TheAlchemist

heaven is here when the mind is clear into love I dissolve my fear heaven is here when the mind is clear our concentration draws us near the promised land is not found on a map gotta draw the mind back pull out of the trap move back retreat make direct contact it's hidden in this moment buried right where you're at lost in a strange land caught up in this game plan trying to find my way back to the train station looking outside but it's not a place, man it's a state of mind graceland

I want to say that your work has inspired me to look at the world again with a mysterious sense of wonder that I have always had, but that I have not found others who could relate to it with. It has helped me more than any other individual source to make sense of the world and to identify many of my own biases and ways in which I trick myself. It has given me a framework and something to relate my psychedelic experiences to, which has been immeasurably valuable in minimizing unnecessary suffering from the solitary nature of this work and for having some kind of map on where it might be good to look. I have three points that I have been thinking about for some time. 1. I think a lot of this drama and controversy just ties into a few key things in your videos. I don't think the negative reaction is primarily due to what you say in your videos, but rather due to how you say it. And it's not even anything very big, it's just these subtle expressions and ways of saying things which trigger people. As an example you might say I am God vs. You are God. This is a small difference but to an outsider the former word choice causes a whole other level of triggering. There are many people online who say even more radical stuff than you, but because of how they say it, there isn't as much uneasiness and backlash. So I think a lot of the drama could be eliminated with subtle tonality changes and word choices that don't need to affect the content itself. Maybe it's a sacrifice in authenticity, but it might result in calmer waters and be a net benefit. 2. Many people use this forum as an emotional unloading/venting place. I think this is one of the main causes of distraction here. Emotions are unloaded as baggage to other people without their consent and this is taken as some fundamental right that people hold, so that might be something that should be regulated to some extent at least. I mean posts and comments that have no genuine intention at looking at things from a new perspective or to actually solve the issue, they are just pure expressions of frustration, anger or bitterness. This brings me to my third point/suggestion. 3. Some kind of barrier of entry to the forum. I have been a part of many online communities, and the best ones have been the ones with some barrier to entry. This is probably not easy to implement in the forum, but a questionnaire when creating an account would be golden. Just basic questions to see if the user has read the rules of the forum and to see what their intentions are in using the forum. This can filter out a lot of spammers and trolls who don't have the energy to even look at the rules or have no interest in real development and learning. Also I think it's important to keep allowing criticism, at least when there is a genuine desire to find some common ground. It seems to me that for example @AdeptusPsychonautica's criticisms have been mostly good faith, with a desire to find some common ground. You would much rather have Adeptus as the (sometimes annoying) person pointing out potential problems than someone who was truly with bad intentions. And somebody needs to serve that function, that niche of pointing out criticism will inevitably get filled with a community as large as this. So having someone like Adeptus (who often acts in good faith) is a real blessing compared to what it could be. So it's good to keep good diplomacy with the "opposing" side, which will inevitably emerge regardless of who it is.

@The Mystical Man I have found that the best way to "transcend" a lower desire is not to run away from it and resist it as much as possible, but counterintuitively to embrace it totally and to let go of any resistance that arises. I was obsessed with nofap for 5 years, I had countless "streaks" of over 50 days and even a 6 month streak. And sure, there were some benefits, it can work as a kind of defibrillator for your system, kind of like fasting, giving you all this ape energy because you're not reproducing and your body system goes into basically panic mode to get you out there. But overall I found it to be doing much more damage than good. I was just repressing and resisting my desires, and as Carl Jung wisely said; whatever you resist, persists and grows in size. It can become a very unhealthy obsession, where your self-worth becomes tied to it, and you start thinking of it as the solution to all your problems. Really it is largely a distraction from the real, deeper work that needs to be done. It is a simplistic solution, and it sucks because 99.9% of people who do nofap will never permanently stop fapping, so they are stuck in this trap of thinking that it will solve all their problems, yet they can never achieve it. That can go on for years and decades, until it is reflected upon more and you snap out of it. At least that is how it has been for me.

@Tim R I was at a live event of his in Finland a few years back where he was asked about psychedelics. He likes to cite Jung who said: "be careful of unearned wisdom". He is terrified of psychedelics because of their chaotic nature, he seems to have this story in his mind that psychedelics could unravel everything we have built and cause a collective decent into madness. As Leo pointed out in the new video, his life-mission is to basically remind us of the value/usefulness of stage blue orderliness, so psychedelics can be seen as threatening that. I don't think he will ever sincerely try psychedelics again at this point as he seems to feel it's too threatening for his image and identity, but then again he is also a highly curious and open individual so it's not impossible.

I like how Daniel pointed out how science is pretty much a subset of philosophy. Certain philosophical ideas and metaphysical assumptions that have embedded themselves into the methods of science and are largely not questioned. So it's not just materialism, there's a whole soup of philosophical ideas that most modern scientists have an addiction to and take as "obviouly true". We can do science from radically different philosophical assumptions than it is being done from now, for example something like phenomenology is pretty much dismissed nowdays, but from a solipsistic position it would probably be one of the best methodologies.

Very interested. No need to start a circus by talking to him, l am super curious what would happen but that's probably just my brain craving for some drama entertainment or something.

I bet Daniel Schmachtenberger would be totally open to a conversation especially at this time. His new media/education nonprofit platform consilienceproject.org just launched in its pilot phase, so I'm pretty sure he is also looking to talk to people with an audience to raise awareness for that. I'm sure you could talk about basically anything though. Neither of you have a podcast, but it would still probably take off and get traction even as a one off chat.

I think it's possible since you first melt the dmt into the mesh with a few short clicks so it should be stuck there, but there's no struggle with keeping it just at 0 degrees vertical. You simply put your mouth on the mouthpiece, click a button and inhale. You can get a curved driptip (mouthpiece) that is longer so saliva won't be an issue at all.

Yes, I can confirm this method is an absolute beast. You can inhale a full breakthrough dose with 1-2 inhales simply pressing a button. For me the smoke still stings in the lungs but it's not really harsh. No hassle with open flames, hot pipes, efficient vaporization and it makes exact dosing easy. Make sure to get a long driptip so the vapor has even more time to cool down. I tried gordotek method, crack pipes etc. before this and it was always a hassle and wasted a lot of material. Once you get this method set up, you are just a click away from hyperspace Feel free to ask me if you have any questions.

This. Paul is also quite the 5-meo connoisseur, in Aubrey Marcus' podcast he talked about something like 100 5-meo breakthroughs he has been through. He just doesn't talk about that too much, but maybe with Leo he could find some common ground to talk about it.

Why are aliens so interested especially in the USA? To me this mostly sounds like another case of Muricans fantasy of thinking they are the center of the world and not realizing they are 4.25% of earths population. When intelligence agencies around the whole world in Japan, Russia, Germany, France, Congo, Uzbekistan, Argentina etc. start coming out making these reports I will take it more seriously.

One thing that confuses me about spiral dynamics is that it implies that development at the collective level is non-linear, as in the scale of time it takes for a new level to appear is shorter and shorter. For example: Stage purple: 50,000 years old Stage red: 15,000 years old Stage blue: 5000 years old Stage orange: 300 years old Stage green: 50 years old Stage yellow: >50 years old Stage turqoise: >50 years old Why do we all of a sudden have new stages popping up within a few hundred years (or less) from each other, when before it took thousands of years? Are we just being modernity centric here, overly focusing on modern times as being somehow special, or does the emergence of new levels facilitate faster emergence of yet new levels, making it non-linear? These new stages emerging faster and faster would imply that collectively humanity is developing in a non-linear, almost exponential way. But yet the general consensus is that it will take at least hundreds, maybe thousands of years for humans to shift significantly as a collective to tier-2 for example. But doesn't that imply a linear growth pattern? What if there are certain thresholds we break through collectively, which allow faster and faster development? That would change our assumptions quite a bit.

Abundance mindset vs. Scarcity mindset perhaps?

Great points, thanks. Population growth surely is part of a positive feedback loop. It keeps going until a "competing" stabilizing or negative feedback loop gains more momentum and slows it down. This is the case with all positive feedback loops if space or resources are limited. Once they gain momentum, they usually grow non-linearly until they reach saturation, or are overtaken by another loop. So assuming that the same would apply to collective human development, we will eventually see rapid growth and some kind of saturation point. Will this point be a collapse or a transcendence? It's just very interesting to think about.

My point is the same regardless. Why did it take 110,000 years for the next stage to emerge from beige to purple, but only 20 years from yellow to turqoise?

Yes that makes sense. And in the same way that we couldn't have predicted how these new enablers (like the internet) will change opportunities for development, we probably can't really know what the future enablers will be. What will be the next enabler at the same magnitude or more than the internet? Who knows, some personalized AI algorithm optimizating for nutrition, spiritual practices, psychedelic use and teaching epistemology based on environment, genetics etc. could quite quickly result in massive breakthroughs where vast amounts of people start developing much faster than ever before. I'm just not so convinced we can predict at the collective level how these developmental stages will unfold, and especially when they will unfold. Since it seems like a non-linear process, there could be rapid breakthroughs so that it won't take hundreds or thousands of years. Maybe it's like solving/filling in a puzzle, the beginning is the most difficult, but it gets easier the more we fill in the pieces, until at the end, progress is extremely rapid.

You mean Connor Murphy? He didn't train after about a week in due to the weakness

The earth is not in danger, and no serious climate scientist or systems thinker who is working on these issues is suggesting that. This is mostly a threat to the stability of human civilization. How resilient are we if a well expected pandemic stopped growth for many years? If one ship was able to stop a massive portion of world trade probably for weeks? How well are we prepared for much deadlier pandemics, more harsh hurricanes, droughts, mass environmental migration and flooding of highly urbanized coastal areas? Sure we will probably solve these things in the long run, but rather sooner than later, with minimal human suffering. This requires many tranformations within our societal systems, which we are all a part of.

For that to be true, at least the following assumptions would also have to be true: A) Neanderthals had significantly higher IQ that homo sapiens B) The genes that enable higher IQ were genetically transferred to humans from Neanderthals in significant amounts and they are affecting cognition in humans. Those are some highly shaky assumptions, whereas the assumptions about how the differences can be explained by sociological and geographical reasons are way stronger. So it's not impossible, but it's not really plausible either, so I don't see any reason to go creating these hypotheses in that direction, unless there is a vested interest to "prove" some races "superiority" over another or some other divisive motive.. And it doesn't require much thinking to realize how that kind of behavior is problematic for society and humanity's progression.

Nice, seems very legit. I love that there is truly a global perspective in the topics of the videos, great relief from all the USA-centric content that the internet is flooded with. The first one seems fresh, cheers mate.

What are some podcasts/youtube channels/other sources that analyze current geopolitical affairs in the world with a nuanced, perhaps even integral/holistic perspective?

Beautiful and fun game, I'm not totally convinced of all the wide-reaching benefits though. The only major effect I notice outside the playing is that my mind starts contantly imagining chess moves when trying to sleep, meditate or concentrate. If I play a lot of chess, my monkey mind goes crazy obsessively trying to somehow solve these chess patterns that appear in my mind.

For me it's an easy choice, just think about how many unknown variables you are introducing to your body system. Even though we have no evidence that Teflon is toxic to humans in the amounts it used in pans, it is still good to follow the principle of reducing unknown variables, just like with inorganic/organic food.