Jodistrict

He is a professor who taught clinical psychology and when the going gets tough they blame it on demons, instead of facing himself and his defenses. He is a quack psychologist.

I am wondering how you get around the Federal Analogue Act which specifically targets "designer drugs". It treats chemical analogs as if they were the original controlled substance.

You don't know that.

They use dyads in holotropic breathwork. The breathwork sessions last 3 hours. One partner does the breathing while you take care of your partner. Then you switch. This works well for breathwork. But doing that with a powerful chemical sounds risky. I have been to over 20 bufo ceremonies and I saw some crazy things happen that require an experienced facilitator to keep the space safe. It might work for micro doses.

Meditation is a technique that quiets the mind and puts you in a non symbolic space where you can see the truth. Your non duality dogma is conceptual and will not liberate anyone.

Meditation is a technique for awakening that we know works. It has worked for thousands of years, worked for Buddha, etc. Ramana Maharshi meditated in a cave for 17 years. From a modern perspective, the problem is that it takes too long. Shinzen’s idea is to give meditation (which we know already works) a technical boost using technology to cut down the time it takes to awaken. It doesn’t replace meditation, it amplifies it. He has already experimented with this describing a TMS session as “like compressing a week-long retreat into 20 minutes”. Meditation is an empirical technique and not a dogma.

It does have something to do with the brain. Consciousness is modulated through our nervous system. This is what Yoga is about - purification of the nervous system to prepare it for higher consciousness. Shinzen is actively working with scientists to locate the brain centers involved in enlightenment. I tend to trust Shinzen on this subject because he was my first meditation teacher and I had personal contact with him and know he is for real. But that is just personal to me.

There are 5-meo retreats in California and other places in the US. I have never been to one but they use freedom of religion and establish some kind of church.

The best candidate should have been chosen through a fair primary process. That is how you find the best candidate. My favorite going forward is Governor Newsom. The issues should be focused on the economy and not divisive identity politics. It will take Newsom 4 years just to bring the government back to stability and undo some of the damage.

I have tended to find this to be true. I have taken Bufo many times over a 5 year period and it gives mind blowing experiences. But an experience no matter how intense is just an experience and the next day becomes a memory. There is no particular value to having a mystical experience. I heard in an interview with Shinzen Young that he has been working with scientists on TMS or Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation, as a possible technical boost to enlightenment. He says that psychedelics don’t have the industrial strength nor precision to target the relevant brain areas. If psychedelics worked, everyone would be enlightened by now. However, I am open minded, so potentially interested in learning more details on a seminar. If there was a way to use psychedelics as a technical boost that would make subsequent spiritual practice more productive, even that modest goal would be highly valuable.

It's irrelevant what I believe. Trump won because he convinced the swing voters that he was the better candidate. Ralph Nader lays out the argument in the video I provided.

It IS the fault of the democratic party for running a mediocre candidate and an issueless celebrity driven campaign. It's important to acknowledge this and replace the leadership.

Trump is losing the popular support he would need to take over. He promised prices would go down, but his tariffs are just increasing inflation. His support base, MAGA, is maxed out and unlikely to grow any larger. Then the drunken clown Pete Hegseth literally orders every general into a room and demeans them in front of the world and they respond with no applause. Are these guys going to participate in a coup? Ralph Nader believes that if Trump loses enough of the public support, he could be impeached, even by a Republican congress, since their choice would be to go down with him or get rid of him. Also Nader says there are over 100 impeachment charges against Trump, some of them criminal, in contrast to Nixon, who had only two charges against him.

This is an insightful interview with Ralph Nader discussing the problem of the democratic party and what to do.

No, he was more of a conservative or a moderate. The Republican National Convention selected Eisenhower over Douglas MacArthur. McArthur was more of a right-winger. If he had become president, he would have been feared by opponents, and not humored as a fool, like Trump.

Eisenhower supported the Marshall Plan. The right-wing in American wanted to kill the Marshall Plan for the same obvious reasons - why should we help outsiders? If the Marshall Plan wasn't high consciousness, what is? We live in the real world, not an ideal one with perfect actors.

What about Eisenhower? We are in different times now and Trump is not a conservative. He is an opportunist, which is why he has stacked the government with grifters and criminals.

This is a really intelligent discussion with Chris Hedges. He starts out talking about Kirk being turned into a martyr and the importance of martyrs in fascist movements. He goes on to discuss the right’s goal of consolidation of power and the failure of the democratic party.

Context. The goal of the yoga sutras in samadhi. You simply can’t achieve a peaceful mind if you let an evil man stir up emotions inside of you. It doesn’t say anything about taking actions to protect or not. However, in the present situation of an evil man meeting misfortune, indifference means something like neither celebrating nor expressing sorrow. It seems to be prudent advice in this particular situation.

I follow the Yoga Sutras. Pantanjali said that you should treat a wicked man with indifference.

The Internet has adopted the Alex Jones model. No matter what happens, we can no longer agree on the simple facts. At least a few dozen YouTube channels will bury the discussion in an avalanche of trivia. Where did the bullet go? Was there more than one bullet? Bullets just don’t behave that way? What was written on the bullet? Can bullets talk? Did the bullet have any feelings for Kirk? As a result, any meaningful discussion gets lost in a sea of irrelevant speculation.

I know someone who says he is happy and he seems so. He had good parents and escaped most of the traumas of childhood. That is a big factor. I think the emphasis on enlightenment is misdirected. The key to happiness is learning to be fully human. If you wake up and find you are God, but you still suffer, then congratulations, you get the booby prize.

In my opinion, the focus of this forum should be on the completely irresponsible memorial service. First, it wasn’t a memorial service featuring the loved ones and neighbors of the deceased. It was a rally featuring political hacks spuing hatred on their fellow citizens. The running assumption was that “the leftists assassinated Charlie Kirk”, when it is clear by now that no organized group had anything to do with this. The careless use of the word “assassination” implies that he was killed for a political agenda, but the prevailing evidence is that he was murdered by an angry young man, schooled in how to shoot a gun by his MAGA parents, and finding a convenient target. Speaking of the unconscious and projection, the speech by the hate-monger Stephen Miller was full of it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_KSYjqB_Q-8

I was watching an interesting documentary on Mussolini. He said that the crowd is like a woman. The crowd loves strong men. The crowd is like a woman waiting to be violated. The similarity to Trump’s attitude is striking – how Trump treated women in the past and his relationship to Epstein. It shows that at a deeper psychological level, Trump really has the fascist leader mindset. Trump is no joke. Delving into this deep psychology is complex and the best psychologists and philosophers in the world tried to address it after World War II. But here we are repeating history.

That video of her hamming it up for the cameras in front of the coffin was goolish and sent chills up my spine. I could only watch a few seconds of it. These people don't need more religion. They need to learn how to be human.