impulse9

That's pretty amazing. Never forget that animals are our brothers and sisters.

Get into regular and serious meditation practice. While you're at it, you can try breathing exercises as well, I highly recommend the Wim Hof method, it has worked wonders for me.

The word water will not quench your thirst. Words are useful as guides, but when you confuse them for truth you will be deluding yourself into a false sense of wisdom.

That's a more profound realization than you might... well, realize. There's a concept in Castaneda's books called "stopping the world", the implication being that your thoughts are the only force that keeps the world going. "We talk to ourselves incessantly about our world. In fact we maintain our world with our internal talk. And whenever we finish talking to ourselves about ourselves and our world, the world is always as it should be. We renew it, we rekindle it with life, we uphold it with our internal talk. Not only that, but we also choose our paths as we talk to ourselves. Thus we repeat the same choices over and over until the day we die, because we keep on repeating the same internal talk over and over until the day we die. A warrior is aware of this and strives to stop his internal talk." -from "A Separate Reality"

90% of the work is going to be a grind. It's worth it for that 10% that isn't.

You really can't be a good programmer unless you thoroughly enjoy the craft. Programming is one of those things where you can't work for 8 hours and go home and ignore it. To create proper solutions you'll be deeply invested in your work to the point where it will consume your entire life. I started programming 20 years ago and have been doing it professionally for nearly 15 years, and I can tell you from experience that there's two kinds of people, those who can do programming and those who can't, and I don't really know why. If you can love code, it's for you. If you can't, you should probably find something else to do, something you will enjoy.

Depends on the job, but for technical jobs, all I care about is if you're skilled, resourceful, and creative - in that order.

It helps remove accumulated negative patterns from your body and your mind, be they in the form of physical toxins or depressing thoughts.

What more do you need, health isn't enough? (Obviously fasting has been used as a spiritual tool since time immemorial, but that shouldn't be your main spiritual practice. Your main practice should always be meditation.)

It's a good way to cleanse your body, and a healthy mind needs a healthy body.

"Let's suppose one day while you were very, very high on LSD, you looked into a filthy ashtray and you saw the beatific vision. Which is, of course, the case, wherever you look while your eyes are open you will see the face of God. Then, you come out of your ecstasy with the dirty ashtray, and say to everybody, "Here it is." Now, there is a possibility, an extraordinarily skillful painter, or even photographer, of presenting the dirty ashtray in a way so that everybody else will see almost what you saw in it. But, you will have to have a technique which will translate every grain of ash into a jewel. Because that's what you actually saw. But that requires mastery of an art. And I'm afraid people think that all it's necessary to do is.. just throw out any old thing, because under that transformed state of consciousness, any old thing is the works.. But nobody else can see it if they haven't shared that point of view" -Alan Watts

Most psychedelics are the least physiologically harmful substance you could ever take. You should worry more about the mental states they will open to you and the hidden pathways in your psyche they will unlock.

RIP

I like to call it the guiding principle.

You are twisting your mind by trying to apply logic to what only the heart can understand. Look at the sky, look at the trees, look at the river, feel the wind on your skin, and enjoy. That's the highest explanation of what life is, everything else is mind chatter that will drive you mad.

No two psychedelic trips are alike, more likely than not the entheogen has lessons for you, and that's why it showed you what it did.

AlphaGo Zero taught itself Go by playing against itself. It's now the most powerful Go player in the world. Self-reference is amazingly powerful.

Because gender and sexuality are your spiritual clothes, and psychedelics like to strip you naked.

Enjoy it.

Why not hedonism? Because the search for pleasure will evolve into searching for more, and more, and more of that external thing you perceive to be pleasurable until the search for pleasure imperceptibly, gradually, subtly but surely, turns into the search for pain, and you will gradually require more and more and more of it because that's the only thing that will satisfy you. Having your internal state of being depend on something external is your first clue as to why it's not wise to live hedonistically. Since you browse these forums presumably you seek wisdom, and you shall find none in search for pleasure. But since it's your life, you're ultimately the one who will make the decision as the final authority on that matter is yours and yours alone. If you want to live hedonistically, you have every right to do so. You will, however, never find that which you seek in the search for pleasure alone.

Buddhism. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Śūnyatā

By lowering your inhibitions and letting your subconscious out. "In vino veritas" isn't just a cute saying. Not that I recommend alcohol for spiritual purpose, but think about how alcohol is literally called "spirit" - ever wonder why? In any case, don't under-estimate alcohol. It's a very dangerous, addictive drug with nasty side-effects.

Trust me when I say quitting smoking is going to be the best thing you ever did in your entire life. It's worth the week or two of discomfort. So, so worth.

On a mushroom trip about a decade ago I had a very, very distinct and undeniable feeling that everything that I know and experience, is nothing more than an infinitely thin sheet of paper. This paper is wedged right between the inner and the outer world, so on the inner side all your emotions and thoughts manifest, and on the outer side all the physical things exist. And you're nothing more than the bridge between the two.

Duality and non-duality are all words, symbols, mouth noises. The concepts we invent fall far short from the reality they are supposed to be describing.