Carl-Richard

I was abroad in the summer, and two times, we were sitting waiting for someone at a gate at the airport, lots of people, and I would randomly look up and directly catch the people we were waiting for when they were 10-20 meters away.

Yes. No. You can have achievements, you can have drive, energy, industry, but on the inside, you're no one. "People that are a little more perceptive, clearly see that I don't even exist" — Sadhguru

When you challenge the self-deception of the collective, it's easy to fall to the self-deception of the individual. But self-deception is really not more sinister in the non-physical realm. To the contrary: what you take as solid, that is arguably what hides the most sinister forms of self-deception. Thinking you're on the right side of a world conflict, that's one of the biggest examples of solid self-deceptions. But yet you have an opinion, you have a sense, you have a moral compass, so you give it life. You have an experience, and you will argue for it. And you should do that, with anything, be it non-physical or physical. The only antidote to self-deception is ultimately self-awareness, not denying what you think or holding your mouth.

It's the only way. You can use psychedelics alone in isolation, without social distractions or theological dogma to explore DMT realms and talk to entities, without aiming towards enlightenment. You can use meditation alone in isolation, without social distractions, merely to reduce stress and anxiety and become more calm and productive, without aiming towards enlightenment. You can use contemplation alone to become better at your business, your academic work, your social life, your emotional life, your intellectual life, without aiming towards enlightenment. But once you aim towards enlightenment, you can use all these things to move you in that direction. The practice, the path, is just that. It's not the goal. And it's generally not simple and one-dimensional. But your aim, ultimately, can be.

The question means you're not enlightened. Enlightenment is the most profound thing there is. But I can ask my reductionistic scientific questions: Do you experience yourself thinking about yourself, your issues, your problems, being lost in thought? Do you experience any thoughts about yourself more than 5% of your day? Conversely, do you experience a profound stillness, tranquility and peace, beyond thought, more than 95% of your day? Do you always know what to do? Do you simply channel the will of God through you without doubt, without hesitation, without self-concern? Is there really anyone doing anything or is the movie of life simply running with you as an eternal witness? Is there anything you want to achieve or do in the world, or does achievement just happen, without desire, without resistance? Do you fear death? Do you fear insanity? Do you fear ultimate lack of control? Do you fear non-existence? Do you fear eternity? Do you fear suffering? What is love?

They didn't mention the Danish statue they removed 🐒

The irony is spirituality is survival all up until you're liberated. Spirituality is spiritual ego all up until you disidentify with the ego. The true way to separate fake from real spirituality is what your aim is.

There is analytical idealism postulating every organism, even single-celled, has a private consciousness, and then there are mystics claiming to have entered the womb at a certain point (some state this happens around 40-48 days after conception). Are these contradictory, or are both correct? Could there be a mind prior to the subtle mind entering that "merges" with the subtle mind? Or are the minds always separate, even as the organism develops (maybe the first mind is the Unconscious of the other)? I actually think this is Bernardo's position: the parts of your self (including your body) that you cannot access introspectively, is the Unconscious. If the first mind is the mind of the body and the Unconscious, this could explain why a more "Conscious" aspect of the mind could enter later. This could actually have implications for gender incongruence. If the subtle mind has been in mostly female bodies, it entering a male body could cause feminine behavior, homosexuality or dysmorphia.

I think both could be true. Some feel it only in intense states, others are more finely attuned to it.

By time-restricted, I essentially mean no snacks (except an orange at the gym). I just eat my three meals and that's it. I'm aiming as I said to move my last meal earlier in the day, but I think I would have to make my second meal smaller for that to happen more or less naturally. When I do that, it would become more window-like.

I gotta say after doing stairmaster a couple of times for 20 mins at 160 bpm (after my weight training), it does not compare to sprints or 4x4 in brain effects. You need that lactate and BDNF boost and just pumping explosive energy into your brain 🧠 Maybe I have to do it for longer? 🤔

Sprint training is when you do maximal effort (95-100%) for a short period of time (20-30 seconds), ideally while running. Why maximal effort? Because solving difficult problems is like a sprint. Remember all the times you've read a difficult text and you feel like you're straining your brain while reading one particularly difficult sentence. Reading a sentence takes maximum a few seconds. Understanding or grasping the idea takes the time it takes to read the sentence and maybe a little more, but not much more. Either you grasp it there, or you don't. You can try again, sprinting again, but chances are, if you read it a few times and you still don't understand, you probably won't understand it for a while (you have to e.g. read some other text or take a break). You have to make the sprint then and there. You have to engage in that level of intensity then and there, or else you won't grasp it. Now, lower intensity training (e.g. moderate intensity cardio) might help you sift through more problems over a longer period of time and increasing your general work capacity, but the quality, the depth, the weight of the problem depends on your level of intensity. Thus training at maximum intensity will strongly increase your ability to solve difficult problems. Also, I've noticed sprint training makes your thinking incredibly fast (the rate of thinking), which is maybe not so unexpected either. That's probably also a big part of solving difficult problems, of being able to present a wide range of alternatives in a short amount of time before your attention runs out. Why ideally when running? Because you are biomechanically most equipped to expend the most energy per unit of time by moving your body in a way that resembles running. Running is not just about moving your feet; it involves the entire body, the upper body arguably just as much as the lower body. And you were built to run; there are millions of years of bipedal evolution driving your body to run, and therefore your body should expend the most energy by running (because energy spent running is essentially congruent to evolutionary fitness). Evolution fine-tuned your body to move your arms and legs in that specific way, so you should take advantage of that. So far, I've made the case on a purely mechanistic ground, call it "philosophy of physiology". But you can also make the case on more concrete scientific and neurophysiological grounds. Sprint training, or more accurately in this case "working out until failure" (which is best achieved by sprinting until failure), induces the production of lactic acid, which is converted to lactate, which is a neurotransmitter that is involved in brain function. It increases BDNF (which increases the growth of neurons), it's involved in monoamine neurotransmitter synthesis (dopamine, serotonin, norepinephrine), it's even used as an energy source for neurons. However, sprinting until absolute failure is arguably not where you'll get the best overall effects, but rather when you try to sprint as fast as possible, because again, you want to strain your system at a maximum level and elevate your ceiling of intensity. It's an overall systemic adaptation towards maximal intensity that I believe should be the main goal. Again, there are other cases to be made for again moderate intensity cardio, or 4x4 training (for increasing VO2 max), or even lifting weights, as these all produce their own particular signatures in the body and which feeds into the brain in their own unique ways. If you want to be a well-rounded person, you want to engage in all of it from time to time. But if you care about solving difficult problems, if you care about "thinking fast", and if you care about feeding your brain a very beneficial nutrient and signalling molecule (lactate), you should consider incorporating some form of sprint training (ideally running sprints) into your workout routine. Other alternatives than running sprints are assault bike, normal bike. I find that I can only sprint around 1-2 times a week (on top of weight training 3.5 times a week) because it is very fatiguing. So keep that in mind, because fatigue will also inhibit cognitive functioning.

If I didn't value time-restricted eating, I would probably chomp blueberries all day.

No-self means that the chair over there in the corner is experienced just as strongly as yourself as what is seemingly inside this physical body. Rali made a very powerful video about this years ago, but all his videos are deleted.

I swear to God, I thought earlier today "is ChatGPT going to launch a new model soon?", and now I open ChatGPT, and they released ChatGPT-5 "And what I'd like to suggest, is that the fields of our minds stretch out far beyond our bodies; they stretch out invisibly, and our consciousness is related to and based on these fields" - Rupert Sheldrake, The 2023 Holberg Debate.

Here is the personal account, which I will also title "why process can sometimes be just as important as substance": I recently started taking a multivitamin. I noticed if I took it together with my other existing supplements (some minerals and fat-soluble vitamins), it made me have an upset stomach. Apparently, many nutrients compete for uptake in the stomach, so too many of them at once can cause trouble. So I decided to separate the multivitamin from the existing supplements. Initially, I started taking the multivitamin on an empty stomach and with water so I could absorb it before taking the other supplements with my morning meal (mostly eggs, so fat-based, good for my existing vitamins). This helped a bit, but the multivitamin still made my stomach a bit upset. So I decided I could eat the kiwi fruit I usually eat after my morning meal, before the morning meal, right before I take the multivitamin, to soften the landing in my stomach. This was also a good idea because the multivitamin I take is mostly water soluble, and a kiwi is mostly water and fiber. It also has a lot of vitamin C which helps with particularly iron uptake from the multivitamin. Then recently, I decided to change my meals a bit: increase the size of the morning meal and decrease the size of my two other meals. This was to make me eat earlier before going bed, because food and sleep can be antagonistic in many ways. So this meant going from 3 to 5 eggs in the morning, and also moving my blueberries from my evening meal to my morning meal. I started eating the blueberries right after my kiwi. This was going pretty well, but I thought, what if I can do better? So I researched blueberries and found out the anti-oxidants can reduce iron absorption by 80-90%. I also felt a bit stuffed after eating so much fruit before the rest of the morning meal, so I decided to place the blueberries right after my morning meal. Then I went to the gym, and either it's a big fluke or something else is going on, but I've not been so energetic in a long time. Maybe it was the iron? Maybe it was the anti-oxidants being freed up when they couldn't bind to the iron? Even if the story is bogus, the things I've demonstrated should be possible in principle and demonstrates the importance of process. I will maybe make a more general thread demonstrating this with also other topics than nutrition.

Yes there is a neurotic element, and you can approach anything more or less neurotically, but try being "open" when you're deficient in vitamin D. Next video I'll have black metal face paint on and stare 250% more intensely into the camera. As hard as I stared on that Danish mermaid statue that got banned for certain reasons 👁👁

In Enlightenment, no-self sticks with you from moment to moment. If you had realized no-self at that level, there would be nobody to do anything. And this is meant as literally as it can be meant. You wouldn't even be in control of your body.

@Bryanbrax Hi. Presenting ChatGPT answers, or other AI creations, without declaring that it's AI, is a no-no. https://www.actualized.org/forum/guidelines/

Anybody who has experienced severe heartbreak has felt the heart chakra. Anybody who has experienced severe repression of saying or doing what you want has felt the throat chakra.

I had a period where I was sort of numb, certainly dissociated, back when I was meditating very heavily and on very long streaks of nofap, at the beginning of university. Firstly, I had a severe ego death experience on weed which I tried to push down (and ironically also during my meditations, but I still kept meditating). The way out I figured was instead of ignoring thoughts and feelings during meditation (and in general) was to dive into them and magnify them (and stop with the extreme nofap). The combination of doing very energy intensifying things with also trying to push down the inevitable products (mystical experiences) lead me into this weird half disembodied state. Everything was happening very quickly, and there was like a lack of depth to things. I would go to parties and drink tons of alcohol and say a lot of weird things that in hindsight just sounded completely unhinged, and that if I had the sensitivity and emotional awareness (of my own and also other's emotions), and of course the lack of intense half-constipated energy (that played a role), I would come off as relatively normal. So if your symptoms are not related to chronic pain, it's likely they're related to something you're repressing. Or you could have some other physical illness causing it.

You don't have to respond to anything 😆 I recommend anybody to not respond to things they don't want to respond to. You didn't say anything except "not sure if I believe it", which is why I asked questions 😉 I just want somebody to validate my personal experiences 🥹

Do you link it to the chronic pain?

I know you don't like systems thinking and that you're lazy 😛 What's new? Your mom.

Why treat huge money like it's a bunch of small coins and not build something with it? Invest it into something that grows a particular thing. Instead of paying people to do "good spirituality", you can make spirituality better. You can steer society in the direction of spirituality. Money means work, and work means change. The more money, the more change you can make.