melontonin

Hi everyone, hope you're doing good. I've recently been going through a period of relapsing on a lot of bad habits and I wanted to start a thread about it to hear other people's stories/advice with it. Five years ago until about 1 year ago, I was going through extreme depression and self-destruction to the extent that it's a miracle I'm alive now. It was drug abuse, overeating, self-harm, etc. Over the past year or so though I've gone through profound healing and growth after what felt like me banging my head up against a wall for years trying to implement good habits. I've been going on dates and getting laid, been very consistent with my life purpose practices, massively improved my social skills, great holosync meditation habit, etc. But then over the past couple of months I've been relapsing on a lot of bad habits and, to be honest, I'm terrified that I'm gonna end up where I was before. I've been overeating and masturbating a lot and not pushing my comfort zone as much. Does anyone have any advice or any thoughts whatsoever on relapse, backsliding, and other frustrating aspects of the journey like this? I was almost in tears on the way back home from a social event where I couldn't bring myself to talk to the people I wanted to speak to so I'm feeling pretty down. Peace and love.

EDIT: Apologies, I've only now seen the other recent threads about this. Hi, I hope you're all doing good. The essential question I wanted to ask is what ideas people have for how they're going to prepare for the AI revolution specifically in a business and life purpose context. If you don't have time to read the rest of this post I'd still really appreciate hearing any ideas you have. I've been seeing more and more indications that the AI Revolution is really starting to take off and it's making me feel anxious. As context, I'm 22 and still figuring out what my life purpose and business niche are, though I'm far enough along to know that it's going to involve the combination of cultivating wisdom/understanding and expressing it through arthouse cinema and poetic writing. I'm sure you've all seen that AI art is becoming more prevalent and it's making me anxious of my prospects but equally I don't think I could passionately pursue anything that wasn't artistic or poetic. Potential solutions I've thought of so far: AI art won't have the depth of art created by someone who has cultivated wisdom, spirituality, and a connection with truth therefore depth is what will distinguish successful human-made art from both AI art and unsuccessful human art. Reframing it in terms of how I could use AI art myself to boost my chances of success as opposed to seeing it only as a threat to me. This has all been very specific to my niche but I'm interested in how people are looking at the AI revolution in general. What are your mindsets for approaching how AI will change the marketplace? How are you thinking about it in terms of your business and prospects of supporting yourself? Are there any ways you're planning on utilising AI for your business? Peace & Love

@aurum Yeah, that's what I thinking. I've made the mistake of going overboard with psychedelics in the past so I thought it might be the case. Would you say Holosync's made a noticeable impact on your life over the years you've been doing it? I've only been using it for a couple of weeks but I've already noticed the difference when I've been meditating with it. Have you noticed a difference in terms of processing residual emotions and lowering anxiety?

Does anyone have experience combining holosync and psychedelics for healing purposes? I recently bought Awakening Prologue from Centrepointe and I can feel how powerful it is just from doing it sober so I was wondering whether it'd be effective combined with psychedelics like lsd, 2cb, or mushrooms or whether it'd be too much at once for your system.

Hi, hope you're all doing well. What is everyone's perspective on the law of attraction? How much truth is there to it? Any? I hear a lot of very conflicting perspectives on it. For example, I hear a lot of people whose opinions I respect - Stage Yellow and beyond thinkers - not regarding it as having much truth. These include: - Ken Wilber - Jamie Wheal - Bernardo Kastrup - John Vervaeke Ken Wilber's criticism in particular is interesting because he talks about how it's based in narcissism - the idea that the universe effectively revolves around your egoic desires to deliver you what you need. On the other hand, you see so many people with massive success claiming that they did it through the law of attraction - i'm thinking in particular a lot of artists, musicians, spiritual teachers etc. Could it be a placebo where believing it is the case makes you put all the effort in required to do it and that ends up actually creating the success you wanted? Another thought i had on it is maybe it's not some ontologically existing law but it's effectively just the utility of the principle that if you focus on what you want rather than what you don't want. I don't know, I'm interested in hearing your perspectives. Peace and love

Hi, hope everyone's doing well. Does anyone have advice about improving your epistemology to start unrooting limiting beliefs? I feel like my ability to distinguish truth from falsehood is very weak because I'll get these absurd thought patterns that, although superficially I can see are ridiculous, I can't feel are ridiculous - I still feel them as though they're true. I've been reading books on critical thinking and epistemology which has helped to some extent but I haven't been doing it for too long so I don't think I've seen the full benefits of it yet. Also, would learning formal logic be valuable for specifically evaluating the inferences the arguments are based on or do you think that'd just be getting sidetracked? One thing that works for some of them is just to apply empiricism but then for others, it feels like it's not within that domain so it feels like to just deny it on the basis of empiricism would be the same kind of reductionism/bypassing of modernist science. For example, one thing that empiricism could be used for is "everyone will laugh at you if you share your art" because I can just literally perform the experiment to see whether that's true. But for example, I get thought patterns like "you've got no skills which means you're worthless and deserve to die because you have no utility to society." That doesn't feel like it pertains to empiricism, it feels like more of an ethical question so for me to just deny it on the basis that it doesn't correspond to anything empirically observable feels like bypassing. It almost feels equivalent to saying that "meaning" or "value" don't exist because they're not empirically observable phenomena. I have similar confusion around socially constructed concepts and what degree of reality they have - whether I can just completely negate the existence of thought patterns about "status" simply because it's not a sensory empirical object, for example. Anyway, they're just specific examples. The broader question I'm asking is just whether anyone has any advice for unrooting beliefs. Thanks in advance for any responses. Peace and love.

@DocWatts Thanks again for your response, I appreciate you taking the time to help me out. I've been reading a summary of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions online and I can literally feel how powerful what it's saying but haven't fully realised it if you understand me. It's points like these especially: Something like a paradigm is a prerequisite to perception itself (recall G. H. Mead's concept of a predisposition, or the dictum it takes a meaning to catch a meaning). What people see depends both on what they look at and on what their previous visual-conceptual experience has taught them to see. This difference in view resembles a gestalt shift, a perceptual transformation—"what were ducks in the scientist's world before the revolution are rabbits afterward." It's making me want to instigate one of these "gestalt shifts". It's interesting because I had a few mystical experiences a couple of years ago when I was tripping that felt like paradigm shifts but it's clear from my behaviour that I'm still operating from the materialist paradigm. I still treat people as fundamentally separate and external to me even though when I had direct experiences that I was everything and it was all my own mind. I've since read a lot of Ken Wilber's stuff and specifically the "Wilber-Combs lattice" which made the distinction between the awakening and the interpretation of it but, still, it's mad that I experienced effectively supernatural shit and then still ended up living how I was before after a few months. I guess that's the pull of homeostasis.

@Gili Trawangan To use the language of Ken Wilber, I'm more focusing on the domain of "growing up" as in the quality of your interpretations/cognition as opposed to "waking up" which transcends all interpretation like you're saying. Thanks for your response anyway.

@DocWatts Thanks a lot for your response. I've read some stuff about his critique of Husserl and pure phenomenology but not enough to be really familiar with it. How familiar are you with Thomas Kuhn's work? I basically only know what I've seen on Leo's paradigm video but feel like I don't really understand them. It seems like quite a slippery concept where I think I'll understand them but then hear someone else say something contradictory. For example, I've heard Ken Wilber talk about how paradigms aren't just a "big theory" but an actual injunction that you carry out. How could something like the materialist paradigm be an injunction? I suppose it's gonna completely determine what actions you carry out and what you see as worth investigating but still, I feel like I'm missing something in my understanding of them. Any analysis/insights would be greatly appreciated.

I've heard Leo mention on a few different videos about how there's an implicit metaphysics to, for example, calling a cat a cat. I feel like I understand this in the sense that it then necessitates the question "well what's a cat?" which then goes to "animal" which then necessitates "what's an animal?" and then might go to "a living being" which'd then go to "what's a living being" which'd then might go to some description about a how life is created by atoms interacting in a certain way if it's a materialist metaphysics - or something along those lines anyway. My first question is just what should I read to look more into this cos other than Leo and Thomas Kuhn I'm not really aware of many people who've spoken specifically about this. That includes any of the videos @Leo Gura has talked about that because I can't remember what the videos were. I specifically remember him talking about underdetermination which seems relevant but I can't remember which. My second question is can there be any interpretation whatsoever without some implicit metaphysics? If there isn't then the implications of that are insane. If you changed your ontological assumptions then literally all your interpretations would change. Is that what a paradigm shift is? Or at least an example of one. This is something I've wondered about for a while but not considered fully but on my Philosophy BA i've been set the question on whether Frege's sense and reference theory of identity statements is accurate which has been the perfect prompt for me to look into this. If any of have any points specifically relevant to that I'd appreciate them but that's secondary. Thanks in advance for any responses, peace and love

@Reciprocality This is a really interesting point. I've been thinking a lot about the beliefs and assumptions I operate on the basis of and how although they seem to be justified, I don't know they are in some direct and immediate sense. I've been struggling with that because I've been thinking that if I just operated on the things I know in some direct and immediate sense then I'd have nothing to go off and some of them are a lot more justified than others. The concept "objects of reason" though is really useful because it means I'm not negating the utility of justified beliefs, I'm just not mixing them up with actual knowledge. I think I've been looking at it as though by distinguishing beliefs from the knowledge I'm going to abandon completely all the justified beliefs. It's interesting how just learning a concept can completely change your view of a situation or what you think is possible. Thanks for sharing.

@AuroraDream That sounds like a life-changing, paradigm-shifting insight. Rationally I completely agree with what you're saying and I've heard similar in the past but I don't feel it and that's what counts. I'll contemplate it though to see what parts of me disagree with what you're saying because if I genuinely felt had that orientation to my trauma that'd be a game-changer. Thanks a lot for sharing that. Yeah sadly my mental state at the time meant I wasn't sensible with doses which has just fucked it for me in terms of doing it now. I'm not sure where you're from but in the UK we get high-dosed pills (200mg-300mg) and I'd do 3-5 in a night. Just makes me feel ill now, especially if i was doing 120mg. Oh well, there's a whole world of psychedelics out there and that's mainly what I've been doing for the last couple of years since I stopped MD. @Ulax Thanks a lot for your message. Yeah, it's intuitively obvious to me that anything but root-level, identity change isn't a real solution but there can be things that aren't but which are still helpful. And yeah I'd really appreciate hearing any advice or methods you've got.

@AuroraDream It showed me love I didn't know was even possible at the time and in that respect at least was exactly what I needed. It coincided with my first real relationship as well with someone who was equally as in pain as me so we just ended up doing it all the time. I don't know if the amounts of it you do in therapy give you the feelings of love you get off higher doses but if they do you can imagine how beautiful it was doing it with my first girlfriend after going through so much suffering. That's obviously not to say that the way I was doing it was healthy at all because it wasn't and I wish I hadn't in terms of the neurotoxic effects. But at the same time it'd be untrue to say it was altogether bad. It's a life-changing thing to experience those levels of love and only something that's been surpassed for me by the mystical experiences I've had on LSD. @Breakingthewall That's interesting, I remember Leo talking about how it can force you to go through a lot of your emotional work but I didn't realise that extended to stuff that wasn't related to Enlightenment. I have done it twice but didn't get anything meaningful from it mainly because I wasn't mature enough at the time. @Ulax I don't ever feel at ease around other people to the extent of letting my guard down. There's always anxiety there. I've been going out a lot more recently and socialising though because I feel the intuitive truth of the point that "relational trauma can only be healed in relationships." It's clearly gonna have to be done in combination with trauma work though specifically focused on the fact that I always feel like something I say could just trigger anger and violence from the person I'm speaking to.

@AuroraDream I abused MDMA from age 17-20 so I don't know if it'd be effective or advisable for me now. I've been trying to sign up to some psychedelic therapies though.

@Tristan12 Yeah it has seemed like the most direct form, I imagine like anything it's just a skill I'm going to have to develop though. I think as well just getting to a point where escaping and distracting myself when the emotion gets intense isn't the path of least resistance anymore. Still now when it starts to get intense a lot of the time I'll end up just going and eating food but I'm telling myself that I have to go through the process of doing that over and over and it just making me feel worse for me to genuinely feel and know that doing that is causing me more harm than good. Clearly right now I wouldn't be doing that if I didn't think it was causing me less pain. @catcat69123 Unpredictability is definitely the word. It's like I'm talking to people and there's always this conceptual filter for everything I'm saying of "what if I say this and this person becomes aggressive or violent towards me". It just means I end up being inauthentic most of the time around people which is probably one of the most annoying aspects - watching myself talking to people in ways that I'd never authentically talk to people. But yeah you're definitely right, relational trauma isn't gonna get healed other than in relationships, I've accepted that. Went to a party last night and I've set the intention of taking every opportunity to socialise I get - especially while I'm at uni cos there are so many opportunities. Doing the inner-child work has helped me have more compassion for myself as well cos I can see how when I act in maladaptive ways like letting people talk to me like shit without saying anything back, it's this traumatised younger version myself taking over that thinks if I fight back I'll get physically attacked. If I'm honest it's been the fear of that happening again that's stopped me socialising more than anything because you can imagine how those kinds of experiences have destroyed my self-esteem. But yeah, that's why it's gonna take socialising AND trauma work to really sort it out. Thanks a lot for your reply @Loba Yeah, I relate entirely with what you're saying about not sticking to specific methodologies. I think it's really one of the downsides of living in this era where you have access to everything and just having the fear that you'll end up wasting your time with one that doesn't work. I'll check those vids out though, thanks a lot @Nahm That emotional guidance scale is fascinating, I've never seen that before. Thanks for linking @Breakingthewall Yeah it's a massive challenge but there's not even really a choice. I'm either gonna grow and heal or I'm gonna end up killing myself, I don't see any other turn of events other than an eckhart tolle scenario like you're saying. It's funny as well because one of the lies and rationalisations i'll say to myself when I'm in escapism mode is that even if i'm not growing it'll get to a point of such pain that I'll surrender. And maybe that's true but there's no guarantee obviously, if that was a guarantee no one would kill themselves. Plus even if that was the case he went through HELL to get to the point of surrendering so it's not exactly the best option.