Carl-Richard

I want to live in a world where you can go to your standard psychologist and say "I'm so successful and accomplished in life, but yet I feel so empty inside and I'm longing for something more but I don't know what it is, and I'm an open person who takes in new ideas and sensitive to subtler aspects of life", and the psychologist answers "have you tried enlightenment?"

I must have been 4-5 years old and I vividly remember one time looking up at the night sky and feeling like I was becoming one with the sky, and I have related memories of floating upwards and travelling through space (which could have been imagination, but extremely vivid and "vast"). I got the sense that the universe is much larger than the planet I was standing on. And this had to be before I was familiar with the concept of "space". I think the first documentary I watched about space was when I was 5-7 years old, about Voyager and Cassini–Huygens travelling to or past Saturn and Jupiter. I also have some memories of proper "non-duality", or of emerging out of it, of going from a state of being completely lost in rapture and eternity, of no sense of time and a very jumbled sense of space or awareness of thing really happening, like being really lost in the sauce. I have no idea how old I must have been then, but I think I was very young, maybe able to walk, and it must have happened in our family cabin. I believe I have other memories of it from other times but I can't really pinpoint where I was. Generally, when I think back to early childhood, I get many pictures in my head that are very out of the ordinary and somehow "expanded", but I think that's really common the longer back you go.

Salman Rushdie had a premonition in a dream the night before he was attacked:

(For those unfamiliar with GeoGuessr, he gets a photograph and is supposed to guess where in the world the photograph was taken): Look at the people in the comment section twisting themselves into a pretzel trying to explain this within the materialist paradigm. If you just accept that psychic phenomena exist, the explanation becomes so incredibly simple.

Seems like the blue triangle logo is a surprisingly effective way of weeding out conspiratorial crazies from ever joining the forum.

Music never stopped me from pursuing enlightenment 😆

The "lodged" concept seems to be not so straightforward related to binding affinity. It seems like binding affinity measured as Ki (the one you were reading off the wiki page) is more about attraction to the receptor (measured by competition binding), while the lodging phenomena seems to be more geometric, which would be measured by other metrics like Kd which measures dissociation (how easily it lets go of the receptor): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ligand_(biochemistry)#binding_affinity Here are two articles mentioning the lodging phenomena: https://www.popsci.com/lsd-gets-stuck-in-brains-receptors-serotonin/ https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/01/170126132541.htm And here is a quote from the study they're referencing: https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(16)31749-4?_returnURL=https%3A%2F%2Flinkinghub.elsevier.com%2Fretrieve%2Fpii%2FS0092867416317494%3Fshowall%3Dtrue They're mentioning slow dissociation, so high Kd, and specifically from 5HT2a/2b, not 1a. So it seems like I'm right: after the trip, 5HT2a activity continues while other serotonin and dopamine systems are downregulated, causing a combo of elevated cortisol and otherwise lowered serotonin and dopamine activity.

I want to live in a world where you can go to your standard psychologist and say "I'm so successful and accomplished in life, but yet I feel so empty inside and I'm longing for something more but I don't know what it is, and I'm an open person who takes in new ideas and sensitive to subtler aspects of life", and the psychologist answers "have you tried enlightenment?"

When I do think about it, I've heard that LSD's special long duration is due to it getting lodged in the 5HT2a receptor, which is a receptor that is associated with increased cortisol. Now, if it's only the 5HT2a receptor it gets lodged in, then you will get a cortisol-filled after-high combined with downregulation of dopamine receptors and probaby also the more calm-inducing 5HT1a receptors. I agree with the "dry" feeling. One time after LSD, I said to my friends while inhaling some weed "I just feel... mentally corrupt" *stares tiredly up at a leafless early spring tree top and exhales*.

Maybe you're comparing your current life to the high?

💯

Just chill man. The world is like that. Have some Capybara:

There are similarities and differences. Psychedelics are like a roller coaster; slow climb, epic descent, high-energy, often challenging, sometimes terrifying. Meditation is like a slow angelic ascent into the clouds, the descent is like a fluff of pollen in a soft summer breeze. But meditation can also be challenging and terrifying. It's just a bit easier to snap out of it (unless you've gone past the point of making meditation your baseline state). Probably for some. Because it gives a concrete goal and sense of direction. If you have already experienced, if only for a millisecond, or if only in the most murky and delusional form, what you're looking for, that makes it easier to know when you're getting closer to it or when you're getting farther away for it. But still, people who meditate in order to awaken but who has not had a previous awakening experience (psychedelic or not) tend to have a strong intuition of what it is like, and that too will work in a similar way to guide them. What is usually learned when you have the full experience is not that it was completely antithetical to what you were expecting, but rather that the sacrifices and the real-life implications of embodying that experience fully, were completely antithetical to what you both were expecting and maybe also what you really wanted. Probably for some. You have form and formlessness. You can recognize formlessness (without distinctions), i.e. being nothing, or you can recognize form without distinctions, i.e. being everything.

We live in a Stage Blue forum.

The phu is going on

I used to take 720 IU, now I'm taking 1200 IU. I've been thinking about if I could up the dose. Meanwhile expert doctors in my country are writing pop journalistic articles about how you can overdose on vitamin D and that you shouldn't take more than 400 IU a day unless you're already deficient

I know it's a rhetorical question, but how would you answer it?

Boomers must die first.

This is bullshit ☺️

Realistically, how many hours a day would you spend on your marriage and kids? Some things you will actually lose on by cutting them out even if you gain more time to do "more valuable" things. For example, you can save time by not eating or sleeping, but is that really going to benefit you in the long run? Let's say you spend one hour on average of fully-dedicated time on marriage and kids every day. If you put that hour into work instead, that would be your least productive hour anyway (late in the day with high fatigue and low energy). You might be better off just resting at that time (and no better way to do that than with family; but yes, sometimes it's not so restful, but it should be most times). Also, giving yourself a break and taking in new stimuli can lead to insights and breaking through stale patterns ("disruptive practices"), which is very good if you value creativity.

It could contribute to your future in ways you are not currently aware of. And you could also just want to study it because it's interesting in itself and not just as some means to an end. And even if it's not very interesting, it's always possible to find at least something interesting about anything.

Conversations, even about ideas or knowledge, are often less about learning something new or coming across something you've never heard about but reminding ourselves what think is important and what we care about. Notice how often you genuinely learn something new when talking to someone about something.

Yes, you can develop new habits that become your new "go-to". Scrolling TikTok for 5 hours even though it's the path of least resistance might not be ideal or even restful. But sometimes you have to take the path of least resistance.

The largest effects are seen in people who are prone to mystical experiences, get a taste, get hooked, develop an obsession, meditate consistently for hours every day and make it their number one priority to merge with whatever is behind the curtain. That's my personal experience at least.