satan (“The God of peace will soon crush Satan under your feet,” -Romans 16:20). The whole reality (ground under your feet) of Satan (the ego) will be destroyed when God is recognized. yeah, I guess that's the pre-trans fallacy, anything that has even a whiff of pre-rational dogmatic religiosity is like a toxin for the mind in full on rationality mode, even though it might be including and transcending the rationality.

@machiavelli

Shit, the loophole has been discovered already!

#1 - I'm not sure how experienced you are with tripping but if it is your first time I strongly recommend a lower dose, maybe half of that max. If you get stuck in a negative thought loop, or you feel like you're going overwhelmingly deep into shadow work land; move your body, stretch, just move! Music can guide you, I can send you an amazing tripping playlist with intrumental music if you like that will take you deep. Download the music, and turn off the internet so you wont be interrupted. #2 -

It's such a relief that there is always the possibility of dropping every story. Also a nice practice is trying to drop all knowledge and just chilling or contemplating in a state of "I don't know anything at all about anything". Any explanations that rise up as thoughts, just correcting them with "wait I don't actually know that" no matter how obvious they seem. What's the danger? There's nothing to lose, everything to gain. It can be totally threatening to the "grand story" if it goes deep though. That's why we should have an annual day of not knowing on the forum, a day where everyone takes the position of not knowing anything and everyone corrects each other if they grasp on to some kind of knowledge.

Understanding/realizing God on a direct experiential level seems much more powerful to me than trusting or believing in God as an abstract idea. I don't fully understand God in my current state of consciousness, but I trust in the possibility of fully understanding/realizing God. In some sense I do trust in God, after I realized fundamental perfection on a dmt trip experientially. It was so powerful that after that it's been pretty much impossible for me to believe that anything in the universe can be fundamentally flawed or broken in any way. So for me it seems that trust is something that is important if it has a ground in direct experience. Or rather, trust comes as a direct result of it and is not even a choice in the direct experience. Basing trust on further layers/abstractions outside of the ground of direct experience is more shakey and requires belief. But then again perhaps totally trusting God (even if it's just an abstract idea) could somehow be a path to realizing God directly? ? But my intuition is that trusting the idea of God (the map) can distract and divert from realizing and being open to the actual direct consciousness of God (the territory).