Carl-Richard

@Lyubov Then again, people have the freedom to fuck themselves over in other ways, like taking life advice from ignorant low consciousness people

It's not just like this. It's an infinite design. And that is why it has to be this way. If it wasn't, it couldn't be infinite.

That's good. It's funny when people make posts like "x happened, am I enlightened?". Of course not! There is nothing subtle about it. It cannot be missed.

An explanation requires a conceptual mind to exist. Reality doesn't require anything. Even within a scientific framework, you'd have to feel very entitled to believe that reality must necessarily fit within the frame of the homo sapien mind — a mind that was molded by evolution to pick fruit and avoid predators.

One thing that has always puzzled me is how chemically similar 5-MeO-DMT (5-Methoxy-N,N-dimethyltryptamine) is to melatonin (N-acetyl-5-methoxy-tryptamine): Melatonin is the chief hormone for regulating the circadian rhythm. During the day, we produce serotonin, but at night, it gets converted to melatonin. Metatonin exists in the retina aswell as in the brain, and it breaks down when exposed to light, which is how your body adjusts its sleep-wake cycle. Considering the fact that 5-MeO is in a league of its own when it comes to serotonergic activity, it's not really hard to imagine that too much of it could have lasting impact on those systems. This is just pure speculation though.

It's instantaneous

I also listened to his podcasts talking about it and he mentioned that he had sleep issues his entire life but that they recently got much worse.

I think we're seeing the repercussions right here. You'll become such an intensely authentic person that you'll sooner or later be let down by more conventional people who proport to share your interests

IMO that has been his shtick since he wrote Maps of Meaning (he had a couple of mystical experiences back then aswell). In one interview, he expressed an affinity for William James' pragmatic theory of truth ("it's true if it's useful"), which is how he tries to reconcile his scientific side with his mythological side. You see him skirting around the same territory in his debates with Sam Harris. Even if he didn't make any definitive statements until now, this has been brewing for quite a while.

Have you not heard about his biblical lectures?

Growing up is like a very long-term gradient of hedonic adaptation. You go from being completely unfamiliar with the entirity of reality as a stimulus to being slowly adapted to its regularities.

You might eat some poisonous berries or something

The human experience of empathy for similar beings is a just as beautiful part of reality as anything, but realize how selective this empathy is. It's very interesting if you go to videos of cute animals being rescued and compare the comment section there to a video of cockroaches being killed. The sense of relief expressed in both cases is nearly identical. Selective empathy is a deeply ingrained survival mechanism, but it can also be heavily conditioned. There is this youtube channel that uses dogs and minks as rat control, and the comment section there is filled with rationalizations for why it's OK, which is only there because of an obvious underlying feeling of empathy for the poor rats. The dog owners are of course completely desensitized to the dogs tearing them to pieces, but they also make sure to take care of any live rats they catch. For me, I often feel the same level of empathy for a rat as for a dog as for a cockroach. The perk of elevating your consciousness is that you get to see past these limited and selfish perspectives. You may start feeling empathy for a plant just as much as a human, not because they're equal, but because you recognize their innate beauty and begin to marvel at the wonder of their very existence. This is directly tied to seeing the interconnectedness of everything and recognizing the necessity of constrasts, polarities, and opposites. What would happen if we eliminated all types of death? Well, for starters, what are the decomposers going to eat? If there are no decomposers to decompose organic material, how do you get nutrients in the soil? What happens to the carbon cycle? The nitrogen cycle? How can plants grow without nutrients? How can animals live without plants? Do you see just how intricate and intertwined the process of growth and decay is? This is just one example, but whichever way you choose to look at reality, you can't escape the fact that without death, there can be no life. From this perspective, you can actually start to appreciate death and even see the beauty in it, and maybe you can slowly start to let go of your fear of it.

@Phyllis Wagner Notice how nobody actually jumped out of a window.

There are no documented cases of people jumping out of windows on psychedelics according to Hamilton Morris.

I kinda am this way with lifting weights, or atleast I noticed that when talking with my friend back in the summer when the gyms were re-opening. He had just started working out at home after reading JP's self-help book and he couldn't understand why I wasted money on a gym membership. It's just something about lifting really heavy and pushing yourself to the limit that triggers a combination flow, a surge of brain chemicals and hormones, and that taps into a deep primal need. I'm also kind of good at it. It's the same reason you would do any hobby: you do it for the joy of doing it.

But of course, you shouldn't neglect your humanity either. Your humanness is just as a valuable part of reality as the tiniest speck of lint .

You call it nihilism because it seems meaningless for you, but I want you to notice how it can only be meaningless from a human survival perspective; a perspective which only sees meaning in the perpetuation of its own agenda. What is really meaningless about an infinitely complex dance of trillions of molecular machines, interacting with eachother and rearranging themselves and their environment in an ineffable display of creativity? When I say "just a bunch of cells", I don't mean to be reductionistic or to subtract meaning from the equation. What I'm really saying is "but what about the cells?". The mistake would be to look at the phenomena of "animal" from a gross surface level view and forget the immense density of stuff happening at the micro and meta-macro levels. The mistake would be to not see the vast web of relationships in reality and how each part is dependent on the other. There is an absolute necessity in everything being just as it is, right now and forever. It's a perfect design.

Age is incredibly valuable. Imagine having had twice the amount of experiences as you have now; twice as many mistakes to learn from, twice as many perspectives that you've encountered, twice as long of a time to sit and reflect on all of it. It's impossible to estimate the impact of such a thing from one's current perspective, just as it's impossible to predict the outcome of one's life. This only becomes more and more clear as you age.

That's actually a great way of cutting through the implicit anthropocentrism behind such concerns: what are predatory animals but a bunch of cells killing another bunch of cells?

It could've been way worse.

@Rilles It's almost feels like a parody, so I don't know whether to laugh or cringe

Life.

This a good example of the distinction between a description and an explanation. How would you explain what a trip is?