Asayake

Yes, the human "Someone here" is very small and fragile. He makes poor judged decisions all the time just like all humans(just like me as Asayake constantly fucks things up and makes mistakes), sin as they call it in Christianity. It's nothing to beat ourselves up over since it is simply put human nature. But our sins can weigh on us like heavy baggage, which causes us suffering. We carry the baggage of our sins with us everywhere we go(just like Jesus carried the cross to his death, Jesus was God in his human form). But in the Now is where you stop being the human "Someone here" and your deeper self is revealed. The baggage of sins we carry with us exists only in our thoughts(past & future). Our sins cause us suffering right now only because we think about the mistakes we made in our past and it feeds into negative emotions of shame, guilt, despair, meaninglessness etc. We are afraid of making mistakes again in the future and so think thoughts about everything that can go wrong in the future. But the future & past doesn't really exist. It's just an illusion created by thought. When you feel your breath and body you are free from your thoughts, freed from your sins by God. Try to notice how there really is no problem when you feel your breath, if you keep returning there it will transform you. You will gain clarity and less and less mistakes will happen because the mistakes that happen in the future is just a repetition of mistakes that you made in the past. In the Now no mistakes are made, thing just are as they are, even if something unfortunate happens it's a part of Gods plan. My bet is, when you looked out over the city you were in the moment, the Now. That's why it was one of the happiest mornings you've had in a long time. A deeper knowing of yourself which transcends thought was felt right then and there while you were watching the city. The moment was pure even if you had feelings of meaninglessness or being small, those feelings are actually healing in the Now, it's just that our mind is scared of them and wants to escape them because feeling those feelings ultimately leads us back to who we truly are and kills the illusion of the ego.

Just a perspective man, feel your breath & inner body. No thoughts about how being a man is doomed there, is there? Keep returning to your breath and feelings of your body, that's the feeling of life, be with those feelings and let go of the thoughts, they don't serve you.

Well put. I agree with everything you wrote completely.

Go deep in a genre you like. Try to learn from it, figure out how to recreate the sound that define that genre. Figure out which plugins people use in that genre and try different ones to find ones you like. Let's say you like deep house. Learn how to create a deep house style kick, how to create a deep house style drum groove. How to build a deep house chord progression and try to put an entire deep house track together. Repeat and make a few deep house tracks. After that you can dive into an other genre, let's say Chicago house. You do the same process, learn how to create those kind of sounds. Then when you try to put a track together, you can start mixing elements from different genres you've explored. How would a Chicago house style chord progression work with a deep house drum groove? The more genres you've experimented with the more you can start mixing & matching different sounds from different influences and create something unique. But if you don't dive deep in any genre your musical language and production skill will suffer. This is a very practical approach, but it will produce results. Then when you know how to create tons of sounds and grooves and got a good sense of melody in different styles, eventually you can let go of thinking so much about it and just start creating stuff until you come upon some idea that you fall in love with(this is also a good way to go about it no matter where you're at, but working on your foundation is never a bad idea either).

I am more of a movie guy so here we go, have not seen much anime yet. Movies: Manchester By The Sea(2016), The Red Shoes(1948), The Grand Budapest Hotel(2014), The Killing(1956), Memento(2000), The Truman Show(1998), Arrival(2016), Lost Highway(1997), Eraserhead(1977), 2001: A Space Odyssey(1968), Amélie(2001), Groundhog Day(1993), Reservoir Dogs(1992), The Prestige(2006) TV Shows: Breaking Bad, Twin Peaks

I had a rough ear infection in my left ear 2 years ago. I would try to avoid headphones if you're not doing that already, I think overuse of headphones(10 + hours per day) was what caused the infection in the first place for me, it caused a very damp climate in my ear. I see dislike in the thread for antibiotics. It might be the case that it comes with risks/downsides. But the risks can be reduced if you only take them for 2 weeks(no shorter, no longer) and that is probably what you will be prescribed if you go to the doctor(they will probably let a nurse look at your ear, she will see swelling in your ear canal, send you to the doctor and he will look at your ear too and then prescribe you antibiotics for 2 weeks, is my guess). You can also take a daily probiotic with your food to counteract the gut flora harming properties of antibiotics a bit. Personally my body didn't seem to react negatively to the antibiotics at all(as far as I can tell) and I took daily probiotics with it but I guess it can vary from person to person(I'm not a doctor). If you decide to go for antibiotics you can also make sure to eat proper amounts of fiber rich foods for a period afterwards to give your gut flora something to eat. I was really hesitant to take antibiotics and tried using garlic cloves(which only burned like hell) but it helped me nothing. But I have not tried garlic extract so I don't know how well that works. But when I started losing my hearing on the ear and liquid was leaking out of my ear at night I decided I had to give it a shot for the fear of permanently losing my hearing on the ear(which would be detrimental for me because I work with audio). I understand if you don't want to do antibiotics, but it might be worth a shot if it doesn't get better soon. However, it is possible you have a viral infection, in which case I don't think antibiotics will help. So it's tricky... It's a bit easier when you have infection on only one ear because then it is more likely to be a bacterial infection.

Really cool & interesting film. Watched this a couple of years back with a few friends. Will have to rewatch :).

Franz Schubert - Piano Sonata no.18 D894 Favourite rendition: Andreas Staier

These are limiting beliefs you need to let go of. Realize they're just thoughts and not some absolute truth, otherwise prove it. Become aware of thoughts like this and realize they don't describe you but limit your potential greatly, your potential is greater than you think it is. Thoughts like this is your ego resisting change to solidify your identity as a black pilled individual. All that has happened is that you've had some negative experiences to confirm these thoughts as true for yourself with. Read Eckhart Tolle, it is powerful as heck. You can use techniques from his books(especially The Power of Now) to become more aware of your limiting beliefs and let them go for good. Then you will not act like they are true, you will go out there in the world again and when you least expect it you'll have a positive experience with a girl that solidifies the absolute fact that those thoughts you had were in fact just limiting beliefs. You remind me of my mother, all her life she told me she was not a creative person, and it made her never even attempt to practice an instrument. People believe they have no talent in something because they didn't get good results yet and so they don't practice. People who are good at things practice a lot to become good. Believing you're not good at something makes you believe practice/even trying at all is not worth it and so you will not become good and then your reality will seem to confirm your thoughts to be true. But they're NOT!

I'm interested in knowing this too. I have not done it, was thinking about doing it but then didn't do it. I would assume domestic flight is less risky and LSD is one of the easiest substances to smuggle. Ideas that comes to mind is placing the tab in a package of band-aids or inside of a book, I highly doubt that would be detectable. But I was still too paranoid about it to do it myself the last time i travelled..

This is just another thought that pops up from time to time when meditating. Realize this thought is just like any other object that appears in meditation, it's just another thought. Just be aware of thoughts when they arise and let go of them when they pass on, like clouds fleeting on a sky(the sky being you, the thoughts come and go but you're always here). I think this is a sign of progress yes. When I first started meditating for example I would feel itchiness or tingling in random places on my body, after a period of meditation, that stopped, and I became aware of some tension in my back for awhile instead. After a while that also stopped and I became aware of some energy in my third eye chakra instead. About one year ago when I meditated on LSD I had fractals appear in my visual field. They came back every time I meditated for a few months afterwards. At first I was worried about this and thought I had done something wrong and I was scared I might have injured myself. But now I realize they were just another appearance in meditation and all appearances move on sooner or later and will all teach you something about yourself that transcends thoughts. All sensations, thoughts, feelings, visions that appear will pass on sooner or later and eventually you will become conscious of a new appearance. You don't need to think too much about it or what it means but you can just let the pulsing sensation be when it appears, be aware of it and eventually it will pass on and some other sensation will arise. You can view it like getting to know a part of yourself you didn't know before, it's on a temporary visit to be accepted by you(which happens just by you being aware of it when it appears) and when it is fully accepted it will dissolve and leave space for something else to appear. For example when something like anxiety or frustration arises, it can be viewed as suppressed emotion in ourselves that we didn't let ourselves feel before because we escaped into our thoughts or distracted ourselves with activies when it wanted to arise. There's no need to think too much about whether you're accepting or resisting, because just being conscious of what is is actually what accepting is.

Very interesting thread. This is something I became acutely aware of last summer when I was stuck in a perspective of meaninglessness and slight depression. Everything appeared as meaningless and pale to me and I had thought my way to the conclusion that it was the truth and that it was ultimately a curse that can't be unrealized. From my point of view any pleasure/fun activity or any achievement was absolutely pointless and not worth to pursue because it wouldn't last forever. And when the fun at last goes away what's left is despair and suffering, the loss of pleasure, an at first seemingly unescapable and horrible duality. That's how I believed the world to be and so the world became. Also the world became very "intrusive" feeling, like everything was hostile towards me. If I would order food to my apartment the delivery guy always looked like he was in a super bad mood or angry at me for no apparent reason at all. Every human I met looked like they were suffering chronic depression and were on the brink of suicide from my perspective and it sucked the soul out of me. I was also becoming aware of insane aspects of a close friend to me, thinking everyone might just be delusional after all(he is completely normal by most peoples standards), not realizing that's just a dimension of who he is, who everyone is, but not the full picture. I took up meditation daily to try to increase my concentration to stop doing pleasurable things like masturbation because I believed they were pleasurable and hence would cause me unnecessary suffering, which they then ended up doing. I suffered after masturbating. I couldn't quit smoking weed because I believed quitting weed was difficult and that i would suffer and so I did. etc. etc. Then after about 1 month of meditation(and also some LSD microdosing) a shift in reality started to happen. I did not gain that much concentration or any of the benefits I first expected to gain from meditation, but I stopped judging reality and started to let it present itself how it wanted to be and was becoming more accepting of what is. Now when I ordered food to my apartment, all of a sudden the food delivery guy was looking like the most wholesome dude on the planet. Because meditation helped me stop experiencing reality through my depressing perspective of meaninglessness. I no longer had thoughts like "I hope the delivery guy won't be in a bad mood again and make me feel bad", thoughts like this would give me anxiety to even go out to pickup food. But I just accepted him as he was, and for a while every single food delivery guy was in a good mood all of a sudden and that was rubbing off on me, a complete 180 degree shift from my previous experience a couple of weeks earlier. That's when something clicked in me and I realized reality is not as I thought it was. I finally popped out of the perspective of meaninglessness and became conscious of the fact that it was not any truth at all but just one perspective of many and that no single perspective is absolutely true. And that is of course just another perspective .. The rabbit hole goes deep... The biggest shift for me personally was recently when I read The Power of Now. I started to be able to let go of thoughts whenever I want by focusing my awareness on my breath and sensations of my body and in that way I could let go of a lot of limiting beliefs and negative perspectives a lot more easily than I could before. For example I could suddenly quit my weed smoking habit without any withdrawal because I could just let go of craving thoughts. Turns out quitting weed is not as difficult as I first believed it to be. Quitting weed being difficult is just another way reality appears to be that is not absolutely true, just like the food delivery guy wasn't really angry at me after all, it was just that I made it that way without yet being conscious of it.

LSD has way less mindfuck for me than mushrooms. Although, there's still some mindfuckery for sure . You can't remove the mindfuck component completely without removing the essence of what makes psychedelics useful. The deep confusion about what's actually going on drives you to realize your true nature.

@RickyFitts That's well put indeed. His playing grabs my attention fully, it certainly has something magical about it, he's got a lot of soul and it spills over to the listener. Beautiful song, I had not heard it before even though I think I've seen the Time performance from the same concert. I will have to watch the whole concert..

Thank you for reminding me, I had forgotten about this masterpiece. My sister and I used to play it as kids. That game really came alive with the fantasy I had back then

@Akashic YES! It's very difficult to pick my favorite song of all time.. but Time might be it for me too. I listened to The Dark Side Of The Moon for the first time ever on LSD 2 years ago. I can't believe I had not listened to it before then because music is a big part of my life and I've listened to a lot of music in a lot of genres but somehow Pink Floyd had managed to fly under my radar, even though I knew they had a lot of hype. That was until I took LSD one day and randomly got the idea I should see what all the fuss is about. Mind BLOWN!!! When the guitar solo of Time kicked in I could not believe what was happening, it was like the music was purifying my soul. I had no expectations of what that album would be like at all and had no idea there would even be a guitar solo in it at all and didn't see it coming at all until it happened. I had a musical/spiritual/emotional/life climax right then and there. It was so beautiful I thought to myself life can never be better than it was right then and there. I often listen to the dark side of the moon when tripping still. It just goes deeper and deeper and shows new dimensions of itself every time, it's like a religious experience for me that I keep coming back to. MASTERPIECE! But since you already posted it I'm going with this(even though it's an album and not a song but in my opinion it's like one long song since the parts go together in one piece, and just posting one of the songs from this album would not do it justice since it's best heard in its full context): This is another one that is like a religious experience for me.

Runescape. It was many years now since I last played it but that game was freaking beautiful. And I'm not talking about Runescape 3 or Oldschool Runescape, but Runescape 3 before they made it into Runescape 3(they changed combat system, trading system, a lot of what made the game what it was). That game taught me a lot about life(street smarts, patience, English skills and more). It has a nostalgic charm to it for me that reminds me of the good times of my childhood. Beautiful music and surprisingly good/witty lore in the quests, almost meditative at times when you would spend hours just clicking on trees for no real reason. My mom used to say the game will still be there once I've finished my homework. I get why she said that but... she lied

3 of my personal favorites but... @puporing The Rachmaninov piano concerto no.2 you posted is maybe my favorite classical piece of all time. The first time I heard that.. good god. it's just TOO good!! It's that or Schubert Sonata D. 894 for me

I was mentally addicted to weed, smoked or vaped large quantities of it daily for months without being able to bring myself to quit and then suddenly quit it overnight without any physical symptoms, only drug cravings(mental, that I could let go of within a day and then I was sober). How is that possible? I have also quit weed after being addicted years back and gone through a very rough withdrawal filled with anxiety, insomnia and nausea that I believe in hindsight was actually just caused by the mental side effects(drug craving thoughts and thoughts about how life is pale without weed, thoughts about how I am addicted and should give up quitting and how quitting sucks and is hard that I believed in, which was feeding the negative emotions and causing my body to react physically and emotionally in a negative way). The difference was that I let go of thoughts the time where I didn't get any withdrawal(dysphoria, nausea, anxiety, insomnia or anything like this) after quitting. It's fully possible that I'm not using the clinically correct terminology here, I'm not formally educated in the matter. The reason I thought of it as mental addiction/physical addiction is because in my mind mental addiction causes mental side effects after quitting(thoughts that try to pull you back to using the drug). And physical addiction causes physical side effects that is unrelated to the mental symptoms of quitting(like migraines, physical pain, diarrhea). Letting go of thoughts might make opiate pains less horrible but they will still be there because the body is physically adapted to the opiates in a way which makes physical symptoms from quitting inevitable. This is not the case with weed, from my experience, the physical symptoms were not there for me when I handled the mental side of it differently. Drinking water is an addiction with both a physical and mental component(or in other words, both an addiction and a dependence). Quitting will cause thoughts like "if I don't drink soon I will die". Believing those thoughts will cause negative physical reaction in the body and feed negative emotions. But even when letting those thoughts go your body will still die and decay away without water. Hence drinking water is physically addictive(the body is dependent?) on water. I think we actually probably agree on a lot of this and it's just largely a confusion of terminology.

Weed is not physically addicting, the addiction is in your mind clinging to weed to try to escape what is. Thoughts like "Today would suck hard/be pointless without some weed" appear and acting on those thoughts even though they're not true makes you keep using weed regularly. They make you addicted to weed even though it's not addictive by itself. It's not like with cigarettes or opiates where you actually have a physical withdrawal that you can't deny even if you let go of thoughts. A weed withdrawal is just mental, it can give you physical symptoms by having negative thoughts about how horrible not smoking would be if you believe those thoughts, because those thoughts will feed your negative feelings with energy if you stay stuck in them. But if you can manage to let go of thoughts the withdrawal is non existent. What happens is people who become addicted to weed and stop smoking is that any negative feeling they have will be confirmed to be caused by quitting weed by their own thoughts and they will get stuck in a loop of feeding that negative feeling with their thoughts, thinking about how horrible it is to quit weed instead of processing their emotions, which in turn can cause symptoms like nausea, stored up anxiety, being utterly exhausted etc. At least this is how I understand it from my own experience. That being said people can still be addicted to weed, it's just that the addiction is mental and there are so many things that can be mentally addicting. So I guess it depends on what one means by "non-addictive". It can certainly be psychologically addictive, that's for sure. But any psychological addiction can be let go of by connecting to the Now.

Good job, it seems to me you've already evolved by becoming aware of things you want to improve on in your life. Just remember to also not be too hard on yourself because you couldn't have done things differently than you did in the past. But Now you can do things differently moving forward. Oh and also don't be too hard on yourself for being too hard on yourself .. Yoga can help with the numbness by energizing you and helping you to stop reaching for external stimuli to make some excitement happen, it helps you reconnect to your body and heal. Other than that I would say keep doing what you're doing, keep reflecting on what's a good way forward for you and use this forum for some guidance. Just don't wait too long before you take action. That's ultimately how to create movement in the right direction, at the end of the day thinking too much gets us nowhere.

The sensation of clothes on the body for example, is a sign of increased body awareness as others have stated here. It is not something negative but it's the fact that the persons mind is judging it to be bad because of not being used to that feeling that it becomes a problem. With time such things, like tingling sensation in third eye chakra, increased awareness of heart beating, sensations of clothes sticking to skin etc. turns into places you can go within yourself for peace and clarity.

What does your diet look like, are you eating enough after training? Also what does your workouts look like, are you 1 rep maxing deadlifts or doing higher rep movements with lower weight? How many body parts do you train in a session and how many sessions do you do per week? What kind of movements are you doing? Try a few different kinds of Yoga and see what works the best for you. There's a lot of good content on YouTube(Yoga with Adrienne has a 30 day Yoga challenge I liked if you want to try that at some point). I like Hatha Yoga and Yin Yoga. Hatha Yoga early in the day gets the energy flowing in my body. Yin Yoga makes me calm and connected to my body and helps me wind down. I'm sure Kriya Yoga is also a good practice, all I have tried from that is Shambhavi Mudra so I can not speak a lot about it but from what I have tried it was good, it's something I'm going to explore more myself in the future.

Do you workout or do yoga? These will make you more energized and break through the sluggish phase that can be experienced sometimes after masturbation. Also they will improve your self discipline so you don't have to masturbate everytime you feel like it. But never masturbating is probably not the best either imo, doing it sometimes can be a good thing. Try doing it without porn and focusing on the feelings in your body to make it a moment of bonding with yourself. Also work on your diet to make sure you get enough nutrients, it will make you recover faster not only from masturbation but from training as well.