Carl-Richard

When people get famous, they understand the blessing of anonymity, of being able to walk in public without being constantly looked at. We all want to be famous, but we don't often realize the downsides. I think there is a similar thing with aliens. Once we make contact, we will no longer be anonymous in the universe, and that might be a surprisingly terrifying realization.

@Keryo Koffa Don't post while high. Please read the guidelines.

In other words, you're projecting?

https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/high-blood-cholesterol/expert-answers/cholesterol-level/faq-20057952 I don't know anything about this by the way

You alright?

I guess the US is just fucked if you can't go on a mountain trail without fearing for your life.

I know.

You gotta chill the fuck out 😂 All I've been giving you is advice.

I said up and down a mountain, in nature, not in a concrete jungle.

Do this: Rent a cabin in the woods, not necessarily with no internet, just out in nature and preferably close to traversable mountains. Stay there for a week, go for one long hike every day for 3-5 hours, preferably up and down a mountain. Do active mindfulness practice while making food and just in general when picking up objects (cups, glass of water, remote controller). Don't use any non-essential substances (coffee, tea, tobacco, melatonin supplements, weed), especially "psychoactive substances", for the entire week. This method is especially effective if you're a habitual weed smoker, speaking from personal experience (again, you quit cold turkey for that entire week). At the end of the week and the first morning at home, either before or slightly after breakfast, do seated meditation. Try to go 1.5 hours in one sitting. When your legs start to hurt, that means you're passing the 1-hour mark and you get a free object of meditation (slight leg pain). This is also where you will make the most progress, unless you already had an awakening after 5 minutes. The logic behind the method is a sustained and subtle form of "disruptive processing" where you expose yourself to new impressions which pushes your brain into a new state and makes it more vulnerable to sudden deep transformations like spiritual awakening experiences. You mentioned "smooth" and little "repurcussions", so the cabin trip sounded fitting (I've tried it myself, although with my family's cabin lol). If you want more extreme versions, try things like water fasting (within reason), sleep deprivation (within reason), sensory deprivation (e.g. dark room retreats).

Hehe. Trying your best to answer that question honestly is a good exercise in epistemic humility and actually an accurate test of whether you're coming at the "direct experience" doctrine from a place of authentic experience or ironically from a place of intellectualized dogma. I remember Rupert Spira saying something like this once when starting a presentation of his worldview: "you firstly have to concede that you only care about what is known". That is a honest statement of the limits of his position and a sign that he knows what he is talking about

Consciousness is that which is known. But how can you know that which is unknown?

I swear everybody has a different definition of the cognitive functions 🙈

I've wrestled with this question: how to deal with the unknown (that which is beyond that which can be known, the known being e.g. consciousness)? The answer is: you take it as it is and leave it as it is; potentially true, but unknown. You don't make any more fuzz about it (and if you do, you'll be in a constant state of existential anxiety, which is not really worth it). And it's one thing to say that, but it's another thing to base your metaphysics on it (on an unknown, which is what materialists like to do, anyway). Just because something is unknown and potentially the case, that alone shouldn't hold much weight for your approach to reality. So while I can't know if the entirety of my idea of reality (including emptiness itself) actually rests inside the butthole of a pink elephant, that doesn't necessarily mean I should entertain that thought very much.

RIP

The ego sees what it wants to see

The "classical psychedelic receptor" (5HT2A) is involved in the stress response, so the experience is always going to be energetic in some way. Kinda, but not really. The most low energy way would be meditation, but the awakening experience itself is high energy (but not in an unsustainable/stressful way, so you shouldn't actually worry about it). The activation levels experienced during meditation can be visualized like an U-curve. When you first sit down, your energy levels tend to drop. Then, the longer you sit, the more rested you get and the more energy you can expend, and also you might have an awakening experience which actually releases tons of energetic chemicals (endorphins, serotonin, dopamine, etc.). It's primarily the CB1 signalling caused by THC which makes cannabis "psychedelic". So strains with less THC essentially just means strains with less psychedelic effect. And like 5HT2A, CB1 signalling is involved in the stress response (in fact, CB1 interacts with 5HT2A signalling).

Yeah. But curing aging is a big thing. I think absolute immortality, i.e. when even infinity itself cannot stop you, requires omnipotence. Then we're truly in spiritual territory to say the least. Just imagine if 10 million years in the future, you run into an inter-galactic, hyper-intelligent, sociopath asshole who constructs a machine that keeps all the atoms in your body away from each other using some force field, or he locks them inside an unbreakable box in liquid form, or he throws them into a black hole. Even if you had the medical capabilities to rejoin each individual atom back together into your physical form, that helps very little if they're being kept forcefully isolated from each other. These are the things we have to start considering

But non-duality awakening was only one example (I edited the post now to make it a little more clear). The general definition of awakening (or spiritual transformation) still fits I think.

Awakening is a radical and often sudden change in how you experience the world on a moment-to-moment level. The type of awakening which is probably most referenced is awakening to Oneness or non-duality, which coincides with the loss of self-referential thinking and experience of self in space and time, reflected in the deactivation of the Default Mode Network (DMN). Spiritual transformation is when the awakening creates a lasting but incomplete change where some parts of yourself will never be the same. Your first awakening tends to coincide with a spiritual transformation. For non-duality spiritual transformations, this coincides with a lasting relative deactivation of the DMN. Enlightenment is when the awakened state becomes your new baseline, i.e. what you operate from most of the time (~90% of the time). After many awakenings in different ways and contexts, the tower topples over and flips. And for non-duality enlightenment, this coincides with a lasting and more significant deactivation of the DMN. Your enlightened state might refine over time in subtle ways, maybe filling in the remaining 10% and for non-duality enlightenment maybe eliminating self-referential thinking altogether, or through more embodied manifestations (in the case of non-duality: purifying egoic responses/behavioral patterns, contractions, "defilements"). I used awakening to non-duality to illustrate each term, but you can substitute it with any type of awakening; awakening to God, Love, even intellectual awakenings; but of course, the terms are less commonly used in this way. An example of an intellectually focused (or moral) spiritual transformation I had was the transition from a hedonistic to a eudaimonic value system.

Why do that? Just eat more food lol How is it too much fuel? Are you running out of money? How much more food are you really eating?

There are times where I'll have thoughts where I imagine some place, and it brings up a very specific type of place which seems like it's a real place, but I can't confirm ever having been there. Or there will be times where I imagine events that I couldn't possibly have experienced (like being killed in a particular way), and I'll create a surprisingly vivid image of it in my mind, as if I'm recalling a memory. Trivially, we know that previous experiences influence imagination, and likewise, imagining a specific scenario will draw on specific previous experiences. If I were to imagine being killed in a grotesque way (e.g. in war-like scenario), the most relevant memory for that would of course be experiencing being killed in that grotesque way. And considering the potential amount of previous lifetimes and the probability of having experienced such a death at least once, it seems likely that these experiences could've informed the imagination given the existence of past-lives.

You found a positive thought and turned it into a negative one. You turned "hope" into "comforting falsehoods which pump up my ego". This is a pattern your mind seems to engage in very often. Try to become aware of that. Why does it sound too good to be true? Is that statement based on an objective fact, or is it based on a subjective feeling? Does merely the fact that it's a positive thing mean it's too good to be true? Is anything positive too good for you? Do you see how unfortunate this thinking is? It's called hopelessness. Again, try to become aware of this type of thinking. As for "comforting falsehoods pumping up your ego", that is what hopelessness is (just like any other form of thinking). It's just one way your mind tries to cope with a situation, and for some reason, you learned to get stuck there. It's possible to unlearn it and to allow hope to exist. And it starts by becoming aware of what you're doing.

Maybe not 100% immortality, but close to it. And I'm talking about physical immortality (this current body). Curing aging is probably theoretically possible. You might not be able to stop being smooshed by a 10 ton boulder or an asteroid, but I think regenerative medicine could become really powerful as well. We could be on the verge of a paradigm shift in fields like synthetic biology or medicine in general (cracking the morphogenetic code or discovering the next "antibiotics").

@nuwu I said you're free to talk the way you like. Just don't expect people to understand you very well. Let's move on.