Dr Palmer Aldritch

THis book opens your eyes to how getting people 'hooked' is about as fundamental to a capitalist society as anything. Think about the gas station. What do they sell besides gas? lotto, garbage food. caffeine, nicotine, alchohol. I' probably overlooking some things here, but the point remains the same. Our society isn't built for people, it's built for profits on the backs of people who shell out the cash, one way or another, for whatever reason. The fine point is that we must be very diligent of our own biases, and seductive addictions. I find the 'news' to be really hard for me. Media companies are desperqte for clicks, likes, and shares. And they frequenly get it it by tapping into our deep seated desire to know about tragedies, violence, wars, and partisanship. It's OK to check he new here and there. But def not multiple times a day. There's a point at which being informed works agains t our priorities it actualize.

Hi All. First, I want to say how grateful I am that I found Actualized. I have been devouring the material, plus a lot of books that are definitely aiding some sort of rise in my consciousness. So, I met my wife 7 years ago, and out love was fairly immediate. I took a gainfully employed job after 5 years of being treated like dirt in graduate school. We bought a house, had a kid. My wife's boss was an awful persona and a bully, and my boss was too. She was alternately lazy and narssicistic, she didn't care a whit for my time, and was frequently a bully. No matter, I was grateful to have finally clawed my way out of shit pay purgatory. Trump gets elected, I lose my job within 6 months because he took 20% of the DOI budget and gave it to the DoD, because the DoD can clearly never have enough money. I was the highest paid contractor, and we were told to not mention the climate in pretty much any situation. I knew I was fuct because a big part of our study was climate. So I lose my job. With a new house. My wife had quit her career because her boss refused to extend her maternity leave. To make matters worse, Trump put a hiring freeze across the DOI so there was really nowhere for me to go. So here we are with a new house, and a new baby, no income, and my obliterated career. We rent the house in New Mexico, and we move to NW Iowa, where Trump is extremely popular, but my wife gets a decent job there.. The universe can be such a cruel bastard. Both my parents, my sister, and my wife's family are all Trump supporters. You can see how utterly enraging all this is for me. I had a long history of meditation, and some spiritual inquiry, but not a ton. But of course, I regress pretty hard at this point. Trump shouldn't have ever been within a million miles of the Presidency, but here I am, with a family of brainwashed yokels, a destroyed career, and a long history of bullying scumbags trampling my face while my life turns to shit. It was too much. After basically losing my mind as a stay at home dad, I eventually get my shit together and decide (for better or worse) to go to medical school. I move BACK into the house in NM, we rent our Iowa house, and my wife gets another job in an even Trumpier place in Snowflake Arizona. All this, during the pandemic. My wife's work situation turns out to be super toxic and shitty, (because, of course), so she quits and moves back into the house with the kids. At this time, I am a 4th year med student. I have a little bit of breathing room after the shit show that was the first 3 years, and now I'm sinking deep into healing myself. Actualized, and a few books have been integral here. I have rekindled my mediation practice. I'm finally starting to get over the trauma of all of this completely unnecessary nonsense. I'm figuring out how to reframe things, how to forgive my family of brainwashed yokels. How to move forward. We have 2 kids. My wife is upset, she's been taking care of the two kids. But not working has been really hard on her, and our marriage. I'm at a point where I want to help her, I feel that she needs to open her mind in order to move forward. She's paralyzed in a state of trauma, retrauma, hypervigillance, and rage. I truly empathize with all that, because I have lived that very thing. It's interesting: I feel that I was on a path and then was derailed from it years ago by trauma, but have started to find a way out of it through elevating my consciousness to be able to accept things as they are, and the people in my family as they are. It has been hard, but I feel that it is starting to pay off. But my wife, she is stuck. Caught in a loop that is closed. I want to help her, I want to pry open her third eye a bit or at least open her mind to possibilities so she can move forward from all of the absurd bullshit that has so deeply affected us and our nuclear family so acutely. So, I have a question. How can I help her to find that path of elevating her consciousness so that she can get out of her rut? I feel that this is extremely important. Both my wife and I grew up in households with mentally ill parents. If there is one thing I want to achieve in life it's to give my two kids better than we got. It's touchy though. You can't make anyone be open minded. Can't make them start to engage. She is pretty rooted in materialism. I'll take any advice on how to proceed here. Another question that I have that's completely off topic. Is there anything to chakras. Clearly, the 3rd eye opening is a real thing. But the others? I'm just curious if they should be taken seriously, and if so, where to I find out what they are about and how to utilze them. All the best, D

In the US, LSD took off into the stratosphere in the early/mid 60s. This happened as the hippie movement was gaining pretty substantial steam, in no small part due to an idiotic war that seemed (and was) unnecessary and was drafting young men left and right to go fight in said war. Timothy Leary came on the scene and was basically growing what had a lot of aspects of what could be described as a cult. Along comes Nixon, who was undeniably a fucking asshole of a person and it scared him. He was scared of hippies and he essentially started what has become the GOP playbook ever since: go after minorities in a drug war. He did this to shore up Confederate white voters in the South and elsewhere, and to shit on the hippies. After that, pretty much everything was banned in one swoop: Acid, shrooms, peyote, and other psychedelics were quickly criminalized, and research into them came to a screeching halt. We have been dealing with the spectre of that piece of shit Nixon ever since, and every other asshole GOPig that has come along since, derping the country into one dumb war after another even after Vietnam was a huge wasteful and tragic fiasco. Reagan came along, yet another piece of shit, who ran even further with Nixon's bullshit, but at least Nixon cared about the environment. Then Bush senior (another dumb war) and a CIA scumbag, then came Bush 2 (still more dumb wars [we will never learn]) and then Trump came along too. Having said all that, psychedelics are not without danger. Some people have died, others have had their brains fried from gigantic doses, and others have done stupid shit. Cracks started to appear in the late 90s when Rick Strassman started to rekindle research into shrooms and DMT, and whispers of people using mescaline and ibogaine to quit heroine addictions. Then the Internet started to really get going with these fringy subjects, and psychedelics have again arisen in popularity. I do think that generally psychellics should be legal, but controlled so that idiot teenagers aren't out eating mushrooms and drag racing every friday. We can do better than the way cannabis has been decriminalized. People need to know risks, need to be taught that drugs need to be taken very seriously, and should be taken in safe, purposeful environments. In case you were wondering, I am definitely biased against Republicans. Nixon turned them into garbage, and they haven't found a low point since.

I don't know. We can measure pretty concretely how many people died from it: well over a million in the USA. That doesn't sound 'sociological' or subjective at all. I Think the right has so saturated the zeitgeist with antivaxxer bullshit that it becomes easy to go from 'can't we all just get along?' with both siderism. No. its pretty clear. getting sick from covid sucks donkey balls, and it killed a lot of people. We are also starting to reckon with long covid. Apparently, it also sucks.

Hello everyone. I'm new here. Surely this has been addressed elsewhere in the forum, but I'm just going to ask it. First, though please excuse my ignorance. I'm a medical student with 2 kids, so the time I have to dedicate to spirituality and growth is limited. Here goes.... Leo states that psychedelics are essentially the best way to attain enlightenment and higher states of consciousness. This rubs me the wrong way, a bit like Midichlorians, for you fellow SW nerds. The theory goes that consciousness is the fundamental stuff of reality. If that is so, then why is it that taking substances (psychedelics) that have particular bonding capacity for certain brain receptors are the road to spiritual enlightenment? This seems profoundly physical, and scores a point for the materialist world view. It would be more intuitive for higher states of consciousness to be more readily reachable with shear will, practice, and meditation. I don't know. I am open to the idea of nonmaterialism, but this paradox hurts my brain and sows doubt. I've had a few psychedelic experiences with shrooms and 2Ci. I've also had a few mystical ESP type experiences that were more or less spontaneous. Any thoughts out there fellow Seekers?