Joseph Maynor

Psychedelics are interesting because although they're thought, commonly, to be fantasy, they're actually direct experience. It depends on how we want to define direct experience.

I've only needed to do 5-Meo once. But nothing compares to that trip for me. It was enough.

The elephant in the room is there's a psychedelic connection to solipsism or to that insight anyway.

It seems to me this turns on what we mean by mind.

How so?

I agree. You have to look at individual philosophers. It's easy to lump them all into a class and then judge them all. There are a lot of great analytic philosophers. A lot of contemporary epistemology has in many ways been a project of analytic philosophy.

One technique I did is brainstorm into an audio recording on my phone for like 30 min to an hour. I just let myself talk which is like a brainstorm. Then I would listen back and try to outline what I said in the audio into salient points. Then I wrote those down on my whiteboard and made goals out of those principles.

God created your finite mind and body no? So by extension it seems He could do this for other finite selves.

I feel like some people are more into an artform than others are which explains wider taste. People who aren't into music that much have a very different set of albums or songs they listen to. I'm the same with visual arts, I have very little interest in that so someone who is really into visual arts would look at the pictures in my house and probably cringe a little.

My honest answer is that all of us have a finite perspective we attach to so that we can know what a finite perspective is. So the Absolute contains all finite perspectives, including our own.

I never try to fight with people about taste. That's where you learn that everyone has their own unique perspective. Everyone loves music, but they differ as to what music they like. There's a lesson in that! We can value the same thing and expect to be different too. This is what I think musicians learn quicker than others do.

Does contemplation mean you're trying to control a contemplation or are you letting contemplation emerge more naturally?

Not on a daily basis, but I want to make better Indian food.

I guess it's understandable that most people have confusion with how deep artistry goes. Think of an artwork like a trip.

I have a different take. It's not to deactivate the self, it's to integrate aspects of the Self into the self. It's to realize the self is a character that can be modified to a degree by influence of the Self.

And then I guess the question is what are you communicating to them that they can hope to find? What is Absolute Truth, even in pointer form?

You can't convince anyone of Absolute Truth, they have to find it. You can point them toward the project at best.

This seems like it would be easy but it's actually the most difficult problem in self-help. The answer is you have to do work to develop the motivation to do clearly specified projects. My method of doing this is building up inspiration to do a list of projects in a specified time. But to make a long story short I try to build up a way to have fun while doing a list of tasks.

Yes. If you need to create this, I get it.