something_else

@Leo Gura I'm remaining completely open to whatever spiritual teachings I come across, I simply don't have the experience to claim I know better. The only point that keeps cropping up in my mind that I think is worth sharing here is on the nature of progression. It's undoutable that you did a lot of so called 'traditional' spiritual work regarding non-duality and no-self and so on before you started giving the God-realisation and Love teachings. Do you think that for anyone else who also wishes to explore God-realisation and Love, these other steps are important grounding work before one can tackle more advanced teachings?

This is something I've been thinking a lot about recently as well. I've just recently moved out of my parents house into my own place, and as the freedom is sinking in, the desire to be more random and spontaneous is as well. To me, going on random walks at any time of day or night is good, especially on Friday/Saturday nights when just by walking around the town where I live you can encounter all sorts of interesting people. It is one of my strategies for starting to deal with my general social ineptitude in a gradual way while clubs are still shut, because the people I encounter will often do the initiating. I happen to be lucky in this sense, where I live random people will often interact with you on the street out of nowhere, especially if they're drunk lol

Some people just don't like the style of dating apps. It's not about it being easy or hard, necessarily. There's a reason there are significantly less women on dating apps than men in the first place. It isn't the best or most appealing environment for many girls either, even though they could meet many high quality guys through it quickly. This has always been an interesting point for me. If Tinder is so great for women, and they can all find high quality men there, why don't all girls have Tinder?

No one here can tell you what is realistic for you. No one here can answer general questions about what types of girls will like you. It depends on an unlimited number of factors about you that none of us know. It's not like women are all identical 1-dimensional creatures that will all rule you out because of your skin colour. Maybe some will, maybe some won't. We don't know, you don't know. You are looking for excuses to sit and think about girls instead of going out and talking to them. I do it too. I'm doing it now. It's a bad habit.

I am by no means an expert, but this right here sounds like the mindset that's fucking you over here. Too much theory, worrying about making mistakes, too much thinking. Go and actually try stuff out. You honestly think that speaking to a bunch of girls who you find attractive would be costly and wasted time even if you don't end up with a single one of them? The goal here is to socially calibrate yourself. All social interaction is beneficial here. You're trying to minimise embarrassment and risk for yourself by planning everything and overthinking everything in the comfort of your home. That's not gonna work.

Go find out

Why are you even spending this much time thinking about this? Really, it doesn't help the situation much. Maybe you will attract 8s, 9s, 10s, maybe you won't. Maybe you will need to develop a social network first, maybe you won't. Maybe some girls will find that social proof more important, maybe they won't. Depends on where you live. Depends on your charisma. Depends on the situation. Depends on luck. There are literally an uncountable number of factors at play. So keep rolling the dice and levelling up your skills, see where you get. It can be cathartic to read and write answers on here, I do it too. But I think you'll get more value by asking practical questions. And at the end of the day, you need to go out, do the practical work and find out for yourself.

@bliss54 From your experience, maybe. How do you know this applies to everyone? Why would evolution allow for all/most men to be weak and drained from consistent ejaculation? That gene would die out so fucking fast If you're jerking off everyday to cope with being bad at attracting a mate then sure, I agree with you. Mentally that will drive you insane. However the solution there is not exactly to stop, it's to fix the root cause. Which is being bad at attracting a mate.

It could also make you desperate, which would definitely not help you get laid

@Leo Gura Have you ever tried mescaline cacti? For practicality reasons that's what I'm planning on starting with

Says who. How would you know? I meant conscious in terms of being aware of why exactly you were watching porn in the first place. If it's out of addiction you have no control over it then we agree entirely, where we disagree is that it's impossible to enjoy it in a way that is not destructive to your psyche. I suppose most people who watch it probably are addicted, and it's definitely something to be careful with. But it seems like you've turned it into something that triggers a pretty aggressive reaction in you which I'd say is something else to be careful of.

Nope. If I had to guess, to stop it from being overcrowded and restrict the list to books that are really the cream of the crop

If you're a little bit technical you can find the old books that used to be on the list but were removed. If you right click on anywhere in the book list (likely under Emotional Mastery in this case as @Waves pointed out) and click 'Inspect element' on Chrome you can see commented out HTML for all the old books. Perhaps you'll find it there?

Maybe if you're addicted. You honestly think watching porn once a week or whatever is gonna damage you psychologically? You probably get more psychological damage by obsessing over how bad and evil something is than indulging in it consciously and in moderation.

I practiced self-inquiry pretty heavily for about 3-4 months, at the end of which I had my first experience of a different state of consciousness. I identified with perceptions like the sounds I was hearing, mainly water running as I was in a public bathroom practicing self-inquiry. Yes, I had my first mystical experience in a public bathroom cubicle while a dude was shitting in the one next to me. It's a long story. It was nothing ground breaking, but it was the first "Oh shit there's something worth further investigation here" experience. Weirdly, after that I had a really difficult time doing self-inquiry, I couldn't focus on the questions and my mind just wandered. Perhaps the ego was thinking "great, we got what we wanted, no need to look any further hee hee " Anyway, I've now been doing Kriya for 6 months instead to quiet the mind, and I'm planning on experimenting with more psychedelics as soon as that's practical for me, then I'm going to start up self-inquiry again. It did do something for me.

Are you trying to tell me you think you're better than the people thinking "I'm better than you"

Consider that you don't know that much about the dating scene yet, and that you're extrapolating a lot from limited experience and hearsay from communities online like blackpill/redpill. What they preach is so so so easy to believe when you don't have a lot of experience socialising or talking to people in person, but really how do you know any of it actually applies to the real world? I'm only a few years older than you so I can hardly say I'm that experienced with dating either, but accepting that you don't know how dating works yet leaves room for the idea that you can learn. You're just inexperienced, and that's normal. Accept it and start looking for ways to change that. Online dating is kind of a crutch, even if you can make it work for you. At least, I have used it as a crutch, and I'm in the process of trying to change that

Discrimination is not really something that can be solved by throwing more money at the problem

There's a whole section in the JP video about how the vast majority of Green people don't want equality of outcome and those that do are on the extreme side

I haven't watched the Gödel video, but I can imagine how considering the metaphysical implications would be worthwhile, or at least interesting. It demonstrates the absolute limits of symbolic logic and mathematics, two of the most widespread ways for reasoning about reality that humanity has. Why not consider the metaphysics of that?

Funnily enough, I was in a very similar situation recently. I just completed my 4th (final) year dissertation for my degree, and throughout the entire thing I felt almost exactly as you describe in the quote above. My topic was very open ended and there was a very real possibility that I was going to have little or no results up until the last month or so. The sense of impending doom, but not knowing exactly what kind of doom, is excruciating. Your mind assumes the absolute worst when it doesn't know what the worst that could happen is. I don't have advice for you other than the obvious; it will be OK, you will get it done, the worst case scenario is not as bad as your imagination wants to think it is, nor as likely to happen as your imagination wants you to think it is. See @ivankiss comment! But what I can tell you is that you are most certainly not alone in feeling this way about big university projects, it's essentially how you're meant to feel. I mentioned the particular kind of stress about my project I was experiencing to one of my friends who is also studying a similar topic, and what he said to me that was particularly cathartic was "all university students feel this way about their thesis".

You need at least one spades worth of midi-chlorians to jump like this: Comical children's character? No. Darth Jar Jar? Yes.

Hahaha, even by stage orange standards this kind of obsession with aggressively debunking a single person is unhealthy Last updated May 8th, the person keeps their work up to date. They might even see this thread en route to find outrageous statements to cherry pick

@Leo Gura Criticising materialism doesn't trigger people's defence mechanisms as much though. It might be an easier way to get through to people. The quantum mechanics video you made was the one that finally opened my mind, and if I remember correctly that was because it made me question materialism. I don't think it's as hard to make people question materialism because it's more abstract and inherently philosophical, so people are more open to discuss it. Compared to when you question science and people freak the fuck out because their worldview is built on all the cool shit they attribute to science. Obviously that fact itself is why it's important for people to address how they view science, but I think discussing the idea of reality not being perfectly material is a better way of opening people's mind in the first place. It worked for me, and that approach helped me have some cool discussions with my friends where they were able to acknowledge that there are lots of ways in which materialism doesn't really make all that much sense.

@Leo Gura That's a cool idea actually, and I agree with its inferiority when it comes to measuring someone's in the moment wit for sure. Along with Fischer chess, another cool variation I saw recently which works around the same concept was Fog of War chess, where you can only see your opponents pieces that are in the line of sight of your own pieces. https://www.chess.com/terms/fog-of-war-chess Similar idea to Fischer chess where you can't reliably prepare, but rather than initial randomness you have partial observability, it really fucks with your mind and leaves a whole shit ton of room for creative strategies. I would also say that the preparation component of classical chess still has merit, surely planning counters to your opponents preferences is an important part of strategic thinking, even if that works out as raw memorisation in this case.