CosmicExplorer

Hardcore definition of enlightenment: someone who eliminated all suffering and/or Duhkha* * Definition of suffering - "Suffering, or pain in a broad sense, may be an experience of unpleasantness or aversion, possibly associated with the perception of harm or threat of harm in an individual" What Duḥkha means according to Wiki: "Duḥkha is a term found in the Upanishads and Buddhist texts, meaning anything that is "uneasy, uncomfortable, unpleasant, difficult, causing pain or sadness" That person can endure professional torture for an indefinite time with no suffering, aversion. He/she can easily sit for 16 or more hours meditating without back support, dullness, or distraction. Whether there's anybody like that in the world or has ever been is questionable, whether one can stay alive for a prolonged period in that state is also questionable. Soft definition of enlightenment: like you said "A person who's ordinary experience is without the separateness of I and external world." so someone who doesn't have the felt "center to the experience" that is the self, typically felt in the head

Strong and long enough pain, mental or physical, for which there's no remedy to, and you start to prefer not being alive.

If people are driving cars in a dream, does that mean there must be individual humans with different conscious experiences, or you're just dreaming them up/imagining them? You haven't gotten deep enough on psychedelics

3-cmc 3-mmc mephedrone type of drugs But they're probably also neurotoxic like MDMA Less euphoric but safer - DXM

Typical "normie" interactions with humans are not interesting to me at all, so if I have to be social it drains me and feels like a job. Just being myself doesn't work well, probably because i'm somewhat neurodivergent. As for the need for human interaction, I suspect I'm on a very end of normal distribution, I can not have any social interaction for months and it doesn't bother me at all.

I also have to strongly disagree here with Leo. I'm very prone to nausea in general, even sober. And I can easly vomit on drugs when not eating anything for 12 hours previously, even. That's also part of the reason why I don't want to do higher doses of any tryptamines, I always get very strong nausea no matter if I've just eaten something or been fasting for 12+h, and it destroys my trips and feels like shit. Nothing helps for that kind of nausea too, ginger extract does absolutley nothing

Weed has always gave me anxiety, I don't like it. Neither it numbs away my pains, it has never helped me with pain. Weird how different drugs work for different people. In terms of hedonic/painkilling/feel good effect for me: Opioids>mephedrone>benzos>MDMA>GHB>alcohol>amphetamine>DXM>caffeine>LSD(low dose)>weed>nicotine>DPH But it also depends on my current mood to some degree, it's not as straightfoward

That would be very interesting

@DianaFr By brain activity I mean brain metabolism, measured by functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), electroencephalography (EEG), or magnetoencephalography (MEG), in healthy humans (or rats), compared to placebo. You're missing a point, those details don't matter in the context of what I was saying: "Anesthetic drugs increase brain activity. Metabolically the brain under anesthesia is further away from a state in which the dead brain is than in a normal sober waking state, and the brain in a normal sober waking state is further away from the dead brain than the brain under LSD, psilocybin or DMT" What matters for my claim is whether or not the overall brain metabolism is increased, decreased, or stays the same under psychedelics (and anesthesia) vs placebo. In a dead brain, metabolism ceases. No. It means a lot for the sake of discussing metaphysics. According to materialism, consciousness is brain activity (a totally inactive brain is, after all, a dead and unconscious brain under materialism) https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1119598109 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15179026/ (in rats) "Human EEG studies with serotonergic psychedelics consistently report a broadband spectral power decrease (delta to gamma) most pronounced within the alpha band (8–12 Hz) and a decrease in functional connectivity and integrity of networks [21,22,23,24,25,26]. On the other hand, increases in higher frequencies (gamma oscillations, 30 Hz and above) have been also described [27,28,29]; however, the effects are hard to interpret due to typical contamination related to increased tension of the facial muscles. MEG, in contrast to EEG, is devoid of this contamination [30], and on the contrary shows a decrease in oscillations within the gamma range [31]." https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1518377113 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15179026/ https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-51974-4 Anesthesia: https://www.cell.com/neuron/fulltext/S0896-6273(24)00446-X?_returnURL=https%3A%2F%2Flinkinghub.elsevier.com%2Fretrieve%2Fpii%2FS089662732400446X%3Fshowall%3Dtrue

If you post study directly and say psychedelics decrease brain activity, it's the same reaction This is precisely the reason why this time I thought it would be better to post the link to his blog post which explains it in more detail. The brain connectivity in psychedelic studies is notoriously misinterpreted as the brain activity/metabolism of the brain increasing. You can have more brain activity and less connectivity and vice versa. "what the paper shows is that, although brain activity, as measured with MEG, has decreased, the activity that remains is more synchronized across brain regions"

Every time I comment anything about psychedelics decreasing brain activity/metabolism, I get downvoted into oblivion. They either don't even read the studies or misinterpret them. There's never a valid critique, either straight up denial or ad hominem type of argument. https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/1e70w9g/comment/ldx3a2p/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button If you mention to them for example that the hypothesis "other people exist beyond my mind" is unfalsifiable, they'll immediately label you as crazy. It's shocking that people who pride themselves on being scientific, logical, and rational, are cherry-picking when and how much they want to be scientific, and are in full denial about it. I mean I guess water is wet and what did I even expect, but still I naively thought they were not as dogmatic. I considered making a post on askscience or some similar subreddit explaining my frustration but realized that there's no point. There's no discussion with them. If it potentially threatens their preconceived notions, they'll deny, downvote you, and call you unscientific (oh irony).

I've seen my friend (pretty shy/insecure personality, not enlightened at all, never meditated) taking 7g of potent dried shrooms and almost nothing happened. He was unsure if he was feeling anything from it or it was a placebo. Psychedelics don't work on some people and it means nothing. Also, you never know how much actual LSD was in 2.5 tabs he took. Frank claims he eradicated all aversion but still suffers from pain which doesn't make sense. You need an ego to have a conversation so that's already contradictory to me. Oh and btw psychedelics certainly work on Daniel Ingram and Culadasa so...

OK, but suffering associated with that is maybe like max 35% of total human suffering. There's still a shit load of human/animal mental/physical suffering that only perhaps fentanyl/heroin can put a big dent in and it doesn't work long-term due to tolerance/withdrawal.

"The Far Out Initiative is a Public Benefit Biotechnology Company focused on developing technological solutions to the problem of involuntary suffering in human and non-human animals" "In 2019, scientists discovered a woman with a new form of congenital pain insensitivity that left her virtually immune not only to physical pain but to psychological pain as well. Unlike other forms of congenital pain insensitivity, her condition left her blissfully unaffected by fear, sadness, anger, anxiety, and grief" "On May 24th, 2023, University College London released its landmark paper investigating the molecular basis of this strange new pain insensitivity syndrome titled "Molecular Basis of FAAH-Out Associated Pain Insensitivity," in which it was revealed that this "Feel Good Syndrome" was caused by two simple genetic mutations affecting the FAAH" "This "Feel Good Syndrome" could be replicated using gene editing technologies like CRISPR in humans and livestock animals" That would be insane if they can do that. If we genetically engineer cows, chickens... With 10x the anandamide levels, I think it's very moral thing to do. The amount of suffering in the world that can potentialy be prevented by that mutation is insane. https://faroutinitiative.com/

Almost all reasons for emotional pain and emotions are arbitrary. The stronger the mental illness, the more it applies, but it also applies to completely average and normal people. Let me explain what I mean by that What I mean by that is let's say you feel irritated by something, feel guilt about something, or angry about something, or feel lonely, or anxious about something. Or even positive states like you somehow feel hopeful, energetic, and are in a generally good mood, problems seem very manageable, having a "good day". And in the moment it really feels like you feel guilt because of situation X, but actually, you're just in a guilty mood/lens, and in a guilty mood/lens that you're having right now, tends to skew everything towards feeling guilty about it. If you would be in a different mood, the exact same thoughts would not cause you to feel like that. Reckful talks about the same phenomena here: When he's depressed, it seems like he is depressed because he's thinking that everything has no purpose, but it turns out that it's not the reason because when his lens/mood switches to normal or mania, he doesn't mind thinking that everything has no purpose, he still feels happy even when thinking like that. I've discovered exactly the same thing by doing many experiments on myself. I would be feeling intense anxiety/guilt/anger because seemingly Y reason at the moment, I'd be like "ok let's see, maybe it's truly a reason why I feel like that" and I would set an alarm in 8 days on my phone to check how I would be feeling about that exact Y reason. And 8 days later my phone notification appears, so I check and try to bring exactly the same thoughts that seemingly caused me that feeling, and pretty much every single time it no longer felt like that at all, the same set of information I'm bringing to mind and yet completely different feeling about it results from it. If Reckful would feel depressed because of the thought "everything has no purpose" or I because of thought XYZ, then bringing that thought to mind would result in feeling depressed, no matter how we currently feel, but it's not. The easiest way to demonstrate that to somebody would be to give them bipolar disorder and make them do the experiments I mentioned. But It also applies to people without mental illness, in fact, the line between mental illness and not mental illness is arbitrary (I'm absolutely not saying that depression isn't real or smth, just that mood fluctuates in cycles, in normal people too, just to a much much lesser degree) "normal" people also have something like bipolar just only a tiny micro version of it, and most probably don't even notice that their mood cyclicly change. It's really surprising to me that even many therapists and psychiatrists believe that thoughts create mood. When actually it's a reverse causality - mood have a tendency to cause certain thoughts. I don't know how common that realization is, I mean I don't think I would've ever discovered that if not for mental illness. I understand how it can be hard to realize it requires a certain mindfulness and doing experiments on yourself actually trying to make your mood bad when having a good mood (which is a weird thing to do lol) and vice versa