Carl-Richard

While I say that, I think JP is mostly the shit. There is a lot of depth to his personal development stuff (and psychological and religious stuff). Just because something seems simple on the surface, doesn't mean it's not deep. Just because something is foundational, doesn't mean it's not important. A huge trap is to neglect the foundational by mistaking it as not important. That is why sayings like "make your bed" or "walk with your shoulders upright" can be worth hammering in, certainly in a culture that regularly trivializes the foundational.

The West is spiritually dead and any glimmer of meaning in the darkness is celebrated as the new God.

How would you describe how you play the game?

Do you feel that you have developed an in-game strategy over time, and do you think it played into breaking through that initial tough spot?

Do Langan's CTMU.

Cool. What a coincidence that you commented here just now. I was just planning to post something in this topic about a new insight on strategy or more generally how working memory works. Working memory is often conceived through a quantitative lens in the sense that a better working memory means you can process more things and faster. But I've noticed there is also qualitative aspect that impacts your performance drastically, which I will call "subtlety of processing". It has to do with using the right amount of energy and attention in each action; essentially, elegance (which correlates a lot with mindfulness, which is another way that mindfulness could increase IQ, outside mere DMN de-activation). You can see this subtlety principle in other activities, like carrying heavy groceries, or sprint training or playing an instrument. If you hold your groceries just right, or if you have just the right sprint form, or if you hold your fingers just loose enough to move effortlessly but firm enough to hit the right notes, then your endurance and general performance will increase. What this looks like specifically in N-Back training is hard to explain, but it's something like the speed and softness with which you look at each block or rehearse each letter. Nevertheless, I think it's something that can be grasped intuitively, and just becoming aware of it can probably help increase your gains further. In a nutshell: there are different ways to encode and manipulate information that are more subtle or less subtle (and more or less conducive to optimal performance).

Only this forum or also other forums like it?

If it's a speech or presentation, practice like you have never practiced before; get it down to every word, every move, like you're an actor in a movie. That is what I did for my first presentation in many years back when I used to really fear presentations, and because I had practiced it so much, it went so much better than I had expected that it radically changed how I view presentations. I was actually excited to do more presentations after that. How is that possible? One explanation is that dopamine (largely) works like a prediction error (actual reward minus expected reward). For example, if you expect something to go really bad but it actually goes really well, you'll get a massive spike of dopamine. In other words, if the expected reward is much smaller (or negative) in relation to the actual reward, you'll get a big dopamine release. So I expected my presentation to go really bad, but it actually went really good, so I got a massive dopamine spike, and dopamine reinforces behavior, which explains why I was suddenly excited to do more presentations.

*When you find a metaphor that sounds cool but really isn't that accurate, but you've spent so much time thinking about it that you're engaging in the sunk cost fallacy and cannot accept where you're wrong*

It's also in the human identity to be able to follow a higher moral impulse and suspend our lower impulses. That's not dysmorphia; that's what we are. You might feel attracted to eating meat on a primal level, but you can also realize that you don't have to eat meat. This is what makes us so incredible. You might feel compelled to beat a rude person into a pulp, or molest some innocent woman, but you can realize you don't have to do that. You're exactly not a crocodile. You're a human.

Imagine if you were scared of dogs.

I think you actually have to hop on gear to get past a normal BMI as a non-fat gym rat.

The moments leading up to cessation (while meditating eyes closed and seated in half-lotus position), I would describe as a progressive sense of stillness, both in the mind and in the body. The progressive unwinding of tension in the body that occurs in meditation starts coming to a conclusion, and your body becomes very still (close to zero movement). The tiny muscle twitches in your legs start to disappear and you can distinctly sense them relaxing at another level. The space between thoughts become wider, and the thoughts themselves become quicker and more subtle and faint. The very last moments leading up to cessation, I would describe as slowly getting injected with an anesthetic, where all your senses slowly dampen and "equalize", until you lose all sense of being in a body and having a mind. The visual static behind your eyes gets smoother and more clear, and the visual field expands and zooms out slightly. The now unmowing body starts losing its sensation (interoceptively as well as externally, like the pressures under your butt and the feelings in your face and head), and it feels like you're slowly fading out of existence. This loss of bodily sensation is maybe what is most reminiscent of anesthesia, and the sense of being headless is an experience all by itself. The sounds in the room get dimmer and slowly disappear. The mind is now essentially quiet. The moment of entering cessation itself, I would describe as entering an enormous "place" which has no sense of time, no sense of space, and you feel that it's a place that will last forever and has lasted forever. It existed before you were born and it will exist after you're gone. And it's a place of perfect stillness, tranquility and bliss. Of course, the main "attraction" or challenge of the experience is the sense that you're going to disappear forever and never come back, that your sense of identity is fundamentally collapsing and that you're being erased from existence. This can feel extremely terrifying, literally like you're dying, but this is only the last throes of the ego before it can choose to rest and you identify yourself with the larger identity of Consciousness.

What's a normal physique?

It's almost like "spirituality" is no different from religion...