Asayake

So are you

I agree that Connor is not shallow, the dude has more guts than most. He really went for it, he went all in and there's big risk involved in doing that. But if no one ever commited like he did we would be nowhere near where we are today. He's a mad scientist, although he did fly too close to the sun and burnt himself quite a bit, he seems to have recovered pretty well. And although he's a pretty weird dude, nothing less should be expected for someone who underwent the journey he undertook. His journey is an interesting example of a completely unexpected life transformation, revealing that Connor is in fact not a shallow guy but a pretty deep and strange guy, that's what's underneath the bodybuilding youtuber surface.

I sense a difference in outcome between the two examples..

Magnus Carlsen drinks OJ while playing chess, there has to be something to it

Can you change my account name to "Nobody here" please?

By embracing it, swallow conciously, be aware of the sensation of swallowing and stop trying not to do it. It will pass sooner or later, the wisest thing is to just become ok with it happening so that you don't cause yourself more suffering than necessary while it's going on. The sensation of swallowing can become a sensation for mindfulness and help ground you in the moment and bring you out of your head if you observe it as it is when it happens. Over time you'll become less nervous/anxious and then you won't be swallowing like that anymore, but it can take some time so there's no reason trying to speed up that process. The important thing is that this behaviour doesn't make you avoid the situations that trigger it, so that's why you want to befriend this behaviour and stop seeing it as a problem, so you can keep exposing yourself to these situations which make you nervous/anxious and over time you will grow comfortable in those situations.

Smoking cigarettes can make someone feel good, doesn't mean it's good for you

I need to rewatch this one, I think I was too young when I first watched it to get the depth of it.

Good scene indeed! Ah yes, I've heard from somewhere that David Lynch was influenced by Persona for that movie, I can certainly see it as well. God I love Mulholland Drive, it's brilliant. I'm going to watch Hour of the Wolf next from Bergman, it's supposedly a horror movie, which I'm pretty excited about. Fanny & Alexander is the one many talk about as being his best work and I haven't seen that one yet so it's on my watchlist as well.

A certain scene from this movie makes this movie akward to watch with your parents, especially if you're a Swede I think it becomes even worse lol. I can recommend Wild Strawberries if you haven't seen that one and plan on diving deeper into Bergman, it's a movie I like! I would like to add that all Bergman movies I've seen has a similar kind of dialogue/script style that makes them instantly recognizable. I'm not sure how well it translates to English subtitles but the Swedish prose used is really beautiful/different and reminiscent of theatre.

Adyashanti is absolutely awesome! I've been enjoying his guided meditations and talks and hold him in high regard.

I also found this very interesting, some can be read about it in "Man and his symbols"by Jung himself. It goes into this idea that your anima is formed by the examples of the feminine that were set when you were young. So your mother heavily impacts the anima as a man. And the animus is impacted heavily by your father as a woman. Hence why for example a woman with an abusive father finds herself in abusive relationships, she has developed a dependence on that abusive trait, without it she isn't whole, as it's become part of the animus. Jung is a pretty clever dude, he used to have dinners with Albert Einstein.

I think you raise a valid point. It made me think of the other day when Leo said that people who dedicate their life to chess are idiots. How would you know if you didn't dedicate your life to chess yourself? You don't know what chess is if you don't dedicate yourself to it fully, is what it looks like from my point of view. So how could you know that people who dedicate their lives to X are misled if you haven't done the same yourself? You don't really know what they're doing. Of course Leo is biased towards psychedelics because he pursued them more than most so he also knows more than most what is possible going down that path. But the same is true for other paths as well. Other teachers seem as convinced as Leo that their paths are superior because it worked well for them. It seems to me like it's highly individual. It seems impossible to describe what needs to be done without saying something that is self biased and dogmatic, doesn't mean it's not worth exploring. You don't have to become brainwashed just because you do Vipassana, Also psychedelics could just as well be deceptive and clever just like Vipassana. There's a reason people end up deluded on both sides of the coin.

Can you explain your view on the matter? What is God? Awakening?

Is Leo Gura awake? I agree, I would love to see that!

The same is true for many great artists. Franz Schubert för example, one of the greatest composers of all time suffered from mood swings and syphilis. He died from syphilis when he was only 31 years old as it was untreatable in his time. Despite the fact he wrote more than 1000 pieces of music during his life. Illness can bring a lot out of a human.

Have you tried eating vegan first hand or otherwise your direct epxerience is hypocritical. It's not only that a lot of vegan don't use direct experience to find out what the best diet is for them, that goes for most people regardless of diet. A vegan diet can work perfectly fine, there are just a lot of traps you can fall into like unsustainable low fat raw veganism. There are also traps in carnivore I'm sure, there are probably mistakes you can make that will take time to show. It's unlikely you're going to do everything right from the get go. But yes, every vegan isn't healthy, there are unhealthy ways to eat plant based.

Sorry you went through that. Binge eating afterwards is normal, it's the same thing that happens with people in the biggest loser TV program, they go on big caloric deficit lose a lot of weight and then rebound afterwards. Any big caloric deficit will lower your metabolism which is why your body went cold, and will put your body in starvation mode. Your hormones like cortisol will increase and you will eat a lot as a consequence, your body is trying to put on fat to prepare itset for a potential similar situation in the future. I believe listening to your body and eating as much as it wants is good, your body is healing from the fast by doing this and changing its metabolism and hormones. When your body is reassured you're not going to starve anymore cortisol levels will go down. High cortisol also makes you more prone to psychosis as it stresses the body and puts you in a constant fight or flight head high. But you need to eat the things that help your body. Fruits & vegetables are healthy but I'm going to guess you didn't get enough calories eating only that. Nor did you probably get enough minerals. It's the problem with a long fast like that, when you come back from it you can't eat just anything. Fruit makes sense as it digests quickly and doesn't tax the digestive system much. However this also means that the refeed period is essentially a continuation of the fast, you're not fasting but you're on a big caloric deficit with limited nutritional intake. My advice to you would be to continue eating fruit if you experience no issues eating that but to also eat a lot of healthy cooked foods that are higher in calories like a lot of rice, lentils, potatoes. You can make something like a big batch of lentil daal with a lot of spices and have that last 3 days and serve with different carbs and eat as much as you want from that. You can keep eating a lot but eating a lot of fast food is going to potentially harm your body. You need to eat as much as you want, no restriction but eat real food and minimize oil if you become too heavy so you get more space for carbs. Personally something that helped me stabilize my mind was to increase sugar intake by adding sugar on my fruit and cereal. As well as eating big amounts of rice, potatoes, lentils, pasta (no more pasta anymore though because turns out I'm sensitive to gluten). I believe eating sufficient amounts of sugar with no restriction lets your body know it's safe because blood sugar spikes lower cortisol levels and help you relax. It's why back in the day children in my country were given a spoonful of sugar before bed if they couldn't sleep. The key is to avoid foods with both a lot of sugar and fat such as donuts and pizza as fat decreases the body's ability to handle blood sugar spikes by increasing insulin resistance. The body really wants a sufficient sugar/carb intake to help regulate cortisol levels. A big rice & lentil meal before bed helps you sleep like a child again.

I love Jeb Corliss, such a crazy soul. I haven't watched that documentary, will watch it!

I find it beautiful when people dedicate their lives to something some would consider risky or trivial. Please share your favorite videos of people doing dangerous but beautiful things. I'll start out with a classic I love, imagine the amount of falls and injuries one would have to go through to get to this level, having the will to keep going further even though you know one bad fall could end your career, that's true passion:

The same video could be made with Jordan Peterson in his low moments to show the scary side of the carnivore diet. That video is not a good representation of vegans, I don't see anything wrong with any of them except for the girl, she is clearly very underweight and it looks like she's avoiding calorie containing food and opting for zuccini noodles and eating 100% raw which is not easy to make sustainable.

I've had similar experiences. It's great until it isn't, it really is sneaky as hell.

You already quit for 2 months, it's very common to relapse atleast once before quitting for good, pretty much everyone does it so you did nothing wrong, it's just like having thoughts appear during meditation practice, it's not a mistake just a part of the process. The next step will be to give it another go, don't stop meditating just because a hindrance appeared, so to speak. If you want to get to the next level of well being quitting is foundational. It's a beautiful experience, it's ultimately a rebirth/rediscovery of your sober self, restoring the magic of the sober state and the healing of your body and mind. It's going to be an easy way for you to integrate some shadow aspects of your mind. Things will come up as you've already noticed and you'll be forced to learn how to deal with them properly, how to live with increased emotional instability for a while and learn to be okay with that. Quitting will increase your self acceptance and help you come to peace with yourself, it's a gradual process. Quitting is challenging at times but it's also a beautiful spiritual experience. It's a deep dive lesson in maneuvering your mind. Instead of doing psychedelics or chasing spiritual highs in other domains, quitting smoking could be your psychedelic of choice for 2 years, that's how you could approach it. Quitting smoking is more than meets the eye, it's a personal transformation which will have positive ripple effects in all areas of your life. The longer you're off it entirely the more time and space will be opened up for healthier recreation to take place and it only becomes a matter of time before your new pursuits bear more fruit than smoking ever could. At that point cravings have no impact, you start to see through the trick your mind is playing on you, you see smoking for what it is, it's never really as good as you think it is, that's an illusion. Your mind is tricking you to believe that other coping strategies won't compare to smoking, that it will be more rewarding to smoke than for example sober Vipassana practice or taking a walk in nature, or listening to music and cooking a healthy meal. You need to reprogram your mind in this regard. Your mind is tricking you by thinking about how good it would feel with a smoke etc, all of that's not true, smoking is not at all that pleasurable, you just think that it is and then your sober state feels bad because you're going through withdrawal alot of the time when you're not smoking. After a few months of abstaining the withdrawals will get significantly less severe and returning to smoking will become less and less tempting as it becomes clearer and clearer that it just leads to misery. Fatigue, phlegm, yes even cancer as you're aware of. It's not exactly heaven what's in store for you heading down that path. Smoking is like replaying that same song you heard a thousand times before, you know how the song goes already and at this point you're looking for cheap thrills. It's like a toxic relationship you know you should have ended a long time ago. It's keeping you stuck in a place of delayed growth. That's fine, but know that the growth and rewards you can achieve as a direct as well as indirect result of quitting smoking is more worth it than you probably think. You need to look at quitting smoking more as a way of growing and cultivating love in your life, not as merely avoiding disease down the line, although that's nice too. Sorry for the rant but I feel like you need it. You need to give it another shot or your 2 months were in vein.

Quitting smoking will generally get easier after 3 months of abstaining. I'm curious, did you think much about cigarettes/smoking/have cravings? It would be interesting to get a bit of an insight into what made you go back to smoking. There must be some cognitive dissonance going on in you considering that you likely quit for valid reasons of which you're aware in the first place. Cigars are not healthy, anything where you are in direct contact with smoke is not good for you whether that's cigars cigarettes or weed doesn't matter. Even if you don't deeply inhale cigar smoke you'll still inhale some of it and it's also bad psychologically because similarly to smoking cigarettes it will give you an addiction forming dopamine spike and worsen your mental health by increasing your cortisol levels and increasing risk of disease. People promoting cigars as healthy today are like doctors promoting cigarettes back in the day. It's dumb and there are immoral people out there looking to profit of your suffering.

Judging by the fact that you're still quite young it's not too late for you to study psychology still if you want. I agree with Eugene, if you could get the math figured out that could be nice. You could research how to study maths more effeciantly, watch YouTube videos going through different math problems in Swedish. You could get paid help with studying math if you got some money to spare. If you want to become a psychologist you should really start taking your HP studies seriously. You need to study math everyday and find the charm in it and self exam yourself online every month to track your progress. Perhaps you knew all of this already but I figured it was worth pointing out anyways. There's a possibility that you really want to become a psychologist but that you're not motivated enough about HP because it's a bit of an illusion/it doesn't feel like studying to become a psychologist when you're studying maths. You need to contemplate that a bit to see clearly what you need to do to become a psychologist so that you become motivated to study maths consistently and work on improving your study technique itself. However there's also a possibility that you don't want to become a psychologist and that's why you're not motivated to go through with the math studying thing, which is also fine. Perhaps you're more interested in alternative healing and therapy styles not taught in psychology at university. A psychology degree could still be useful but it's not a must to help others. It's still possible. Just more difficult and you got to make it happen more by yourself. It could even be a bit of an indirect route as you say if what you want to work with isn't directly related to the things you learn in University. You should lookup precisely what they study at the psychology program and consider if those are things you find interesting/valuable. Another thing to consider is that you would meet a lot of people your age who are interesred in psychology if you went to Uni which could be quite valuable and fun. To do a more direct path by yourself you need to become very knowledgeable in the things where you want to become valuable to others. You want to become valuable to others to be able to make a living doing what you do. Wether it's having private counseling calls or studying under some authority independent of the University there are many alternative paths. But they're most likely not going to be less rough than studying for HP. But anything becomes more bearable when it feels more aligned with what you want to do. No one can make this call but yourself, you need to take all things into consideration, think things through and then go with your gut. Good luck!