montecristo

I've been slowly but surely opening my dad's mind to psychedelics, he is a lifelong meditator and is well versed in non-duality and spirituality. His main objection is that under the influence of psychedelics you are opening a doorway to the astral plane allowing potentially sinister beings access to your consciousness. I've convinced him on every level seemingly save for this one. any ideas about what I can say to him regarding this? does he have a point?

powerful post, thanks

the more complex a system is the more vulnerable it is.

right right of course, they exist everywhere in the world but to varying degrees. If you havent been exposed to chinese society you dont understand the degree and scale on which they operate as a hive mind. The cultural operating system the chinese have developed is likely the cleanest and most bug free in the sense that every aspect of society knows their place and falls in line seamlessly without need for much debate or friction. Made even more amazing by the fact that their population is so unimaginably large. Though i'm careful to make the distinction between that and the most fair and just type of society etc.

Chinese people are not educated the same way we are in america and welcome infringement on their freedoms for the most part. Also they operate as hive mind, my theory is that it's due to having low levels of genetic diversity in the Han Chinese population, i.e their whole population may have been descended from a very small group of perhaps 150 or so individuals.

@Leo Gura You've characterized mushrooms as "twisted" before, care to expound on this?

I had this same insight powerfully the other day after smoking some weed, glad I get to see it articulated so well here by Leo. I think it comes down to honesty and paying attention to what is actually occuring within your experience. This thought about a pizza is a useful human faculty nonetheless.

i kinda thought it had something to do with what is experienced (or not) when you ARE NOT aware of something. for example looking at a horizon and knowing there is something beyond it but not experiencing it in any way. just NOT in your awareness. sometimes when i contemplate "nowhere" and it hits me that i'm really nowhere I get this feeling of fear that washes over me and makes me want to shit my pants

is a great metaphor for non-duality, and stimulating for self-inquiry purposes. You guys should check it out

@Leo Gura If you give any info on it does it really obligate you to give more and more and so on down the rabbit hole?

read about Ginzing Tea elsewhere on the forum and decided to give a try. Brewed the tea per the instructions with very high quality whole Korean Ginseng and Manuka honey. came on quick after ingestion with a similiar speed to alcohol, felt weird as soon as tea hit my stomach, heavy boadyload with a clear mind, floor was melting and was seeing detailed mandelbrot fractals with my eyes closed. All very lucid feeling, ego fully intact while experiencing these hallucinations. went with 2 grams of shrooms which is less than other times ive taken them and yet with the tea things were powerfully amplified and cleaner overall although didnt really do much for nausea though. Here's the thing though to be aware of, SAVE THE REMNANTS! I had a suspicion that by making tea i'd be leaving some psilocybin on the table, so I saved the soggy shrooms in the fridge and after a few days ate the two grams. I had a solid effect that i would compare to .5 of shrooms, a nice little dose after the fact. So although you are wasting some shrooms technincally the effects are somehow potentiated by the tea and perhaps the ginseng, so in some ways you get the best of both worlds, a stronger trip on less shrooms with some leftover, 2 for the price of one in a sense. the next experiment im going to run will be tea, but this time presoaked in an acidic solvent like lemon juice or vinegar. We shall see if the remnants will yield any substance in that case. PS my girlfriend who is a virgin to this stuff had one tiny sip and had MAJOR effects from the tea, so i have to conclude that TEA=LEGIT

@Leo GuraAlso really interested in this topic. How about going to a practitioner, anyone have experience with this? or is it really necessary to have it in your own home to do sessions at will and for extended periods to see those 100x gains. unfortunately I will need to stay away from psychedelics going forward because doing shrooms gave me a mild case of HPPD (hallucinogen persisting perception disorder), which is profoundly dissapointing to me because nothing else has elicited more growth. This is why i'm VERY interested in the potential of neurofeedback

This is a very deep topic and for the sake of brevity I will gloss over much of it's vastness, we can discuss though. The current activism paradigm that plant-based/vegan people have adopted is that animal agriculture and consumption is the single largest driver responsible for environmental degradation, human health degradation and economic inequality/food insecurity that we see all over the world today. I believe it is much more nuanced than "if everyone goes vegan all our problems will be solved". But perhaps counter-intuitively based on what's discussed below it seems possible that a new paradigm may be emerging, one where ruminant animal agriculture can solve each of these problems. Here are the working assumptions I am operating under, 1. meat is the basis of an optimal human diet, 2. ruminant animal agriculture can reverse desertification/ be the key to restoring a balanced global ecosystem and 3. create economic opportunities for unskilled marginalized people in parts of the world experiencing the ravages of environmental degradation. Obviously nobody doubts that the current CAFO factory farming model is pure devilry but try to have an open mind and consider the following videos, these were certainly destabilizing to my own world view and I think warrant further exploration. I believe the impulse behind veganism to be a noble one that I have deep respect for, just that it may be misguided.

@flume How can appealing to nature be a fallacy? What higher authority do you have to appeal to? I do worry about all the junk food eating but what's ironic is that at least all that junk food is fortified with synthetic vitamins. Growing up I was weak and sick all the time likely becasue I didnt eat junk food, just "a healthy whole foods plant based diet, with whole grains fruits and vegetables". Meanwhile I got hardly any nutrition and I always wondered why my peers didnt have issues. I think the only reason I survived was due to a bit of cheese milk and chicken sometimes. @Scholar "Would you want to be the countless of cows that are put into a slaughterhouse so that some humans could feel a little bit more energetic and healthy?" You cant boil it down to this, those of you who are blessed with good health have NO IDEA what it's like to not develop properly. Youre lucky to have a base of solid childhood nutrition that now allows you to be a vegan or plant based or whatever. My parents were brainwashed into thinking they were giving me the best start in life, little did they know they were actually ruining it. Again I'm horrified by the abuses in animal agriculture as much as the next person, but everytime there are abuses, people swing their pendulums way too far in opposition and create a whole new set of issues. I'm still young and havent found my life purpose yet but it's looking like it will be something to do with bringing balance back into animal agriculture. If I had continued eating the way I did in my childhood, I could forget about dooing anythign higher or selfless, I wouldnt have the fortitude to do anything challenging at all. Indians consume animal products in the form of cheese, milk, chicken meat as well as fish. Btw the western world lives mostly on a plant based diet, be it junkfood or otherwise. I live in China, a place with double the per capita meat consumption of the U.S. Traveling back and forth between the U.S, Europe and Asia I have carefully observed the health of the people I see and the difference is stark between there and the west. Almost every person I see has reached their genetic potential, they have no weird allergies, healthy bmi's, perfect acne free skin, are very industrious and energetic and have perfect dental and facial development without the need for braces, even the poorest among them are extremely robust. Especially the youngest generation who had even higher meat consumption in childhood. They dont even know what autism is meanwhile 1/30 of our kids has it even though their environment is extremely polluted, hmmmmm. They soak all their nuts and ferment their plant foods, they consume almost no cheese or bread for the most part either. Fruit is a luxury item there and they eat every single part of the animal, from the brain, to the intestine to the feet, all of it. This is a more traditional, natural way of living and it shows in the health of the herd. I copied what they do and now i'm healthy like they are, although I will never live down my childhood unfortunately. compare that with what I see walking down the street in London or Boston or elsehwere in the western world and people look dicrepid, fat, sick and rather strange.

people think that fasting is contraindicated for thyroid but in my experience healing my own thyroid issues it can be a powerful reset to the immune system. Do a 4-5 fast on water and some sodium/potassium, this is sufficient time for the immune system to break down enough to really counter autoimmunity, upon refeeding you the immune system will bounce back relearning it's environment potentially without the auto immune component. Make sure you get enough fat/cholesterol post fast as these are the basic building blocks of your immune system, protein as well.

@Cepzeu I have to second the dont smoke weed every day thing. You might be fine, but it has potential to totally destroy a certain subset of the populations lives

I have lived in China for a few years now and this is a dicey issue to me. On the one hand China is a massive, ethno-centric, well resourced country with very low consciousness across the board with little to no dissent in their ranks. On the other hand a reason for optimism is that their temperament is very much on the side of pragmatism above all else I've found. They prioritize comfort and convenience before being willing to die for some percieved noble cause. Mobilisation for good or bad happens at breakneck pace and effectiveness in China which is why I believe they are capable of anything. They are a crucial fulcrum on the world stage, could be a massive force for good or for evil in the world depending on what they are provoked into. Another reason Trump is such a disaster, for example they scrapped many of their green initiatives after the trade war started.

@Scholar that was a fabulously articulate answer thank you. tbh I agree with you, the human race SHOULD genocide itself, and it will likely be gods will to do so in the form of catastrophic ecological disaster, this in order to maximize love. youre absolutely right, I am not viewing this from the perspective of the animals. I am viewing this from the perspective of the human race, same as the cows view things from their perspective, same as every single living things that must destroy and consume other life in order to live.To persist in my bias is the highest form of love my level of consciousness can muster at this point same as the rest of humanity. I am compelled to resist the diminishment and genocide of humanity until my last breath, unless of course I become enlightened, but as of now this is where I am at, for better or for worse. Humanity should be the focal point because we are the highest leverage point for good AND evil as the dominant species in addition to the fact that humanity has the highest potential for increases in consciousness compared with all other life forms on the planet. To find a real solution people need to be offered choices that are compatible with their respective levels of development, unless of course we dump a bunch of acid in the water supply hehe. If we look at the long arc of justice we will see that much suffering was required to arrive at any of the good things we now enjoy as a society. It seems there is always balance, for example, capitalism in the modern era has simultaneously been the greatest force for good AND evil the world has ever seen. When you walk into a grocery store, the people in possesion of those resources actually want you to eat the food. In a less developed state people would simple hoard whatever resources they had excluding everyone else. Yet the current paradigm was only made possible by the destruction of countless lives and ecosystems. the morality of all these systems ccontinually folds back in itself making it almost impossible to nail down what is truly moral in a given situation. Maybe that sounds like a cop-out but then again maybe not.

@Scholar I like the insect/shellfish angle. I think that is a far more reasonable approach to living a more peaceful existence than hardcore veganism. There are technologies that exist right now which turn food waste into insect biomass, hundreds of tons of insect biomass that is dried and crushed in order to feed to farmed fish, chickens and pigs serving as a replacement for fishmeal input. Is it more ethical to let the food waste rot or to recycle it into usable protein? Hypothetically assuming ruminant animal agriculture is a key solution to climate change what would you say about not eating those animals? Is it ethical to deny impoverished humans that meat and offer them big bags of UN grain instead that clearly are nutritionally inadequate? How can we as god maximize love? sounds like a tricky design challenge that to me doesnt look like veganism

Hasnt anyone noticed the overwhelming evidence coming out that points to wellness being found in mimicking ancestral diets and lifestyles? I think it will require major gene therapy to make veganism viable generationally for humans. Technology got us into this modern mess, hopefully it can get out of it as well.

This feels like the powder keg of ww3. Spells disaster if this whets China's appetite for war considering the tension between Japan-China/ U.S- China.

@Shiva I truly wish this were true in my case, but sadly it isnt. I was sick literally my whole life and eating animal foods saved me, it's not like I didnt jump from diet to diet, intervention to intervention along the way either. I take detailed notes on what I eat/my habits and how those things affects my physiology and have been doing so for quite some time and the animal foods had a dramatic effect on my physiology for the better. Chocolate diet sounds like an elimination diet/fast which of course could be beneficial in the short term. To say that all the plant foods we have access to now that have been bio-engineered over millenia are adequate without animal foods is to dismiss the complexity of biology and evolutionary adaptation. Reductionist hubris in my opinion. You said "for the first time in human history" this is my point, it's unnatural. I do my level best to not contribute to the misery and devilry that is present in the current paradigm of industrial farming. And again the impulse behind veganism is beautiful and noble I just think it lacks nuance. Civilization and manmade things are the meta-disease here people wake up!

I found out I have a certain gene polymorphism called akt1 that is responsible for increased sensitivity to cannabis. This makes total sense because cannabis for me has always been totally psychedelic, I always get brilliantly colorful closed eye visuals and changes in cognition more powerful than mushrooms. I started using it consistently at the age of 13 and didnt know at the time that I was having somewhat mild non-dual experiences on it. I had no framework to integrate the experiences at that age and it caused me to develop a certain degree of existential terror that I didnt see in my peers at all as well as encouraged me to deeply investigate life and reality which terrified me even more. It was very painful and limiting to my development. If I had been less aware growing up I would have had a much easier time with the self-actualization process. It's sort of the same as why babies and toddlers are so good at adapting to their environments/learning language etc. They have so little awareness of reality that they absorb what they need to unquestioningly allowing things to run much more smoothly. They arent quesetioning and searching for truth constantly in that process. I cant thank @Leo Gura enough for giving me the tools to finally understand and integrate all of that.

@SerpaeTetranever was totally vegan, but never had any animal food aside from milk and chicken/turkey muscle meat until I was about 12 because my dad had a belief that animal foods were toxic and unhealthy. I always struggled with myriad health issues thyroid, psoriasis, shingles chronic fatigue degenerative joints to name a few. I tried many of the interventions that you hear about in the mainstream, juicing, supplements, yoga etc.and nothing made even the slightest difference. Every single one of these conditions dramatically improved only after I massively increased the amount and diversity of animal foods in my diet at the age of 23. Including organs, cartilaginous tissue and shellfish and quit eating wheat corn soy vegetable oils and the like.

you make very good points but these things apply to everyone, kellog and savory alike. Self-bias is permeated throughout any and all of these theoretical endeavors. And yes of course I am biased towards slaughtering those cows and biased toward everything else that aids in my survival, otherwise I'd be dead.