undeather

Lol. US health care is such a joke. Did you expereince any episodes of fever, chills, malaise, cough, chest tightness, dyspnea, rash, swelling or headache lately? Reversible lung irritation is quite common in people who are exposed to differend kinds of airborne particles in a certain amount of time. A more "severe" form of this is called hypersensitivity pneumonitis, which is a quite rare immune system disorder that affects the lungs. Silicosis is the end stage and usually caused by continuous inhalation of crystalline silica dust. Its irreversible, but dont worry - that only occurs after years of exposure. Then, there are also dozens of mild inflammation processes described in the literature that are also corrlated with the working conditions you described. In the majority of cases, this will get better and heal up over time. 2 weeks of exposure isnt actually that long and maybe you even got some kind of allergy to some stuff used at the construction side (maybe certain particles of the dust). The lungs have an awesome mechanism called "mucociliary clearance" which is a evolutionary self cleaning mechanism that helps the organ getting rid of unwanted stuff. It usually takes a quite a long a time (weeks to months) but it works. To really damage the lungs in an irreversible way usually takes a very high amount of inflammation/very long exposure time or extremely toxic gases. Look I dont know you and your medical history. The only smart advice I can give you with good conscience is to get it checked. Thats what everyone should be able to do, regardless of employment status or financial background - like in the rest of the developed world. But if you really cant do that at the moment then its okay to play the wait and watch game in my opinion. Just observe - it already got better and it should go further into that direction. If you dont see any progress in weeks from now or if its gets worse, immediatly contact your local medical provider. You can try to cautiously inhale with steam or suitable additives. High humidity enhances mucociliary clearance. Take care

Many times in my life I have asked myself this one question: Why do anything? Why struggle? Why work on myself? Why face rejection? Why be someone? After all, isnt this just ego? If the ontological nature of my day to day reality is based on an illusion, what basis is there to do anything at all? - Especially with all the potential suffering that comes with it. If all meaning is illusory, whats left to do? Is there even something like a free will or do we witness pure theatre? What does "free will" even mean in the context of what I know? Why should I do anything else than meditating 24/7, trying to deepen the connection with the source? Is there a way to make sense of this? So I tried... We can get stuck in a place where we flip flop between truths that are both self-evidently true and yet seemingly irreconsilable - or we can choose to reconsile and live them both more fully simultaneously. In order to do whats "right" we have to enter a plane of higher-dimensional sensemaking. I want to compare for a minute, roughly generelized, very oversimplified, a eastern and western model of the nature of reality, meaning and spirituality. Obviously its simplified because first of all, there are a lot of models and the delineation between them isnt clear at all. But lets say, with eastern I mean the kind of vedantic/buddhist primary interpretations, which are very "being" focused. We are using them as a reference for this particular dichotomy. You will notice in most interpretations of the Buddhist tradition, the focus is exclusively on being. In fact, "doing", meaning any chop wood & carry water-like activity is there just because it needs to be done. Everything else is focused on the being while doing it - which ultimately is the only thing that matters. One of the reasons why that becomes insightful, is that the Buddhist's and the Hindu's vedantic model of time is a circular one. They have this system of time called Kalpa or Yugas, where the time and universe itself is believed to cycle through birth and death. These people watched nature very deeply . They saw seasons like spring and fall, they saw empires rise and fall, they saw people born and die, they saw relationships come together and fall apart - they just saw everything cycling. They saw cycles within cycles, days within months, within years, within galactic cycles. So because of that - if everything's cycling, nothing is actually going anywhere. There is no progress, it's just the wheel of time. So if you're trying to push something forward, you've bought into the illusion that you're going anywhere. They talk about this as Maya, illusion or samsara, the cycle of being. If it's just this illlusory wheel that isn't actually going anywhere - going further is fundamentally meaningless. The goal there becomes getting off the wheel, getting out of the concept of linear time completely, being able to access the eternal through the now. The idea of becoming, progress, or making the world better IS meaningless when the whole thing itself is illusory to begin with. It just means you bought into the illusion and you don't get the ultimate truth. Its the lived ontological quality of "now and complete" - in a way that doesn't have progress built in at all. Basically that's the kind of pure zenith of a being model. You notice that happiness in that worldview is a model of contentment, serenity or fullness with what "is" right now. In fact, anything like passion or desire or excitement is called the cause of all suffering - because that means that you believe something good is in the future, so you sacrifice being in the moment for wanting something thats not "here". When you get what you want, you aren't even that happy - you want something else while being anxious of losing it. Dont desire anything, dont have passion- they are for plenty of sound and fury leading to suffering and nothing - just be e full and content now. It can sound boring, but of course the idea of boring, in that model, would be a mental trap. Because when you come into the fullness of being right now, you can access, and this is true, a state of serenity, that has a kind of blissfulness to it, that doesn't need you to do anything. But that's that model. And even though its true in some sense it's also so far from TRUTH that it's actually infinitely off the bigger picture. Now the western model of time is basically originating in Judaism, greek philosophy and then of course modern science. Because the early Jews were very focused on history, they were noticing something like net change over time. There was clear evidence that new things were emerging that didn't exist before. So rather than focusing on the nature and seeing everything as cyclical, they were focused on the emergence of creations. They realized that adding stuff actually means going somewhere, which ultimately led to a more linear model of time. In their eyes, time was phenomologically real and actually going somewhere - which led to a dialectic of progress and a general focus on becoming rather than being. New implications arised – if there is progress, there has to be something like a beginning and an end. Maybe the beginning is the beginning of the universe in Genesis? Maybe the beginning is when you were born, maybe the end is heaven, right? There are different kinds of theological models and they can completely disagree with each other. Yet this dynamic unveils something else. if you think the universe is actually going somewhere, then adding to this evolving project is inherently meaningful. Also you and me, being a part of where it's going is inherently significant. So then, just being in the moment is not that interesting. Becoming evermore in a universe that is itself becoming evermore, developing oneself to the highest capabilities is the thing to do. That means just being completely content in a way that has no drive is antithetical to what's purposeful. You do notice that their definition of happiness has a lot more to do with qualities like passion and excitement, rather the peace and contentment. If you were to look at this culture, there's a lot of singing, dancing, even partying - whereas more eastern philosophies tend to be a lot quieter. (I do realise the exceptions, yet in general this is true.) Now, some might argue that the eastern model sounds fundamentally bland and boring, which is not true. In fact, it‘s the kind of western bias that only the unexperienced would utter because they haven't dropped into that place of getting it. You might have had moments where you are just walking along a lake or a beautiful landside or during meditation - and you stop, and everything else also kind of stops. You just see sparkles on the water, there is no thinking about what's coming next, there is no subject - the moment is just full. Whats surprising is that it's more full, in a certain quality, than excitement about the future could ever be. It's about independence. A part of enlightenment in that model is being able to be fully with what „is“, no matter what. It doesnt matter matter what is happening, because everything that's happening is an illusion, right? It's all just changing and flexing - but the consciousness that's witnessing it is ever present. Realizing that the light is actually the light of consciousness - that's what waking up means in their context. Now, so if one wanted to bias from that direction, they could look at the western reality with all the singing, dancing, linearity of time and say: „Look how immature it is !!“ - It's excitement when things go well and disappointment when things don't go well. Look at how little sovereignty those people have, they're so affected by their environment, their circumstance - look at how they rush around trying to change their circumstances to make themselves happy - look at how attached they get to other people and how fucked up they are when things don't go the way they want. Look at how unhappy they are when they lose something. Look at how when they get what they want - they're only happy for like 15 minutes, and then they want something else. There's like almost nothing of seeming enduring depth there. So how do we reconsile this? In the west the focus becomes purpose because purpose is a time bound concept, which unfolds chronologically. Evolution is a time bound concept. So if it‘s about evolving ourselves, evolving others, evolving the world around us - becoming more able to express more of the infinite potential through the finite, through this illusion we call time - then of course when you get what you wanted, you aren't just boringly happy about it. Because then you would stop becoming, when the goal is to be becoming forever. Remember that you are god. You are the "it", manifesting relativity in the absolute - the finite in the infintie. The goal is actually to be in the process of blossoming, that actually adds to the relative depth of how infinity unfolds itself. The „intelligence“ that brings subatomic particles together into particles and particles into higher order particles, into biology - the whole thing from the Big Bang on is what keeps organizing the universe towards more orderly complexity. You are "it" and the infinite blossoming into higher order potential at the same time. The relative ego also have the ability to choose, in a way, that aligns itself with that truth. And so, of course, when you get something, you're only happy for a moment because you're in the becoming. Whats important to understand is that it's actually the being in the becoming, which is interesting. Its what many great philosophers called „the lure of becoming“ - because it's about becoming and it's also every moment! If you take MDMA, a seratonergic drug, you usually will become very in the moment, very sensory, very feeling, very in the fullness of everything being overwhelmingly beautiful right now - with almost no awareness of anything else. Contrary to that, someone else takes a dopaminergic agent like Adderall or cocaine. They will became profoundly focused on what they want to create. All they want to do is being in the process of creating it. Well now we can also see the beauty and the crashes of both of those - what becomes more available or less available. We can see them in the ways of living. A lot of the Eastern practices are serotoninergic practices: being in the moment, breathing slow, being in nature, having all of your awareness at one point. On the western part you have it the other way around: create goals, achieve the goals, feel good that you achieve them, check them off, reinforce having goals, create more goals - those are dopaminergic practices. You also get addiction with that, which is mostly working on the dopaminergic axis. Now lets go back to the circular and linear model of time. If we embed those two on each other in a higher dimensional way, you get a spiral of evolution, which is a circle that isn't closing on itself. It's a circle that is actually moving along the line. So you might ask, are there even cycles now? Yes, there are cycles. And there is net change from one cycle to the next. Now as we look at the ecosystem we see that you've got spring and fall and spring and fall involved, things are born and die, the cyclical nature is there. Yet over the course of "time", you look at the fossil record, there's evolution of new organisms that weren't there before, so there is net change over time. It's important to understand that there are cycles, because in order to proceed in your becoming, you need to have phases of activity and phases of rest, phases of going outward and phases of coming inward, phases of learning new things and then phases of applying that learning followed by phases of digesting. If you don't understand the cycles you'll feel like you're not making progress. The end.

Pfizer A friend of mine gave me my first shot and because we were clowning around during the process my arm hurt quite bad for 3 days. Second shot did absolutely nothing. I also personally administered around 300 shots. 20 -30 of those were to friends, relatives and ward patients. Noone had any severe reaction.

Keep using it if it makes you happy, I doubt there is any harm associated with your mouth wash. Personally I am big fan of tea tree oil as mouthwash alternative because of the many studies that compare it to the usual products. It works and we know it does. When it comes to oral hygiene products its important to generally look for non-alcohol ones. I believe that periodically rinsing your mouth with a strong carcinogen like alcohol might cause troubles over the years. In fact, we even see this in the data since there is a hint of increased mouth cancer in frequent mouth wash users. Regarding oregano oil, I dont see any problem at all to be honest.

We are dealing with many patients who acutely need dental work in our clinic because its a necessary step before becoming eligible for a liver transplant. First of all let me empower you in your decision to face your fears and finally get something done. Fixing your teeth is one of the best health measures you can undertake to significantly deacrease the propablity of a whole range of degenerative or inflammatory diseases. Our current literature indicates that we have highly underestimated the significance of oral hygiene in relation to our systemic homeostasis. So please, even if its like the scariest thing for you - make this appointment. We tell our patients that those decisions become much easier if there is the possibility of incorperating family members, friends of even a psychotherapist in that matter. There are therapists/coaches who specialize in facing difficult situations, so if its easier for you - maybe think about some kind of support if you cant do it alone. Regarding your medical question: - Sedation comes with a quality of "distancing from the fear", which is usually well tolerated and perfect for individuals like you . You wont be fully unconcious but more in some kind of light doze. Its also less stressful, cheaper, easier and faster. There are multiple ways of sedation and each and every one differs a bit from the other. Depending whats available at your provider, please talk to him about this beforehand. The difficult step here is to make an appointment. If those drugs are finally in your veins, you will feel okay. - Before making the appointments, simple breathwork routines might help you to calm down. A really great one is so called "box-breathing". I will link a video down below. - Anesthesia is also a decent way to get the job done. Dont get me wrong - just because I would prefer and recommend sedation, then this doesnt mean that anesthesia is objectively "worse". For some people this is the way to go. Anesthesia sounds so scary to the layperson - but let me assure you thats its just not. Back in medschool I have spent weeks in OR's observing and learning from anaesthesiologists. It was boring as hell. Because its just basic routine repeating itself and almost nothing ever really goes wrong. Especially with younger and healtheir patients, this is unbelieveable safe. So please, dont worry. - Regarding your Ativan. Keyword: Opioid crisis. Those drugs work but they also exert a seducing aura for those suffering from anxiety or PTSD. Please, dont start taking them regulary and keep the use under two weeks at max. Box breathing:

Yes and no. We want to live in accordance with our evolutionary blueprint so that cumulative stressors dont overwhelm our homeodynamic capacities to repair the damage done just by being alive. Yes. The issue is that its not that clear cut what that even means in a practical sense. Since the ability to adapt itself is part of this evolutionary mechanism, we can be sure that there is no "single intuitive way" to deal with your physiological needs. I think that its smarter to look at it from an entropy perspective: Find out what works for you and then do that CONSISTENTLY, which is the key. The more chaos there is in your sleeping pattern, the less resistence and ability to adapt your endogenous systems will have to fight entropy. WE totally see this in the data by the way. Fixed shifts are usually healthier than rotating ones, at least after cleaning up the confounders. Also, what Lex does or doesnt do is his choice. It shouldnt bother you at all.

Your bias stems from a fundamental misunderstanding of how medical science and data interpretation works. Scientific studies, like the one mentioned in the video, will show you a distribution of outcomes along an axis, which usually takes the shape of a bell curve. Some trials show highly significant, highly escalating results which dont require further disassembling of the data - the smoking example you mentioned is the perfect analogy. We just know that almost anyone who will continiously smoke cigarettes throughout his life, will shorten their healthspan significantly. The statistical aberration is so big that we can tell people without a doubt to better never touch those tabacco products in their life. This same process becomes infinitely more difficult when we talk about a highly complex topic like sleep. Its just not as black and white and there is no "perfect" sleep protocol which works the same for every human being. There are definitely guidelines/rules of thumb which will benefit most individuals in a certain collective but thats never the whole story. The ability of our body to adapt to external circumstances makes it even more complex and thats exactly where Walkers point comes into play. If you have found something that works for you, even if it goes against whats "good" in the orthodoxic sense, then go with it. Thats the best way to approach those topics anyway: Through your personal experience. We are FAR from understanding all the physiological and biochemical mechanisms that make up our sleep - nor are ever going to have a complete picture. If you want to fix your sleep, start with what works for most people and then be your own experiment. Finally I will give you a weird example from my personal life. I used to work nightshifts in a factory during school summer breaks - most people hated it but I loved it. My sleep was amazing, even though my usual sleep cycle got crushed from one day to the other. It just didnt seem to affect me. On the other hand, the early shift, which was the preferred one for most workers, destroyed my subjective wellbeing . Now, if we look at our current understanding then my example goes directly against the grain of our current sleep literature. Its a complex system and no simple reading of the data will get you very far.

Awesome! Was just thinking about which podcast I will listen to tonight - nice synchronicity

Thats wrong. Almost all types of tea and also high quality, pure coffee show beyond any doubt, clear health effects in most people. This oversimplified and ominous look on the caffeine molecule wont bring us anywhere near helpful territory. Coffee is more than caffeine. its very rich in antioxidants — including polyphenols and hydrocinnamic acids. There is no substantial link between coffee and ulcers. Also, there is SOME evidence that coffe is inversely correlated with certain type of cancers.

Vit D: 5-10k IU daily when based on labs and Vitamin D is low - 800-2k IU if you dont know the baseline. Zinc lozenges: several dissolved slowly throughout the day (instruction leaflet) Vit C: 1-10 grams per day orally, spread out to avoid loose bowels - DONT if you are prone to kidney stones (check risk factors) -> Very important: Enough hydration during the infection and supplementation. Green tea extract, EGCG (simply drinking green tea is also good) Melatonin before bed, higher does while symptoms persist, then lower doses for recovery (Nasal wash with salt water and colloidal silver, xylitol nasal spray Gargle with hydrogen peroxide or colloidal silver UV light (from sun ideally)) Note: If you are going to do higher than normal zinc for an extended period of time, balance this with some supplemental copper; if you are going to do higher than normal Vit D for an extended period, balance this with Vit K; balance with a multivitamin-mineral supplement and a balanced diet, ideally have an integrative doctor monitoring blood nutrient levels. You dont have to do everything on this list, anything will have some small effect. There is far more advanced stuff, but this is some baseline which is achieveable for most. Regarding Ivermectine: I dont regard Ivermectine as an effective treatment option at the moment. Currently there are many clinical trials in progress who will give us a definitive answer. Until then, I am not willing to recommend this drug. Disclaimer: THIS is not medical advice. Every self medication is at one's own risk. This supplements dont have any evidence in relation to the treatment of Covid19 and stem from a complex system approach to infectious diseases. Even though the given supplements and dosages are usually well tolerated and safe, dosages can vary depending on weight & age of the treated person. Please notice that most Covid19 infections heal up without any intervention. Also, get vaccinated! I dont guarantee the validity of this information.

Yes, I drink 2-3 black coffees a day - the last one at around 14:00 (2 PM) 4 times a year I stop drinking caffeine containing beverages for a week to reset tolerance. But again, I am also a very fast metaboliser - my sleep barely gets affected, even when I drink it at the evening.

Caffeine is primarily metabolised in the liver by cytochrome P450 enzymes, which are responsible for more than 90% of caffeine clearance. Its genetically determined and you will find huge interindivudal differences throughout the population, which allows for fast and slow caffeine metabolizers to exist. Besides that, there are also high and low responders due to variants at the caffeine-receptor sites. I hope you understand that therefore, its impossible to tell you a magic number that will work for everyone. Well actually there is one - which is zero! A good rule of thumb is no coffee 8 hours before bed. A scientific approach would be measuring your sleep quality with the Oura ring or other tools. Its not perfect but it will give you some data.

Consistency is king when it comes to sleep. A person's chronotype is the propensity for the individual to sleep at a particular time during a 24-hour period. Its mostly genetically determined and therfore fixed - if you want to get as much out of your sleep as possible, its really important to get in sync with your underlying mechanisms. That means, if you are a night owl and go to sleep very late, then do that - but do that consistently. After a time your whole body will undertake adjustments and you will feel much more tired right around your typical sleeping period. Our modern word, as sad as it is, discriminates against certain chronotypes and priviliges type A, rise early and grind personalities - which is in my opinion one big factor for our pandemic of neurodegenerative diseases. The required amount of sleep to stay healthy varies as well, but for most people its around 7-9 hours. Personally, Iam not a big fan of "follow your bodys needs". In my opinion its the best and worst advice you can give at the same time. From a evolutionary standpoint our sleep habits are so out of touch with our what we are programmed to do. We used to wake up to the first glances of the sun early in the morning and go to bed very early at night. Our lifestyle was evolving around a very intense resting period that followed the natural light and darkness - cycles. We dont have this anymore. There is artificial light everywhere, we use obfuscators and if we are honest, who already wants to go to bed at 8 in the eveining? Our bodies are confused, we put chemicals in us that interfere with the receptor sites regulating our sleep cycle (like caffeine). All that and a lot more leads to us modern humans having so much issues with the most natural thing ever- the quality of our sleep. So why is this also the best advice you can give: Well, if you start putting some consistency in your day and night cycles, your body will reprogramm itself and you will start feeling tired at around the same time every night. Thats the key, thats what we want! You will start feeling more energized druing the day, your hormone levels will balance out and your susceptibility for certain diseases will drop dramatically. Thats when you start to "follow your body needs", because now - you are body actually knows what the fuck is going on. There is great marterial out there regarding sleep and how to maximize it: I can highly recommend Matthew Walkers book "Why we sleep". Best regards

Maybe you shouldnt base your sensemaking on what "the majority" is or isnt doing.... because thats what children do.

I have been following Pierre Kory and the FLCCC since the early Covid days. They pioneered treatment regimes and safed thousands of lifes, which makes their work deeply respectable. Yet lately, they seem to promote a narrative warfare over the Ivermectine drug, which sometimes even ends in members getting harassed on Twitter due to changing their positions on ivermectin after better research shows no effect. https://imgur.com/a/EM00u0g That out of the way, lets look at their protocol. Personally, I am a big fan of combinating drugs and vitamins in an intelligent, integrative way. Its not easy to do with certain additives and its definitely NOT common practice in our modern medical establishment. Why, you think? There are dozens studies and meta analyes that looked at the potential effects of supplementation on clinical outcomes but they usually find no significant differences. From a complex system science approach, those findings are of course debateable and there is a lot of valid criticism out there to make a case FOR certain supplement regimes. I wont go into detail there, because you can literally write books about this one topic. Yes! Clinical trials are aiming to single out a certain parameter - in this case, one drug. On the one side, it kinda makes sense: We want to know if THIS drug in particular has an measureable effect. We know that we dont have to combine Vitamin C with your penicillin, because the antibiotic itself does a tremendous job killing the bacteria. Its also easier and less prone to bias. The more variables you add to a certain experiment, the more can go wrong and the higher is the chance of incorrect data. There are clinical trials that look at treatment regimes with multiple drugs but its rare and not as accepeted. Now, are we missing out on stuff? Well, maybe. Here we enter back in the realm of complex systems and potential combinatorics. IT could well be that a certain treatment regime, like the one from the FLCCC, is so much better than anything we do to most of our patients at the moment. It could also be worse. The truth is, we dont know. It takes a ton of money to set up clinical trial like that and frankly there is not enough incentive for the usual backers (pharma indus.) to throw their money into that. State funded research is a possibility, but this has its own kind of issues. A lot of doctors speak from their anecdotal evidence but I am highly skeptical about that. Time and time again, history has shown us that we are not a very good judge when it comes to those matters. Dont get me wrong, clinical judgement is important and we should take it seriously - but should we base the the life of millions on the experiences of a few doctors? No, I dont think so. Its an indcredibly complex & nuanced topic and I could talk for hours about it - but i hope this helps a bit. I dont have the time to go through that, I am sorry. I went through https://c19ivermectin.com/ once, which seem to stem from the same source. It was bad, not taking into account the terrible quality of some of those studies (one even got retracted afterwards). Its a difficult time to become pregnant at the moment. The effect of a COVID-19 infection on pregnancy is not completely known because of the lack of reliable data. Similar infections such as SARS and MERS suggest that pregnant women are at an increased risk of severe infection. No good data is available on the effects on the baby. The same goes for the vaccine - we just dont know for sure. It "seems" to be safe. I have talked to collegues who work in gynaecology and they havent seen any smoking gun yet. Its propably okay and wont harm the fetus. But see, its again - risk assessment. We dont know the real risk vs reward calculation. Which is worse for the fetus? In my estimate, the later in the pregnancy, the better. I would be very hesitant in the first trimenon, but then again I am not an expert on the data. I totally get the concerns and I honestly have to admit that I simply dont know. The current FDA approval is not out of thin air. The data we have so far shows no red flags whent it comes to pregnant women getting the vaccine. Is the analysis complex enough? Is the period too short? Well, thats debateable.

I am a medical doctor working in a university hospital. I use complex disease approaches and alternative, holistic health models as an integrative strategy for my private patients. I am DEEPLY skeptical about the pharma-industry (In fact, most of my collegues are). This is my background As someone who was pretty skeptical at the beginning, let me tell you that most arguments against the covid vaccines are just bullshit - plain and simpel. There will always be a certain amount of uncertainty regarding anything related to a medical intervention. There is a tiny possibility that in 5 yeas, this vaccine might cause a mass pandemic of autoimmune-disease due to a mechanism we had no idea existed. There is a far greater possibility that it wont cause any greater negative consequences at all. As a frontline medical worker let me tell you my experience. The amount of severe covid cases I have encountered in the last months were almost exclusively from non vaccinated patients. The same goes for long covid cases. More than 60% of my countries population is fully vaccinated - we have NOT encountered massive amounts of people with adverse effects in our emergency rooms. I remember back in March when the schools teachers got their Astrazeneca vaccine, we had a lot of young teachers complaining about headaches. This is not the case with the RNA vaccine. Even if you are young and healthy - its propably better to get the vaccine. I have seen triathletes in their 20's suffering from severe lung damage after a mediocre covid infection. A individual risk assessment is almost impossible due to the incredibly complex nature of the disease. Everyone who tells you otherwise is a liar or has no clue what they are talking about. I remember when I first read about Ivermectine, I got pretty hyped. That night, I went through all the literature and "meta analysis" that were available back then. This dampened my expectations. Mostly poor quality studies and very questionable analyses by institutions with a clear conflict of interest. At this moment, there are about 20 ivermectine trials going on - the newest data we have shows no or just a small positive impact. We will see, but my hope is fading... I hope this helps a bit

Happy to call this city my home!

I am just happy that you did it. Kurt might be newbie, but he is still one of the most open minded guys out there in todays podcastsphere. His questions are usually really on point and joining him was a gerat decision. Thanks a lot Leo!

All his interviews are all over the place. How did you like it? Was it an enjoyable experience for you? Did you expect it to go that way?

Hey friend, great input! I didnt realize Leo was hating on us!

Your liver is fine. ALT (Alanine Transferase) is the main one you are looking at for liver damage assessment. Bilirubin is a secondary marker. Your protein levels are normal as well, that means your liver does its job. Is this the first time your bilirubin was high? Do you have older reports with normal Bilirubin? Iam pretty sure your diagnosis is Gilbert's syndrome, which is super common and NOT dangerous - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilbert's_syndrome 43 umol/L is not super high, so dont worry - A tad higher though and your skin/eyes might turn a little yellow. Here is what you do now: 1. We need a complete blood count report - The other thing that can cause high bilirubin is a haemolytic process and covid can do that in some very rare cases. 2. You need an ultrasound of liver, bile ducts, pancreas & spleen 3. To verify the Gilbert's syndrome diagnosis we need direct and indirect bilirubin measurements 4. A complete iron-status measurement would be nice, just for safety's sake Take care

Disclaimer: This is my favorite essay by Ken Wilber. The aim is NOT to convey any absolute notion of self, but to give a more practical and integral perspective on the ego. I believe that a lot of seekers in todays spiritual community tend misunderstand the transcendetal nature of things. This will ultimately lead to suffering. We try to "get rid" of our egos but thats the wrong approach. We try to see through the illusion but we fail to realize that as long there is a body, there will be some ego. This is how spiritual shadows are born and you can become directly concious of this process. Be aware. Egoless Means More Precisely because the ego, the soul and the Self can all be present simultaneously, we can better understand the real meaning of egolessness, a notion that has caused an inordinate amount of confusion. But egolessness does not mean the absence of a functional self (that’s a psychotic, not a sage); it means that one is no longer exclusively identified with that self. One of the many reasons we have trouble with the notion of egoless is that people want their egoless sages to fulfill all their fantasies of saintly or spiritual, which usually means dead from the neck down, without fleshy wants or desires, gently smiling all the time. All of the things that people typically have trouble with money, food, sex, relationships, desire they want their saints to be without. Egoless sages who are above all that is what people want. Talking heads is what they want. Religion, they believe, will simply get rid of all baser instincts, drives and relationships, and hence they look to religion, not for advice on how to live life with enthusiasm, but on how to avoid it, repress it, deny it, escape it. In other words, the typical person wants the spiritual sage to be less than a person, somehow devoid of all the messy, juicy, complex, pulsating, desiring, urging forces that drive most human beings. We expect our sages to be an absence of all that drives us! All the things that frighten us, confuse us, torment us, confound us: we want our sages to be untouched by them altogether. And that absence, that vacancy, that less than personal, is what we often mean by egoless. But egoless does not mean less than personal, it means more than personal. Not personal minus, but personal plus all the normal personal qualities, plus some transpersonal ones. Think of the great yogis, saints and sages from Moses to Christ to Padmasambhava. They were not feeble-mannered milquetoasts, but fierce movers and shakers from bullwhips in the Temple to subduing entire countries. They rattled the world on its own terms, not in some pie-in-the-sky piety; many of them instigated massive social revolutions that have continued for thousands of years. And they did so not because they avoided the physical, emotional and mental dimensions of humanness and the ego that is their vehicle, but because they engaged them with a drive and intensity that shook the world to its very foundations. No doubt, they were also plugged into the soul (deeper psychic) and spirit (formless Self) the ultimate source of their power but they expressed that power, and gave it concrete results, precisely because they dramatically engaged the lower dimensions through which that power could speak in terms that could be heard by all. These great movers and shakers were not small egos; they were, in the very best sense of the term, big egos, precisely because the ego (the functional vehicle of the gross realm) can and does exist alongside the soul (the vehicle of the subtle) and the Self (vehicle of the causal). To the extent these great teachers moved the gross realm, they did so with their egos, because the ego is the functional vehicle of that realm. They were not, however, identified merely with their egos (that’s a narcissist), they simply found their egos plugged into a radiant Kosmic source. The great yogis, saints and sages accomplished so much precisely because they were not timid little toadies but great big egos, plugged into the dynamic Ground and Goal of the Kosmos itself, plugged into their own higher Self, alive to the pure atman (the pure I–I) that is one with Brahman; they opened their mouths and the world trembled, fell to its knees, and confronted its radiant God. Saint Teresa was a great contemplative? Yes, and Saint Teresa is the only woman ever to have reformed an entire Catholic monastic tradition (think about it). Gautama Buddha shook India to its foundations. Rumi, Plotinus, Bodhidharma, Lady Tsogyal, Lao Tzu, Plato, the Bal Shem Tov these men and women started revolutions in the gross realm that lasted hundreds, sometimes thousands, of years, something neither Marx nor Lenin nor Locke nor Jefferson can yet claim. And they did not do so because they were dead from the neck down. No, they were monumentally, gloriously, divinely big egos, plugged into a deeper psychic, which was plugged straight into God. There is certainly a type of truth to the notion of transcending ego : it doesn’t mean destroy the ego, it means plug it into something bigger. (As Nagarjuna put it, in the relative world, atman is real; in the absolute, neither atman nor anatman is real. Thus, in neither case is anatta a correct description of reality.) The small ego does not evaporate; it remains as the functional center of activity in the conventional realm. As I said, to lose that ego is to become a psychotic, not a sage. Transcending the ego thus actually means to transcend but include the ego in a deeper and higher embrace, first in the soul or deeper psychic, then with the Witness or primordial Self, then with each previous stage taken up, enfolded, included and embraced in the radiance of One Taste. And that means we do not get rid of the small ego, but rather, we inhabit it fully, live it with verve, use it as the necessary vehicle through which higher truths are communicated. Soul and Spirit include body, emotions and mind; they do not erase them. Put bluntly, the ego is not an obstruction to Spirit, but a radiant manifestation of Spirit. All Forms are not other than Emptiness, including the form of the ego. It is not necessary to get rid of the ego, but simply to live it with a certain exuberance. When identification spills out of the ego and into the Kosmos at large, the ego discovers that the individual atman is in fact all of a piece with Brahman. The big Self is indeed no small ego, and thus, to the extent you are stuck in your small ego, a death and transcendence is required. Narcissists are simply people whose egos are not yet big enough to embrace the entire Kosmos, and so they try to be central to the Kosmos instead. But we do not want our sages to have big egos; we do not even want them to display a manifest dimension at all. Anytime a sage displays humanness in regard to money, food, sex, relationships we are shocked, shocked, because we are planning to escape life altogether, not live it, and the sage who lives life offends us. We want out, we want to ascend, we want to escape, and the sage who engages life with gusto, lives it to the hilt, grabs each wave of life and surfs it to the end this deeply, profoundly disturbs us, frightens us, because it means that we, too, might have to engage life, with gusto, on all levels, and not merely escape it in a cloud of luminous ether. We do not want our sages to have bodies, egos, drives, vitality, sex, money, relationships, or life, because those are what habitually torture us, and we want out. We do not want to surf the waves of life, we want the waves to go away. We want vaporware spirituality. The integral sage, the nondual sage, is here to show us otherwise. Known generally as tantric, these sages insist on transcending life by living it. They insist on finding release by engagement, finding nirvana in the midst of samsara, finding total liberation by complete immersion. They enter with awareness the nine rings of hell, for nowhere else are the nine heavens found. Nothing is alien to them, for there is nothing that is not One Taste. Indeed, the whole point is to be fully at home in the body and its desires, the mind and its ideas, the spirit and its light. To embrace them fully, evenly, simultaneously, since all are equally gestures of the One and Only Taste. To inhabit lust and watch it play; to enter ideas and follow their brilliance; to be swallowed by Spirit and awaken to a glory that time forgot to name. Body and mind and spirit, all contained, equally contained, in the ever-present awareness that grounds the entire display. In the stillness of the night, the Goddess whispers. In the brightness of the day, dear God roars. Life pulses, mind imagines, emotions wave, thoughts wander. What are all these but the endless movements of One Taste, forever at play with its own gestures, whispering quietly to all who would listen: is this not you yourself? When the thunder roars, do you not hear your Self? When the lightning cracks, do you not see your Self? When clouds float quietly across the sky, is this not your very own limitless Being, waving back at you? - Ken Wilber

Found this video to be quite interesting and non dogmatic!

There is a lot of dogma and ego in our diet culture. Everyone wants to eat the "perfect" thing at the perfect time, which is insane in my opinion. That said, I really like Michael Pollans approach to this: "Eat real, unprocessed food, not too much, mostly plants." Thats how my diet looks like and I feel perfectly fine.

Leo's jabbering wont make a lot of sense to you unless there is an enormous amount of direct experience supporting your sensemaking. There is better material for a novice. If you want a logical, easy to understand argument on why the materialist paradigm is wrong, there is noone better than Bernardo Kastrup in my opinion. All you just asked is explained by his model - he also goes into detail on why materialistm doesnt make sense at all. Watch this