outlandish

It's supposed to be a really potent anti-carcinogen. I can't remember the details offhand, but it's good stuff, and it tastes nice too. Never heard that it's good for hard-ons lol.

Holy shit. I remember there was a news story where it was announced he was infected, and he had said that he didn't have much hope to survive. I thought he was being hyperbolic.

I haven't been following things that closely, but it seemed to me pretty obvious that he didn't have much hope of winning the campaign, so I expect he simply recognized this and dropped out. It's really expensive to run a campaign, and probably very tiring, so if there's 0% chance of winning, why proceed? I don't think it needs a complex explanation (but who knows, there easily could be more going on here) I didn't realize he was gay until quite a ways into this dem race. I think that's pretty cool that we live in a society now where his openly homosexual orientation wasn't the main headline, it was just a secondary fact. Things have come a long way over the last couple of decades on that front.

Sometimes things need to get worse before they can get better. Do you think this could be one of those situations? When I began meditating, I had heightened social anxiety because of the increased awareness. But looking back I can see how this was a necessary growth period. It helped me overcome some artifice and pretence I was holding, which was creating less authentic interactions. The increased awareness helped me notice these things, which was in itself awkward, but in the long run I was able to melt it away and now have less social anxiety and more authentic connections. I'm not sure how much this anecdote would apply to your situation so take what you will.

I was going to try to explain my perspective on Alan Watt's perspective on self improvement, but then I remembered his words will speak it better:

Wait a second here... You mean to tell me that women prefer attractive men? ? /s

Exactly. Extreme caution with this one. Of course you have to weigh the risk of a heart attack against the risk of a life-destroying opioid addiction.

Great answer from @Serotoninluv I know peripherally about a study that is underway looking at using mushrooms as a treatment for opioid addiction. It sounds promising, but the jury is out. Ibogaine/Iboga treatment has been very effective for some people, but it carries cardiac risks and should be conducted under careful medical supervision. Ibogaine is a tryptamine somewhat related structurally to the drug in magic mushrooms. The hope is that mushrooms will have a lot of the benefit with a lot less of the risk of iboga.

Yes, magic mushrooms are well-suited to being used for spiritual development. You don't need any of the other ones you mentioned really, mushrooms have a lot to offer. You'll probably end up with access to the other ones you're curious about eventually. They aren't mandatory by any means. ... although they're really great and you should check them out when you get the chance

Nice observation. That makes sense since the oils in the coconut should be able to dissolve the freebase oil. You'd probably be able to use any vegetable oil for this, but I don't know how absorbable the different oils would be through your colon. I think with the vinegar, if you get the ratios perfect, it should not sting because it will have a neutral pH. But it would be easy to undershoot or overshoot the amount of vinegar to use, which will make either a basic or acidic pH, accordingly. If you get it just right, all of the freebase and all of the vinegar will react, rendering just neutral 5-MeO-DMT (acetate salt I believe) dissolved in water. There will be no more freebase or vinegar left.

@Lynnel Yes I definitely agree with what @TrynaBeTurquoise - this is just my conjecture and fuzzy idea based on casual observation, not to be taken as hard fact. I mention my basis above, but to expand: there was a big bump in caffeine consumption during the Western Enlightenment period - it happened at the same time as coffee began to spread around Europe, and tea consumption increased because of the growth of trade and the spread of ideas. Coffeehouses became social focal points where new philosophy was discussed. Less beer + wine. In travelling the world, I notice that places that consume a lot of caffeine tend to gravitate more to the orange - you see a lot more secularism, commerce, liberalism Caffeine tends to stimulate alert, rational, analytical thought in myself, and I think others might agree I notice that green often discourages caffeine consumption, saying it lowers vibration and so on (which it would from their perspective, if it made people more "orange") Mathematicians sometimes joke about their job being turning coffee into mathematical proofs, universities and coffee go hand-in-hand All this ties into the orange resonance part. The yellow part is more vague, but I think there's something to it as well. Tea is one of the few drugs that's sanctioned in buddhist contemplative practices. In Chinese culture you often hear people talk about good quality tea having a lot of chi, and you can hear perfectly rational adults talk about feeling the chi energy of the tea flowing in their bodies. In spiral dynamics, every second stage sits on top of the one below/above it, so there is often a lot of commonality between the pars. So in many ways blue, green and turquoise are related, and likewise red, orange, yellow are related. I see caffeine as a drug that lights of the red-orange-yellow series, with emphasis on the orange, but also a some yellow and probably less red (but a bit of that too - just thing of the angry selfish anxiety that can be easily provoked when someone has too much coffee!). .. but yeah, just sharing ideas. Like @TrynaBeTurquoise said, spiral dynamics is just a model, there's way more variation on an individual basis anyways. It's an interesting lens to look through.

@steenadrianmr I don't think smoking crack would be like that at all, but I can verify that it's what a very large dose of AL-LAD can be like

Sometimes you need something a bit more extreme to turn your mind inside-out. Enter: Little Snake

Please reach out if you're considering suicide. ❤️

Good way of putting it @TrynaBeTurquoise! I like this discussion because you extended from a thought I had in a way that I didn't think about. I guess that's what makes this forum interesting. BTW above I meant to say "today you can see that heavy caffeine consuming cultures tend to reside in stage orange" not blue, although you could probably say they usually have pretty strong blue too.

This movie looks really well done: Journeys to the Edge of Consciousness Lorenzo did a great interview with it's creator on his Psychedelic Salon podcast. Looking forward to checking this movie out, please pipe in if you've seen it!

In my opinion, caffeine does subtly increase consciousness, but not in the way that psychedelics do at all. Caffeine amplifies Orange resonance within Spiral Dynamics, and to a lesser extent Yellow. It de-resonates Blue and Green. So it can potentiate the transition from Blue to Orange because the wakefulness and alertness that it promotes is conducive to analytical/rational thought. It helps "wake up" from the slumber of dogmatic thinking and begin stimulating rational investigation. Caffeine powered the renaissance in Europe, and today you can see that heavy caffeine consuming cultures tend to reside in stage blue orange. Tea is an important component of Zen. In East Asia tea is often attributed mystical properties. Psychedelics are more potent for the transition to Tier 2. @See that's a good thing to remember - really good idea to keep caffeine consumption to the early part of the day!

+1 @Globalcollective there is a lot of poisonous shit out there. There is probably a time and a place for these things, when someone needs the self-empowerment that these can bring, but I think all too often this stuff gets taken too far, too literally, and becomes self-defeating and counter productive.

You shouldn't dive in at 60mg (or even 50-55mg for that matter) on your first trial. I don't know your history, so maybe it isn't your first trial, but you definitely need to work up to the large dose incrementally to learn your own sensitivity to the material. People can have wildly different sensitivity to these compounds. Also, it's useful to learn to navigate the experience to some extent by getting some practice at lower doses first.

@nowimhere nice one. I love how JR qualified his "bro psychology" re meat eating, cracked me up. Rashad Evans has a nice chill presence, seems like a peaceful dude.

Smaller doses are more suited to catalyzing the answers to concrete and specific life questions. Larger doses of psychedelics will tend to smash the details to oblivion and make them seem totally irrelevant.

It wont matter, as Leo said. In case 1) you are actually converting the freebase into the salt (I guess you'd call it the citrate), which will have functionally identical properties to the oxalate. It's no longer freebase in 1)

Yes you don't have to go to college, lots of people make it work. You can learn the specific skills and craft of programming on your own outside of college relatively quickly. I'm all for people doing it on their own, especially with tuition fees really high in a lot of areas. It's criminal how the university system leaves students so deeply in debt. An undergrad in compsci at a decent school will give you a much deeper and broader education beyond the surface level skills, but the price can be high. If it's boot camp vs undergrad like @Chumbimba asked, I'd go for the undergrad every time. Bootcamps appeal to the quick-fix appetite and tend to smell scammy. I doubt that HR in any company would care if you completed a boot camp, but they might be helpful for getting you off the ground and giving you a taste, perhaps giving you that initial push you need to become self-taught. I think @electroBeam is suggesting skipping both and just learn on your own. If you have the discipline for it, it's a great path because you can curate your own education, and come out of it debt-free.

No, it says that the holder of said degree was able jump through all the hoops erected for that degree. Doesn't mean anything fundamentally about you personally, and I hope no one here would judge someone on the basis of what degree they hold, but don't underestimate the value society places on credentials.

Sure, you can learn it all online if you are determined and are clever enough to weed out the good from the bad, and identify what are these fundamentals that are truly important. And then have the self-discipline to do it all on your own and stay focused. There are no secrets bestowed upon you in college. College is a curated experience of this. Wise people have figured out a programme that will take you step by step to a high level, and teach you the important bits in the correct order so that it all makes sense. It's also a commitment to a work-plan, which most people lack the self-motivation to do without that external motivation. 100% though - if you're very determined, savvy, and self-disciplined you can do it without college. Even if you do go to college you'll still need to be disciplined and curious enough to continue learning after you graduate. College isn't cheap either, so it could be worth evaluating if you have what it takes to be self-taught. Worth remembering also the societal prestige that comes with the piece of paper that says you have the degree. For better or worse, it's for real.