TimStr

I did 4 Myers-Briggs tests in the past and got 4 different results. Not hugely different but still different types. I also think that the mood and well-being of the moment you take it has a big impact. I would suggest that just like all other typologies you treat it more like something you have put on, like a costume or mask rather than something you are.

@Carl-Richard This question requires way more nuance than a simple yes of no! If you would ask me if psychedelics mindfucked me in ways I couldn't even anticipate and revealed how malluable my experience is and how few things I can take for granted in life, I would say HELL YEAH! If you'd ask me if I undertook tremendous work to change my behavior and my attitude to life as a result of a psychedelic exsperience, I would answer: Maybe some of the times. There were many trips, that despite having them approached as a serious conscious endeavour turned out to be mostly recreationally entertaining and didn't affect some of my deeper inner mechanics in the long run. If you would ask me if psychedelics produced any change in my life by themselves without conscious effort on my end, I would answer: Definately not! After a solid 10 years of regular tripping at least 3 - 25 times each year, I have to admit, that all those trips produced way fewer lasting changes than I was telling myself all along. This became more and more clear especially during the last couple of months. I hate to say it but intense inquiry and meditation retreats and even just deeply educating myself on an intellectual level seem to have produced a lot more lasting changes in my life. The couple of deep trips that shifted a great deal for me were also during intense retreat settings so it's hard for me to seperate out the effect of the psychedelic from the rest. Then again we could talk about weather life changes are even the point of tripping and consciousness work of if it's more about gaining experience or understanding. You asked for the first thing that popped into my head. After 10 years of experience, at this moment, it's a NO. Maybe I change my mind at some point.

It's also an option that they just failed to integrate their experience adequately and therefore didn't get any life changing effects.

@Leo Gura Got it. So the creator of the videos I posted has a pretty comprehensive website linking some gear that still seems to be avaliable: https://sites.google.com/view/mintylovesrue/emesh Besides knockoffs that usually seem to require some fixing to get them to work properly, he seems to be recommending this one: https://sites.google.com/view/mintylovesrue/emesh/mesh-rda-reviews/cthulu-iris#h.oqv98jpf3scm https://www.cthulhumod.com/product/iris-mesh-rda/ I have no personal experience with it. Looks decent though.

@shree This is almost the exact setup I use, except that I prefer a short mouthpiece to ensure that no DMT resublimates in it and I inhale the exact quantity that I put in. So far emesh the cleanest and most effective method for vaping tryptamines that I've come across. @Leo Gura I can recommend. For anyone that doesn't know: The emesh is a stainless steel mesh coil that you place your DMT on. You then heat that coil up and it immediately vaporizes the complete dose. The main benefits are, that once you got the technique down, it is extremely precise regarding dosing and that you inhale only DMT no vape juice. Also it's a lot less harsh to the throat and it doesn't taste like breathing the fumes of burning tires. You could use this gear: - Mesh Coil - Vape Mod - Stainless steel mesh These videos do a great job of explaining the details and the smoking technique:

At this point this thread is almost comical!

Happy to hear that! What I love about them is that he mostly uses archive footage and this makes for a really relateable experience of the specific time, he speaks about.

Sephalopod intelligence is the closest thing to alien intelligence, we have on earth. Here are some of the things that struck me as I was researching about them: They have twice as many neurons as a cat but 2/3 of them are distributed in their 8 arms and only 1/3 in their head. Each of heir arms has basically its own brainstem and sense organs. Their arms can act independantly but also concertated. They can change the color and texture of their skin to match their surrounding within an instant despite their eyes being color blind. They do this with photoreceptors in their skin. They can solve compex problems and mazes, they have memory and the capability of abstract planning and can recognize people. They exhibit play despite being an antisocial and solitairy creature. (Play as a form of learning is usually only found in species that form social relations.) Contemplating this is valuable to realize just how many aspects of our mind and our intelligence we take for granted! Realize how radical this becomes: It's not a given, that your body is one entity. Imagine the possibility of your left arm, just going on, doing its thing for a while, grabbing, managing and learning stuff, while still allowing for your body acting as a whole if one of arms fins some information that would necessitate that. This ability to switch between centralized and decentralized intelligence is something that humans are not good at at all. How would it be to have an octopus awakening and become octopus-god? Realize what aspects and what believes about yourself and your intelligence would need to be dropped? More Resources: My Octopus Teacher (Neflix) Inside the mind of an octopus, interview with Dr. Jennifer Mather (Youtube) Dr. Jennifer Mather about Octopus Intelligence (Youtube)

Wow, I can only try to imagine. I think, this is basically what this guy did:

Those videos are just dogfights, organized to generate clicks and views. I don't see productive debate being modeled there. So I agree with them doing more harm. It's just people fighting.

Are there any other plattforms for video creaters, that are worth considering, to be used instead of youtube?

Here is something from the depths of tibetan buddhism: The oracle of Nechung. He puts himself into trance and performs dances wearing extremely heavy bronze costumes (sometimes up to 40 kilos) while transmitting visions. He serves as one of the primary advisors for the dalai lama. By the way: I don't want to discredit this by saying that all of this is fake in the sense that it is purely performative. I believe that going into trance and having visions can be archieved. And I think that if anyone the tibetans are experts in this. But we still have to ponder, weather this is actually genuine truthseeking or something distinct from that. We also need to consider whats the role of tradition within all this. I am mainly posting this because we wanted to have a thread about the peculiarities that happen when humans start to engage with spirituality.

Here is another one for the shits and giggles: The church of dudeism, a religion founded on impersonating the Dude from the famous Jeff Bridges movie: The Big Lebowsky Practicioners usually go bowling, drink lots of White Russians and wear cozy sweaters. It was founded by his holyness, the dudely lama, Oliver Benjamin. The great thing about this is, that most practicioners have self-awareness about the whole thing being a mockery. Here is an interview with the founder of Dudeism.

I think the issue is not so much, that these things are woo hoo. There might be people with legit psychic or healing abilities. But thats not so much what the question of fake spirituality is about. As I see it, the issue is more that people confuse the believes they have about those psychics and healers for doing spiritual work. Many people think they become spiritual by immersing themselves in these kind of new age circles and adopting the "spiritual" culture. They become trapped in a sort of spiritual performance. For this to happen, it doen't matter if the new age hypothoses or the psychic ability is actually legit or not. People create the fantasies about it weather there is legitimacy to these things or not. But thats not what genuine truth seeking means.

This is probably one of the most sinister people on earth: João Teixeira de Faria, also called "John of God", claims to be a spiritual medium and psychic surgeon. He promises to heal peoples psychological or physiological illnesses by "operating" on their body despite having no medical training. Common procedures include inflicting cuts, inserting hemostats into peoples noses or scraping their eyes with blunt knives usually done without any kind of anesthesia or sanitation. He targets people with terminal illness and exploits their hopelessness. Edit: Trigger warning, some of those videos contain imagery of those operations that are quite shocking to watch.

I am genuinely happy that we are talking about this topic! I see, that this kind of fakeness is doing serious harm! Not only posing a trap for ones personal spiritual developement but also hurting the image of spirituality at large, turning spirituality into a weird kind of hippy cosplay! Performative authenticity. Letting those words sink in makes it clear, that there are some deeper epistemic issues at work here. Poststructuralist philosopher Jean Baudrillard called this the transition from the real to the hyperreal.

Probably the fakest "spiritual" person on the internet: Shanin Blake

Oh boy, this is going to be a hell of a thread!! There is just so much fakeness and bullshitting that happens, when westerners get into spirituality without being serious. I've collected lots of examples over the last year: Commercial spiritual transformation festivals: Trustafarians and voluntourism:

That depends a little bit on the use case. If you just want to be ad free, yes, running an adblocker (like uBlock Origin) will do the job just fine. However if you want a clean, undistracting and fast interface of if you're privacy focused or you want to escape the Google ecosystem alltogether (like me), just going ad free is not sufficient. The youtube algorhythm objetively sucks since a couple of years now. And it sucks for user and creators alike! There are many issues with it. But my main concern is that crappy, clickbaity short videos get ranked higher than actual valuable content, even in your personalized feed. And also targeted advertisement is a thing on youtube, as in getting shown videos, that include products that you're likely to buy. Creaters have to tailor their content to this ecosystem in order to get views, so the overall quality of content steadily decreases as we've seen for the last years now.

We had some talk in this community about the enshitification of Youtube and the interface and search algorithm becoming lower quality. I too struggled with this issue for quite some time now. My solution since a couple of months is to ditch the official interface of Youtube entirely and use independantly developed frontend alternatives. It's basically like a complete redesign of the website that ditches all the shit stuff, meaning all ads, trackers, cookies or recommendation algorhithms etc, but it still allows you to watch all of youtubes content. The most straightforward way to do this is to install FreeTube on your computer (runs on any OS). It's a lightweight, open-source and free / donation based Youtube client. Check the official website here: https://freetubeapp.io/ This app also has the option to filter out certain content (e.g. Youtube Shorts, blacklisted Channels etc.) and it even has a distraction free mode, that you can use to hide distracting elements of the UI. You can also subscribe to channels right from the app without an account. Since it is more lightweight, it's also much faster than the Youtube Website most of the time. And it adds a download button to every video. There is also a way to set up and automatic redirect so that any Youtube URL you open is automatically opened in Freetube. Here is a guide: https://github.com/FreeTubeApp/FreeTube?tab=readme-ov-file#browser-extensions It gets buggy with age restricted content, sometimes. Other than that, the only downside I found to this is that you now have to find another way to support your favourite Youtubers since they don't get ad revenue by you now. But it's easy nowadays to send most people a couple of dollars on patreon. Bonus Tip 1: If you want to take extra care about your privacy and you are not afraid to get nerdy, there is also a project called Invidious (which FreeTube is based on), that you can self host so you have maximum control where your data goes to. Link here: https://invidious.io/ If you want to use an alternative Youtube Frontend on your phone, a publically hosted Invidious instance it the way to go! Here is a list of such instances: https://redirect.invidious.io/ Bonus Tip 2: There are alternative frontends for many websites, that are enshitified. Find the ones to suit your needs for making your online experiance more bareable, it's really worth the time. Here's a pretty comprehensive list: https://libredirect.github.io/

Thats definately an issue. Invidious, the outher project I shared (which btw is the service, that freetube uses to stream videos) is allready facing legal troubles by google. And since these are open source projects and anyone can just copy the code, this is a real thread that google cannot really control. So you might be right, Youtube might actually change how it's working under the hood if too many people start using these services.

@Princess Arabia The app is not made by Youtube but by independant developers. Since it's open source, you won't ever be charged for using it. To clarify, this is just for watching videos yourself. It's not meant for embedding them. It's an app, that you would use instead of the youtube website. And if you play a Youtube link in the browser, its still going to be on the youtube website.

@Leo Gura My concern with nano-particles is this: If they are able enter the bloodstream and potentially other organs like my brain, how can I be sure, that they will ever get out of my system again? What guarantees, that those partlicles, don't just stay in my body, making any attempt to detox heavy metals with them obsolete?

If you hate youtube getting shittier you should consider using an alternative frontend for it (e.g. FreeTube). I made a post on this forum about this, today: