Staples

You have a few options; 1. Get out of the pool, 2. Swim to the bottom of the pool, look for pockets of air. Or my favourite: 3. Play with the shit, smear it on the walls and laugh. Don't take your bathing too seriously. These are not entirely 'joke answers'. From a symbolic perspective, those are some classic ways people have dealt with your issue (well, not so successfully with #2, Lol). You're clearly productive enough to be happy when things are going your way. But when you lose sight of that you fall back into indulgence. Classic ego backlash. I know exactly what you're talking about, I'm there more than I'd like to admit. Leo has a great technique for dealing with ego backlashes (at least that's what I use it for). You can find it here.

All at once, 10 sceptics get up and leave this forum thinking we're some kind of cult now. Lol.

No distinctions.

We're all just apes playing with keyboards. Not too worrying I presume?

If you stick to shorter sessions I think you will be fine. I have at least a family history of schizophrenia too and it hasn't been a problem for tripping or this exercise. Obviously that might not hold true for you, but the breathing is not as intense as psychedelics and you can stop practing whenever you like if you get worried. You will be okay, start at 10 minutes. Then do 20, then do 30. If you are comfortable with 30, then go longer and be extra careful around the hour + mark like Leo mentioned. The breathing is a controllable technique, unlike psychedelics, I think it will be good for you.

Yep. But if you feel yourself wanting to move your hands around either hold them still or finish the session. You almost certainly wont lose control and hurt yourself.

Yo this method is legit. Feel very concious after that. Pay attention, shit gets weird towards the end of this post. I'm like 5 minutes fresh out of my first session. Played some tribal drumming and practed for 30 minutes. For the first few minutes nothing happened, which is perfect for practicing the method so that you can keep the rhythm going. Then my conciousness began to focus, a little bit of tingling in the hands. Nothing out of the ordinary. This built up gradually over the course of 15 minutes, i was very focused, but struggled to maintain a steady rhythm breathing. At around the 20 minute mark, my torso and upper back started convulsing. I was moving around like I was possessed, it was concious, I was controlling the movement, but I was compelled to do it in a way i cant fully describe. It wasn't harsh movements, ver comfortable, but significant. It was like i had too much energy and needed to release it. That stopped after a few minutes, then i felt fibration in my right cheek. Intense. It spread to my nose and mouth. Then my whole head, i tried moving the vibration around my body, and i could conciously control it! What the fuck?! Eventually it settled on my chest, upper back and head and became more and more intense. I came to realise that it was real movement, not just a feeling. I was actually vibrating. If you were looking at me, it wouldnt have been noticable, it was very small vibrations, like on the atomic level, but very intense. It felt like every wave of vibration was like a frame of the universe, just like how tvs run at 25 frames per second, my body felt like it ran at 300 frames per second. I did this right before bed, might experience some weird dreams. Cant wait to find out!

@Star Net Disney's Tarzan. It is all about growing from being a boy into a man. His relationship with his gorilla mother and father and Jane is very symbolic.

He's technically right, in that Jihad is about a struggle with yourself and how Islam was founded as a pointer to the truth. The problem is that 99.99999% of Muslims do not see it that way. In the same way, 99.99999% of Christians do not see their faith properly either. They hold an ideology, not the truth, no matter how much they believe their ideology to be the truth. Recently, I've been noticing that Leo is trying to apply the absolute to the limited perspective of the human form, I don't think it will work as well as expected. Just as a hand cannot grasp itself, the grasping is not the hand either (even though the grasp contains the hand). The truth is the truth but it is not complete when bounded in a human form, is that not why Mahasamaddhi exists? So, what does the absolute really have to do with the current iteration of Islam? Very little.

Yep. Personality results change all the time. I've had a different result every time I took the Myers Briggs, and I've done it four times. The results that it gives you have only a little bit more value than your horoscope. After all, when was the last time anyone took a personality test and felt an immediate shift in the quality of their life? Probably never.

You may have heard about how Einstein discovered his theory of general relativity and his other discoveries through thought experiments. All of his greatest discoveries were pulled out of his thought experiments. Would you call this a kind of siddhi? Could it be practiced and developed like one? Does this phenomena already have a name?

@Nahm Oops, meant to post this link http://www.businessinsider.com/5-of-albert-einsteins-thought-experiments-that-revolutionized-science-2016-7//?r=AU&IR=T/#imagine-youre-chasing-a-beam-of-a-light-1

@NoSelfSelf Here's a good one.

Look into Social Science. That's a fun rabbit hole. But you ask about experiences, the best thing to do would be to go to the old folks home and ask if you can interview them. You have some real eye-opening experiences doing that.

@Vingger I think he's talking about his experiencing physical death trip report.

Run headfirst into discomfort. All discomfort. That being said, don't do stuff that's obviously stupid.

Communism on paper sounds great. But it is not feasible. It's actually a very high consciousness system, it is so advanced I don't think we'll be able to achieve a healthy communist system with our current cultural climate at all. It also needs some work, communism is based on a victim narrative. That needs to go. Sharing the means of production and eliminating privately owned property would probably require a fully enlightened society. Marx and the rest of his merry band are so possessed by their ideological vision that they couldn't see society as a whole was not ready for it. I'm not in favour of communism, at least in our time. I think a shift will occur when we become so productive unemployment for a large majority becomes inevitable. Jobs being replaced by machines will slowly phase out lots of professions. And if computers ever learn how to write their own code, you can say goodbye to every programmer ever. At that point, we'll be forced to redistribute wealth to those who no longer have employable skills just so they survive. The only way to avoid that future is to continue to invest in tech. We'll need to create jobs at the same rate they get phased out. How we do that is beyond little old me.

I see a lot of mask-wearing going on around here. People write about their enlightenment experience one day then terrorize the serious emotional problems section the next. I'm guilty of doing similar things. I think it is a product of people doing some of the things you mentioned. Too much forum browsing and video watching and not enough contemplating. For as much as we preach about self-deception, we fall into that trap all the time.

@BjarkeT You are relentless. Saying "if we are talking about iq and not intelligence how come intelligence be a part of iqs name: Intelligence quotient" is like saying "If humans came from monkeys why do we still have monkeys?". IQ tests are designed to assess human intelligence. Exactly. Assessing something is like drawing a portrait of a face. The drawing is not the face, the drawing is just lines of graphite on paper that resemble a face when looked at as a whole. Do you see?

@BjarkeT Once again, IQ is not a holistic approach to intelligence. Intelligence, in its entirety, is immeasurable. We are talking about IQ, not intelligence, make that distinction. Perhaps. Intelligence as a whole leaves plenty of room for nuance. But since we are talking about IQ, maybe you should look at how we actually calculate IQ. Your age is literally a factor. IQ = (Mental Age x 100) / Chronological Age I never said it was fixed. I said we don't know of any really good ways to INCREASE it for an individual. You can certainly lower it. A good hit to the head with a brick or getting drunk enough is obviously going to affect your IQ. Intelligence, holistically, is immeasurable. So saying it can be increased only half makes sense. You see? We've been arguing from two different sets of assumptions this whole time.

@BjarkeT It seems we aren't even talking about the same thing anymore. The OP asked how we can increase IQ. You didn't answer that. You actually answered a different question.

@BjarkeT You literally quoted Cal Newport saying IQ cannot be improved through practice. Yes, higher levels of focus will probably improve your results on an IQ test. That does not mean focus = intelligence. It more than likely means that you were most efficiently utilizing your potential for intelligence, and therefore you have scored higher. @Salvijus That article doesn't even mention IQ at all. Used your control+f method to see that. They reported increased mental clarity and concentration, which is not IQ, it is something else. You must understand IQ is a clinical, hard-nosed term. Your IQ doesn't change until you measure it because it is just that, a measurement. IQ first and foremost is a model of intelligence, it is not intelligence itself. The map is not the territory. I am open to the possibility IQ or some other sort of general intelligence can be increased, I'm actually inclined to think it can be. We just haven't found a reliable way to increase it (in a lab setting) yet. I'm not saying that lab experiments are the only way we can increase IQ, nor am I saying that yogic methods etc are baloney. I'm saying we have insufficient data to draw a conclusion that works for everybody all the time. If something works for you, by all means, use it.

Might be hard to find people in person, not that many people on this forum unfortunately It would be fun to join a group call with you though! I'll start a separate thread if anyone is interested in a weekly call group.

@Salvijus That study has nothing to do with IQ. They said other authors reported increases in IQ, not this study. Check their 9th reference for your IQ related research, that's who they referred to. Also, only 9 participants in the study. Not very representative of the general population.

@Outer You just mistook the map for the territory. IQ is a measurement of an IQ test, not intelligence. And what IQ tests measure is only a part of intelligence.