Sources That Tickled My Mind

[Sincerity]

Videos, graphics, books, quotes and other stuff.

Things that resonated with me and inspired greater wisdom and understanding.

Edited Thursday at 11:03 PM by Sincerity

[UnbornTao]

We're waiting.

[Sincerity]

Bashar on permission slips and other things. Some deep stuff here.

I'm processing all this through my lens of energetic understanding (for reference, see my thread about that). I appreciate Bashar's perspective a lot. What he says resonates greatly, and inspires in me a deeper understanding of this energetic dimension.

13:47 "The higher self is like a guiding principle, a governing principle" --> Interesting. A while ago I introduced a concept in my understanding called meta-energies. A "guiding principle" is an excellent description of that concept. Other words I used were philosophy or tactic, but guiding principle hits the bullseye. That term really resonated. Though I'm still not sure if we're talking about the same thing, perhaps he means something else.

Also, the concept of permissions slips is just so fucking good. So true.

I must listen to this again and try to square it with my understanding, and translate this stuff into "my language".

Edited November 1, 2025 by Sincerity

[Sincerity]

Just now, UnbornTao said:

We're waiting.

First post is here.

[Sincerity]

Another recording of Bashar which I listened to this week, twice.

"When you are acting on your passion, you must also be passionate about being passionate!" --> Great pointer. To me, this is about embracing the ENERGY of acting on a particular thing. Being passionate about coming back to that ENERGY, and not just about actualizing the OUTCOME of that energy.

When you're embracing an energy itself (instead of its outcomes), you are hitting the nail on the head. That's a recipe to let energy flow freely. And thus energetic development ensues.

This is somewhat related to my post here.

Edited November 1, 2025 by Sincerity

[Sincerity]

Great video from Leo's blog. Really resonated with me.

The 20 brutal truths:

1. Psychiatric diagnoses are labels, NOT explanations
2. Most people with psychiatric diagnoses don't have a brain disorder
3. Psychiatric medications aren't cures
4. Psychiatric drugs cause tolerance
5. Psychiatric drugs can worsen some people over the long term
6. Long-term users of psychiatric medications are essentially guinea pigs
7. Coming off psychiatric medications is hard
8. Withdrawing from antidepressants and benzodiazepines can cause severe neurological damage known as protracted withdrawal
9. Cannabis is a major gateway drug for triggering bipolar and schizophrenia
10. Cafeine, nicotine, and inactivity are the biggest gateways to anxiety disorders
11. Psychiatric research can be corrupted by pharmaceutical industry
12. Pharmaceutical companies have co-opted academics
13. ^ These academics train the next generation of psychiatrists
14. Most doctors don't have the time to address root causes
15. (US-specific) Good psychiatric care is nearly impossible to get with insurance
16. (US-specific) American psychiatry isn't designed to help people
17. (US-specific) The NIMH has betrayed the public
18. (US-specific) There's a massive over prescription problem in the US (assuming in EU as well)
19. In rare cases, psychiatric drugs can trigger mania, psychosis, or aggression
20. In even rarer cases, psychiatric medications and can precipitate violent, unpredictable behaviour, sometimes involved in mass shootings

[Sincerity]

I loved the War of Art by Steven Pressfield. It's on my mind often.

CREATION.

[Sincerity]

Take with a grain of salt. 🧂

Also, the "you're not thinking" thumbnail is making me laugh. "Dumb motherfucker."

[Sincerity]

Two of my best sources I'm subscribed to for (mostly) Ukraine war news.

I appreciate their analyses.

Edited December 21, 2025 by Sincerity

[Sincerity]

Six Functions of Character Strengths for Thriving at Times of Adversity and Opportunity: a Theoretical Perspective

https://www.viacharacter.org/pdf/CS_thriving_6_functions_-_theory_article_(Niemiec_2019).pdf

Good article.

[Sincerity]

The Surrender Experiment by Michael Singer has had a great impact on me. I'm still thinking about it often.

The path of embracing life and actualizing energy is one I resonate with the most. It's neither about understanding for me (per se), nor calming the mind or transcending suffering. I wanna live my energy to the fullest. I feel this is an approach Michael Singer is aligned with.

Currently listening to another book from him: The Untethered Soul.

I'm at chapter 7 and I was surprised to hear him talk about the workings of energy! Interested in further listening to his perspective on this.

[Sincerity]

I watched Interstate 60 with my gf a while ago.

Cute little movie about synchronicity. Just something fun to enjoy - some themes really resonated, and some were plain silly. Nevertheless, I really like movies about fate, synchronicity, symbolic journeys, and things like that.

There's truth to them.

[Sincerity]

Amazing essay by Paul Graham: How to Do Great Work.

An absolute goldmine - if you had insights from this essay integrated, you'd be a genuine PROFESSIONAL in life.

Quote

Don't worry if you find you're interested in different things than other people. The stranger your tastes in interestingness, the better. Strange tastes are often strong ones, and a strong taste for work means you'll be productive. And you're more likely to find new things if you're looking where few have looked before.

Quote

Don't try to work in a distinctive style. Just try to do the best job you can; you won't be able to help doing it in a distinctive way.

Style is doing things in a distinctive way without trying to. Trying to is affectation.

Affectation is in effect to pretend that someone other than you is doing the work. You adopt an impressive but fake persona, and while you're pleased with the impressiveness, the fakeness is what shows in the work.

The temptation to be someone else is greatest for the young. They often feel like nobodies. But you never need to worry about that problem, because it's self-solving if you work on sufficiently ambitious projects. If you succeed at an ambitious project, you're not a nobody; you're the person who did it. So just do the work and your identity will take care of itself.

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Work doesn't just happen when you're trying to. There's a kind of undirected thinking you do when walking or taking a shower or lying in bed that can be very powerful. By letting your mind wander a little, you'll often solve problems you were unable to solve by frontal attack.

You have to be working hard in the normal way to benefit from this phenomenon, though. You can't just walk around daydreaming. The daydreaming has to be interleaved with deliberate work that feeds it questions.

If you set your life up right, it will deliver the focus-relax cycle automatically. The perfect setup is an office you work in and that you walk to and from.

Quote

An overlooked idea often doesn't lose till the semifinals. You do see it, subconsciously, but then another part of your subconscious shoots it down because it would be too weird, too risky, too much work, too controversial. This suggests an exciting possibility: if you could turn off such filters, you could see more new ideas. [...]

You could also discover overlooked ideas by working in the other direction: by starting from what's obscuring them. Every cherished but mistaken principle is surrounded by a dead zone of valuable ideas that are unexplored because they contradict it. [...]

What are people in your field religious about, in the sense of being too attached to some principle that might not be as self-evident as they think? What becomes possible if you discard it?

There's an AI text-to-speech for the lazy ones:

[Sincerity]

I've read some great short articles from Andrew Bosworth. I like his simplicity in writing.

• Honesty is the Best Policy

Quote

Dishonesty often looks efficient in the short term. You can close someone on a false pretense. You can persuade with selective truths. You can defer hard conversations that might otherwise slow things down. It works, for a while.

But every lie creates a debt. When people’s expectations don’t match reality, trust erodes. For them, it feels like betrayal. For the liar, it’s exhausting. You have to remember what you said, manage around the contradictions, and live in the gap between what’s real and what you’ve claimed. Over time that gap becomes resentment — toward the people you misled and the situation that forced the dishonesty in the first place.

Honesty isn’t just virtuous; it’s scalable.

A culture that defaults to truth avoids the compounding drag of suspicion, double-checking, and post-hoc justification. It creates alignment not because everyone agrees, but because everyone is operating from the same reality.

That’s what makes honesty a true policy. It isn’t the best because it always feels good in the moment. It’s the best because it performs best over time.

“Every falsehood creates a future obligation to the truth that will eventually be revealed, often with high consequences” - Chernobyl

• Two Things Can Be True
• The Gift of Naïveté

[Sincerity]

Hooooly shit, the channel posting Bashar videos that I've been watching was terminated. 😂

Well, it was fun while it lasted!

[Sincerity]

Paul Graham's essays - p.2

• How to Do Great Work cont.

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It's a great thing to be rich in unanswered questions. And this is one of those situations where the rich get richer, because the best way to acquire new questions is to try answering existing ones. Questions don't just lead to answers, but also to more questions.

Quote

The best questions grow in the answering. You notice a thread protruding from the current paradigm and try pulling on it, and it just gets longer and longer. [...]

Quote

Use the advantages of youth when you have them, and the advantages of age once you have those. The advantages of youth are energy, time, optimism, and freedom. The advantages of age are knowledge, efficiency, money, and power. With effort you can acquire some of the latter when young and keep some of the former when old.

Quote

Curiosity is the key to all four steps in doing great work: it will choose the field for you, get you to the frontier, cause you to notice the gaps in it, and drive you to explore them. The whole process is a kind of dance with curiosity.

Quote

Schools give you a misleading impression of what work is like. In school they tell you what the problems are, and they're almost always soluble using no more than you've been taught so far. In real life you have to figure out what the problems are, and you often don't know if they're soluble at all.

But perhaps the worst thing schools do to you is train you to win by hacking the test. You can't do great work by doing that. You can't trick God. So stop looking for that kind of shortcut. The way to beat the system is to focus on problems and solutions that others have overlooked, not to skimp on the work itself.

This last one hit me hard. I always excelled at school/college because I understood what to do, how to "game" the system. At least that's how I see it. Maybe I'm just intelligent.

This whole essay is so good I'll literally go to a print shop to have a paper copy of it. Again, absolute goldmine.

• What You'll Wish You'd Known

Quote

One of the most dangerous illusions you get from school is the idea that doing great things requires a lot of discipline. Most subjects are taught in such a boring way that it's only by discipline that you can flog yourself through them. So I was surprised when, early in college, I read a quote by Wittgenstein saying that he had no self-discipline and had never been able to deny himself anything, not even a cup of coffee.

Now I know a number of people who do great work, and it's the same with all of them. They have little discipline. They're all terrible procrastinators and find it almost impossible to make themselves do anything they're not interested in. One still hasn't sent out his half of the thank-you notes from his wedding, four years ago. Another has 26,000 emails in her inbox.

I'm not saying you can get away with zero self-discipline. You probably need about the amount you need to go running. I'm often reluctant to go running, but once I do, I enjoy it. And if I don't run for several days, I feel ill. It's the same with people who do great things. They know they'll feel bad if they don't work, and they have enough discipline to get themselves to their desks to start working. But once they get started, interest takes over, and discipline is no longer necessary.

• Having Kids

Quote

I hate to say this, because being ambitious has always been a part of my identity, but having kids may make one less ambitious. It hurts to see that sentence written down. I squirm to avoid it. But if there weren't something real there, why would I squirm? The fact is, once you have kids, you're probably going to care more about them than you do about yourself. And attention is a zero-sum game. Only one idea at a time can be the top idea in your mind. Once you have kids, it will often be your kids, and that means it will less often be some project you're working on.

• The Top Idea in Your Mind

Quote

I realized recently that what one thinks about in the shower in the morning is more important than I'd thought. I knew it was a good time to have ideas. Now I'd go further: now I'd say it's hard to do a really good job on anything you don't think about in the shower.

Everyone who's worked on difficult problems is probably familiar with the phenomenon of working hard to figure something out, failing, and then suddenly seeing the answer a bit later while doing something else. There's a kind of thinking you do without trying to. I'm increasingly convinced this type of thinking is not merely helpful in solving hard problems, but necessary. The tricky part is, you can only control it indirectly.

I think most people have one top idea in their mind at any given time. That's the idea their thoughts will drift toward when they're allowed to drift freely. And this idea will thus tend to get all the benefit of that type of thinking, while others are starved of it. Which means it's a disaster to let the wrong idea become the top one in your mind.

Quote

You can't directly control where your thoughts drift. If you're controlling them, they're not drifting. But you can control them indirectly, by controlling what situations you let yourself get into. That has been the lesson for me: be careful what you let become critical to you. Try to get yourself into situations where the most urgent problems are ones you want to think about.

You don't have complete control, of course. An emergency could push other thoughts out of your head. But barring emergencies you have a good deal of indirect control over what becomes the top idea in your mind.

Quote

I suspect a lot of people aren't sure what's the top idea in their mind at any given time. I'm often mistaken about it. I tend to think it's the idea I'd want to be the top one, rather than the one that is. But it's easy to figure this out: just take a shower. What topic do your thoughts keep returning to? If it's not what you want to be thinking about, you may want to change something.

[Sincerity]

Paul Graham's essays - p.3

• Writing, Briefly

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I think it's far more important to write well than most people realize. Writing doesn't just communicate ideas; it generates them. If you're bad at writing and don't like to do it, you'll miss out on most of the ideas writing would have generated.

Quote

As for how to write well, here's the short version:

• Write a bad version 1 as fast as you can;
• rewrite it over and over;
• cut out everything unnecessary;
• write in a conversational tone;
• develop a nose for bad writing, so you can see and fix it in yours;
• imitate writers you like;
• if you can't get started, tell someone what you plan to write about, then write down what you said;
• expect 80% of the ideas in an essay to happen after you start writing it, and 50% of those you start with to be wrong;
• be confident enough to cut;
• have friends you trust read your stuff and tell you which bits are confusing or drag;
• don't (always) make detailed outlines;
• mull ideas over for a few days before writing;
• carry a small notebook or scrap paper with you;
• start writing when you think of the first sentence;
• if a deadline forces you to start before that, just say the most important sentence first;
• write about stuff you like;
• don't try to sound impressive;
• don't hesitate to change the topic on the fly;
• use footnotes to contain digressions;
• use anaphora to knit sentences together;
• read your essays out loud to see (a) where you stumble over awkward phrases and (b) which bits are boring (the paragraphs you dread reading);
• try to tell the reader something new and useful;
• work in fairly big quanta of time;
• when you restart, begin by rereading what you have so far;
• when you finish, leave yourself something easy to start with;
• accumulate notes for topics you plan to cover at the bottom of the file;
• don't feel obliged to cover any of them;
• write for a reader who won't read the essay as carefully as you do, just as pop songs are designed to sound ok on crappy car radios;
• if you say anything mistaken, fix it immediately;
• ask friends which sentence you'll regret most;
• go back and tone down harsh remarks;
• publish stuff online, because an audience makes you write more, and thus generate more ideas;
• print out drafts instead of just looking at them on the screen;
• use simple, germanic words;
• learn to distinguish surprises from digressions;
• learn to recognize the approach of an ending, and when one appears, grab it.

I want to write clearer and better. I've been writing some essays/posts in the last days, just for myself.

I noticed this week that the idea of being a great writer attracts me.

Edited yesterday at 02:42 PM by Sincerity

[Sincerity]

I've read some great essays by Derek Sivers today:

• I'm a Very Slow Thinker

Quote

When a friend says something interesting to me, I usually don’t have a reaction until much later.

When someone asks me a deep question, I say, “Hmm. I don’t know.” The next day, I have an answer.

I’m a disappointing person to try to debate or attack. I just have nothing to say in the moment, except maybe, “Good point.” Then a few days later, after thinking about it a lot, I have a response.

This probably makes me look stupid in the moment, but I don’t mind. I’m not trying to win any debates.

In fact, I’ll tell you a secret. When someone wants to interview me for their show, I ask them to send me some questions a week in advance. I spend hours writing down answers from different perspectives, before choosing the most interesting one. Then when we’re in a live conversation, I try to make my answers sound spontaneous.

People say that your first reaction is the most honest, but I disagree. Your first reaction is usually outdated. Either it’s an answer you came up with long ago and now use instead of thinking, or it’s a knee-jerk emotional response to something in your past.

When you’re less impulsive and more deliberate like this, it can be a little inconvenient for other people, but that’s OK. Someone asks you a question. You don’t need to answer. You can say, “I don’t know,” and take your time to answer after thinking. Things happen. Someone expects you to respond. But you can say, “We’ll see.”

And maybe, through example, you can show them that they can do the same.

I really liked this article. I think I am kind of a slow thinker, albeit not a very slow one.

Lately I've been thinking about telling people more: "I'll get back to you with that; I'll think it over", instead of answering some questions instantly. This applies both to work and to personal life. I realized that if I have more time to think something over, the answer will usually be more resonant with me.

A LOT of my thinking is done during walks and my 8 PM meditation/listening to myself sessions.

• Parenting: Who Is It Really for?

Quote

Cultivating a long attention span

Whatever he’s doing right now, that’s the most important thing. So I encourage him to keep doing it as long as possible. I never say, “Come on! Let’s go!”

We’ll go to the beach or forest, and make things with sticks and sand for half a day before he’s ready to switch.

Other families come to the playground for twenty or thirty minutes, but we stay there for hours.

Nobody else can play with us like this. Everyone else gets so bored.

Of course my adult mind wanders to all the other things we could be doing. But I let it go, and return to that present focus.

Quote

The reason I’m finally writing about this is because I realized that I’m doing all these things for myself as much as for him.

By cultivating his long attention span, I’m cultivating my own.

By entering his world, I’m letting go of my own, like meditation.

By broadening his inputs, I’m broadening my own.

I thought I was being selfless. But actually, like most things we consider selfless, they benefit me as much as him.

Wow. All of his activities with the kid really amazed me. Inspiring stuff.

I doubt I'd have the willingness to be a father like that. I should probably not have kids. 🤷‍♂️ Maybe it'll change for me in the future. I guess I'll see.

• You Don't Have to Be Local

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I lived in Woodstock, New York for three years. There I started my company, entirely online. I never met anyone in Woodstock. I just lived there, but didn’t socialize there. My attention was focused globally, which helped my business grow quickly.

Then I lived in Portland, Oregon for three years. I worked every waking hour — super productive. I made great friends worldwide, but I never hung out in Portland. It was just my place to work and sleep. My attention was still focused globally.

Then I lived in Singapore for three years and decided to do the opposite — to get fully involved in my local community. I had an open door, said yes to every request, met with hundreds of people, and went to every event possible. I spent most of my time talking with people, and really got to know the Singapore community.

But something felt wrong. After a day of talking, I was often exhausted and unfulfilled. Two hours spent with one person who wants to “pick my brain” is two hours I could have spent making something that could be useful to the whole world, including that one person.

Then people in America started emailing to ask why I’d been so silent. No new articles? No new projects? Nothing?

So there’s the trade-off. When I’m local-focused, I may be useful to my community, but I’m not being as useful to the rest of the world.

So I’m finally admitting: I’m not local.

This really resonated as well. I'm more of a global type too.

And also this:

I absolutely love short videos or pictures that very clearly show the essence of some dynamics and ideas, through real life examples.

[Sincerity]

Best channel on nutrition advice:

Clear, professional and unbiased. I appreciate this guy a lot.