kinesin

@Proserpina I don't know the details of your experiences so feel free to disregard this if it's entirely off base, but I feel as if I can provide some insight based on my own previous experiences of similar states. When your perception of others is stripped of its judgment (I use the word 'judgment' in the sense of categorising and understanding, as opposed to 'judging' in a negative sense), any baggage or generally negative or fearful feelings are also stripped away with it. What's left behind is either absolute neutrality or a sense of love and sympathy for them. There is a common pitfall which an individual becomes at risk of falling into when they reach a state of perceptual non-judgment where they begin seeing the 'raw data' of their surroundings and others, which is that the brain still wants to categorise and label things. The label of 'person' may be stripped away, but that gap leaves room for a new label to arise in its place, and it is in these new labels that many of the more psychosis-related delusions dwell. If the thought arises that "ah... these are not people, they are aliens/gods/reptilians/insectoids/ect", that's a sign a person has not only fallen back down into judgment, but that their old judgment has been replaced with an even more false one. Here's a relevant quote from zen buddhism - "Before I had studied Zen for thirty years, I saw mountains as mountains, and waters as waters. When I arrived at a more intimate knowledge, I came to the point where I saw that mountains are not mountains, and waters are not waters. But now that I have got its very substance I am at rest. For it's just that I see mountains once again as mountains, and waters once again as waters."

@Proserpina Would you mind writing a bit about what you found interesting about it? I have a feeling that if you found it interesting, that means it may have prompted some insight or connections within your own mind which, if you wrote them here, would make a great addition to the thread and possibly enable further insights in others.

@Delis Yes, it is indeed a weird perception to feel. It's both normal and good that you're experiencing it though, as this shows you're developing an ability to observe reality without judgment. A crude analogy which comes to mind for me, to anyone who may struggle to relate to these perceptions, is the feeling you might have just after you've finished looking at porn. During the act your perceptions are being warped by your body's sex hormones, and the moment you finish you look at the very same images which had a hold of you just a few moments before, but all you see now is strange slimy genitalia, distributions of fat and bizarre behaviours.

@Podie45 Ask yourself - what is the reason you find yourself idolising these people? If I myself look back to various people I've idolised over the years, it's been because the character I happened to be at those times saw something to learn or gain from those individuals. Maybe they exemplified a character trait which I myself wanted to develop, or they expressed perspectives which I found myself drawn to. Over time each of these idolisations faded as my priorities and interests continued to shift. You say that you later realised many of those people were bad in some way and that you shouldn't have been idolising them. Have you considered the possibility that you only realised the errors of their ways because you'd allowed yourself to fully explore them? If you had never idolised them at all, would you have reached those same understandings about their failings? Would you have recognised those issues within yourself, and been able to move beyond them? Making mistakes, falling into wrong beliefs and delusions, idolising the wrong people... all of these can be greatly beneficial things. Often it is only by going partway down the wrong path that we become able to recognise the right one. There's nothing wrong with being wrong. The only thing you need to have with you at all times is the willingless and ability to backtrack in your views. The last thing you want is to reach a point where you realise you've followed the wrong person or wrong belief, but that you've gone too far for example by loudly proclaiming to everybody that X thing is the best, or getting a tattoo of Y. To give an analogy - think of hardcore Trump supporters, specifically those who still to this day believe that Trump is the legal president and that Biden is a clone giving fake addresses from a soundstage. Why are those people stuck in that particular hell? Because they walled themselves into it by publicly self-identifying with Trump to such an extent that they can't backtrack without a soul-destroying level of embarassment. Simply don't make those kinds of actions (for example telling all your family that Leo Gura is the new prophet) and you'll be alright.

@Patrick Lynam Remember, Leo is only human. He may be wrong about that - his beliefs on the matter may only be the result of a temporary step in his own spiritual journey. To me it strikes me as a statement which may have been true for Leo himself at the time of that interview - that although he's a spiritual seeker in search of escape from his suffering, he remains trapped within the ego due to fear of what may happen if he untethers from it completely. Imo there's a very practical reason why so many spiritual seekers isolate themselves physically from society and others - it's because interacting in the world as an individual ties you more firmly to the ego. Leo has a known persona, he has a brand, and he doesn't want to go 'off the deep end' and risk losing or altering those things. Do not fall for illusory things like a name, a brand, an image or a sense of authority. Leo is truly no different from us, even if his worldly status lends his words the appearance of credit. Don't feel like you have to force yourself to understand and conform to whatever he says is true.

@BipolarGrowth I don't believe this kind of experience is what OP is referring to. That sounds more like a psychedelic delusion to me. @Delis To clarify, are you referring to a state where other people still look perfectly human and normal to your eyes, but rather your mind is processing their form as if for the first time, giving you the perception that you're looking at something extremely alien? If so, I've had this experience myself. Imo it's caused by a disidentification with the usual categories your brain uses to process the world (such as 'person), so you're left looking at the 'raw data' so to speak.

@Frenk Your concern is understandable considering the nature of the traumatic bad trip you had. I myself went through a short period around 10 years ago when I had some difficult experiences while meditating, and for a while I had to stop entirely because even just reading the word 'meditation' would cause me to panic. It was very similar to the way you describe the feelings you've been having - I'd get the sensation that my sense of reality was about to shatter irretrievably and that would cause me to slam on the brakes. What I did was simply have a break from meditation for a while until my interest naturally brought me back around to it again. I think it was probably around 3 months that I stopped for. Fears fade over time.

@Fran11 Here's something you may find interesting - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_information_theory 'Materialism' isn't as restrictive as it was even just a few years ago, it's expanding. Many self-identified materialists in various fields now consider such things as systems, concepts and behaviours as 'material' because they fit various phenomenological criteria of material behaviour even if they may not be physically interactive or measurable in the traditional sense.

To craft a reason-based argument against this would be a fool's errand. Not everything can be explained by reason, and it's important to be able to recognise the limits of such communications so that one doesn't waste too much energy trying to do a futile thing. As of right now science has no generally agreed-upon mechanism for consciousness, so nobody can show you a proof like they could for the existence of, say, gravity. In my opinion there are 2 primary ways by which a person comes to believe that consciousness precedes the brain - 1: They encounter some mention of the prospect and it catches their interest, and they find their mind open to the possibility. 2: They have a direct experience of brain-independent consciousness. For me personally, I believe that our direct experience of consciousness is a quantum phenomena and that our perceptible sensation of the inward-spatious quality of the mind is actually a dimension reaching all the way down to the quantum level, enabling the brain to interact directly with quantum potentials. In my view, although the brain allows us to process sense data, which gives more complexity to our conscious experience than the majority of conscious entities have access to, the 'observer' which witnesses that sense data is actually a fundamental property which covers the entirety of the universe. You might as well just treat this theory as fanfiction though.

Are you doing the Wim Hof method, by any chance? Cold showers are perfectly safe for your brain. The breathing exercises on the other hand... that's not so certain.

@Vzdoh My guess is that it isn't the aggression which is the real problem here, but rather the context in which the aggression arises. Are we talking about aggression toward a family member or relationship partner? A friend? Strangers in the street? Social media commenters? Aggression isn't necessarily a bad thing, it has its purpose and seeking to suppress it isn't such a practical solution. If you're consistently encountering aggression in a specific circumstance however, a better approach is to reconfigure your habits to minimise or alter your exposure to that circumstance.

Most of them don't have success with relationships actually, and it's the same principle underlying their behaviour which also explains Leo's. Dating coaches are very rarely in committed longterm relationships, infact they're serial daters who have perfected a strategy for the dating process yet weren't necessarily able to deal with the actual relationship stage. If they could, they might be relationship coaches rather than dating coaches. When people give you the answer 'because Leo is human', what they mean is that the entire reason why Leo has learned all this information and spent so much of his life focusing on it is precisely because he struggles with it. Are you familiar with Jung's archetype of the 'wounded healer'? It's a person who has suffered and struggled with something, and in doing so has learned various strategies and methods to deal with it which they then use to help other people through the same issues. The wounded healer isn't necessarily able to put their lessons into practice within their own life - this is also where the stereotype that 'all psychiatrists are kind of crazy' comes from.

@Inliytened1 I've accessed that same meta level many times, I abide in it often. I also abide in subjectivity often. Form is an illusion, cessation of form is an illusion. Form is also reality. Cessation of form is also reality, and an inherently unsatisfactory one - when we experience it in the subjective experience, we mourn the loss of form regardless of what we recognise about its objective nature. Why pretend that once we realise the objective truth, that we've forgotten or lost touch with the subjective one? What are we trying to prove, and to who? We are human beings - regular people with an interest in spirituality who are posting on a forum. When a friend tells a joke, you laugh despite the communication being no-thing. You hug them when you say goodbye, despite the relationship being no-thing. Why pretend that death is any different, and that whenever the subject comes up we have to race one another to assert our belief that it simply doesn't exist, lest we get caught up in believing it does for even a moment? I'm specifically addressing an apparent unwillingness within many comments in this thread to acknowledge that objectivity and subjectivity are on equal footing. To say that death doesn't exist without also acknowledging the fact that it also does, is simply incomplete. @RendHeaven "Before I developed insight, I saw mountains as mountains, and waters as waters. When I arrived at a more intimate knowledge, I came to the point where I saw that mountains are not mountains, and waters are not waters. But now that I have got its very substance I am at rest. For it's just that I see mountains once again as mountains, and waters once again as waters."

Either this thread is full of people who are so spiritually advanced that they genuinely don't believe death exists anymore, or it's full of people who are simply so caught up in regurgitating spiritual teachings that they've become entirely disconnected from subjective reality. How do you feel and react when your closest loved one dies? How do you feel and react when your best friend tells you that their young daughter was just diagnosed with incurable cancer? What do you say when an old man tells you that he misses the way his dog used to wake him up in the morning? Do you think that the 'correct' spiritual path results in you being a person who coldly tells them that their pain is only in their head? Objective and subjective truths exist simultaneously. If you abided in subjectivity your entire life and now simply swapped it wholesale for objectivity, fair enough you've gained some insight into another aspect of existence, but until you regain subjectivity you still only have half of the picture.

@Max_V Yes, it was encountering a video about Ido Portal 6 years ago which got me thinking about movement in this way. Of course originally when I encountered him, I was impressed by the physicality of his feats and part of me wanted to be able to emulate those, but as I continued being aware of movement over time, I realised the truth depth of his teachings with regard to their applicability to so many things.

You're falling into a common trap in your thinking here, whereby you forget that although such statements are true from a certain 'enlightened' perspective, they're also false from a human experiential perspective. When people refer to the death of an individual, you know exactly what they mean. You know exactly what the emotions are which go along with that experience. When a person is at risk of death, you make efforts to save them from it - because in this reality we live and exist within, we care about preserving the illusory forms of ourselves and those around us. Just a few days ago you tried wholeheartedly to protect Connor Murphy from unwittingly destroying his life by reminding him that these illusions are also undeniably real in the subjective, despite their illusory objective nature. When it came to a real situation with a real person in need, you didn't try to argue that death was just an illusion, you reminded him it was real. I can't help but notice a common pattern among spiritual communities where people become so concerned with appearing to embody the teachings that they end up presenting bizarre perspectives where they claim not to be able to understand certain subjective human realities like the existence of death in the realm of form, or the distinction of the self from the environment. It's important that as we awaken, we do not lose touch with the subjective human experience. We have to continue to play along with the act regardless of what we know about the objective truth.

@Leo Gura Or maybe mind is imagined by brain. I'm just poking fun. I see far too many comments on here which consist of nothing more than poetic and profound-sounding single sentence statements, where a person could only reliably infer the intended meaning if they were already at the proper level to understand it... but then they wouldn't gain anything from reading it anyway. Maybe it's just because I'm still new here and haven't yet lost my energy for making longer and more detailed explanations, but I don't believe such short and succinct messages are necessarily helpful to anyone. If we are writing with the intention to educate or provide insight, it makes sense to communicate as clearly and in as detailed a manner as possible, while ensuring the reader always has an understanding of the definitions we intend with our words and being careful to minimize the chance that they'll simply make their own mistaken interpretation of a needlessly vague statement. As a teacher, I gain no satisfaction whatsoever from recieving a confused or unclear reponse to my comments. Some part of my ego may gain a crude sense of 'satisfaction' from the seemingly profound nature of my own statements, but this is ultimately unhelpful to anybody.

You say you want to improve brain power, but your post contains no mention whatsoever of learning. I've boosted my own awareness and intelligence hugely over the past 5 years, so I can give some solid advice. Of course, diet, exercise and proper sleep. You already know all of that. Regular meditation and mindfulness aimed at developing concentration and insight - but you probably know that too considering you're on this forum. As far as learning though, it's not so much a question of just stuffing your brain full of information, but rather if you want to develop intelligence and brain functioning you need to take a systematic approach toward developing yourself a broad, low-level, fine-grain education which will teach you knowledge, methods and insight which are applicable to a wide range of other things. The more fundamental the knowledge you gain, the more widely applicable to many other things it'll be, and this knowledge acts as a portal which can skip you to a more advanced level of understanding in other topics. You need to spend a lot of effort to plan this out and find out what the most fundamental subjects are for you and your needs. Here's a solid example from my own experience. A few years back I got introduced to 'movement' as a topic of interest, and I decided to learn as much as I could about it. I spent a lot of time focusing my awareness on my body, the placement and movement of my limbs, spine and hips, the sense of weight and balance. I realized that I could 'plan out' a specific movement such as a jump or an arm swing by consciously recognising the starting, mid and end position of the movement in order to maximise the efficiency of it. What did this practice lead to? Well, I suddenly found myself able to dance. I found myself able to practice perfect form in exercises naturally without guidance, and to develop my own exercises. I could throw further, run and swim better, jump higher and more gracefully. I had an intuitive high-level understanding of yoga. I'm now able to play the piano by 'dancing' my fingers across the keys in coordinated patterns. These are just a few of the many benefits I've noticed, all of which came as a result of developing a core focus on a single specific thing. Find the right fundamental skill or perspective and a whole new world of brain functioning will open up to you.

@Holygrail That information isn't known for sure. Personally however I've come to believe that the quantum field exists below the base level of 'material', and that at that level there's no longer any concepts of zooming in or anything else relating to the norms of material space. I believe that at level, quantum potentials exist not as physical systems but pure informational possibilities which are the true drivers behind physical occurrences at the higher levels. Imo this quantum field is, in effect, the realm of spirit which guides and determines the properties of everything above it.

@Dodo It sounds to me like that dream represents some genuine new insights being formed in your mind. In particular the recognition that you were the whole dream, not just your 'self' within it. From that perspective, which part of yourself do you think the vicious monster may have represented, and what might its motivations have been in chasing you? Here's a tip I've learned over the years - it's possible to revisit a dream during wakefulness in order to analyse it further. If you close your eyes and conjur a mental image from the dream, you can continue to interact with it in your imagination, ask questions of the characters, further investigate certain aspects etc.

@Holygrail To clarify the question - what are you zooming in to? What exactly do you mean by 'differences'?

@Flowerfaeiry The tension in the neck can also be caused by good old fashioned anxiety. I've had it many times. Infact all of the negative symptoms OP described are things I've experienced while 100% sober, so I have to disagree with the @Javfly33's suggestion that it's impossible to have a 'bad trip' below a certain dose threshold. Sure below a certain dosage the bad experience may lose its overtly psychedelic edge, but this doesn't mean a negative experience can't happen.

Yep, this is totally normal and precisely the reason why set and setting is so important, but you already know that. Expect for a general sense of uneasiness and possibly some mild 'flashbacks' to remain for a while, but they'll go away over time. Congrats on making it through the worst of it, though.

@Growly If you commit to this practice and do it regularly, your anxiety symptoms will reduce. I myself had severe anxiety pretty much all of my life (I'm in my mid-30s now), tension, digestive issues, shaking, stammering, panic attacks etc etc. My anxiety eventually got so bad that I started getting such piercing headaches and nosebleeds that I was convinced I must be having brain aneurisms or something, and then I eventually had a complete nervous breakdown which left me with absolutely 0 tolerance for any stress or anxiety whatsoever, like a newborn baby. It was in the wake of the breakdown that I realized firsthand how anxiety is rooted in nervous energy (the breakdown felt very literally as if I'd blown a fuse) and then I began researching the nervous system and found this knowledge. It's now been 2 years since I learned all this, and I'm now in complete control over my body's functioning. Now I can even raise and lower my own heartrate at will, just by controlling my breathing. As for nootropics - generally no. If you get interested in nootropics, you'll inevitably find yourself continuously reading about new compounds and wondering if you should give them a try. You'll find many new and exciting compounds, but there won't be any real research available yet so you'll be stuck basing your decision to take them on forum posts you read. Many of them will turn out to be neurotoxic or otherwise dangerous over time. Eventually you'll realise that many people in the nootropic community are simply desperate for solutions to their problems and would be better off using the methods I've outlined. If you want a tried and tested nootropic which helps in moderate doses, try caffeine if you don't already consume it. Only consume caffeine before 12pm or so though - it has a half-life of 5 hours meaning if you drink it at 2pm then at 12am you'll still have a quarter of it in your system, and that'll inhibit your sleep leading to further anxiety. Remember what I said about keeping the parasympathetic and sympathetic systems in balance. Exercise, sleep and meditation are really the best nootropics around - look into their beneficial effects on brain functioning and you'll find they far outweigh the promise of any chemical nootropic.

Are the screen and the movie the same thing? Are the car and the journey the same thing? No, the brain and the mind are not the same thing. The brain is a biological machine which enables the functioning of the mind. The brain is the physical mushy thing inside your head, while your mind is the 'inner experience' inside your head.