Carl-Richard

If this forum had a spirit animal, it would be a tiger in a leopard suit

Don't claim brain damage where stupidity is sufficient

Again, it's very simple. My idea of having your priorities straight is that you're sincerely interested in something, you explore it deeply, and then if you want, you can take what you already know and discuss it with someone. That is very different from arranging a debate with a fixed motion/topic and then trying to ad hoc boost your performance in that particular debate by doing some intensive, strategic reading, scheming and planning. Does that mean you shouldn't do any preparation before you speak with someone on a public platform? No, but if you spend hours sweating it out like you're cramming for a test, that does kinda reveal where your priorities are. Don't get me wrong, I still watch Destiny a lot, but he has his flaws (some more obvious than others).

Here:

It's as simple as this: do you seek truth for truth's sake or do you seek to win debates? Now, how does spending hours skimming through articles while preparing for a debate square with that question? Maybe I'm way too picky, but I sincerely believe that once you enter a debate not to satisfy a deep desire for understanding and truth but to instead defeat your opponent with some quick and easy points you scrapped up from wikipedia, then you're way off course.

Are you fucking serious? No way

It goes much deeper than that. It corrupts his entire being. ...and that is why it turned into a 6 hour discussion

@Ves Yeah no, yet more evidence that Destiny isn't a very noble person, mostly in the sense that he has questionable drives and priorities. Sure, there is nothing wrong with having fun talking to people who don't know anything, but I feel his identity as a "debater" has a predominantly unhealthy effect on him in general.

Anybody tried Amanita Muscaria?

Why you mentioning me?

I see this way too often on the forum and elsewhere that DMT is essentially held as a "Theory of Everything" regarding spirituality, more specifically the idea that elevated levels of DMT in the brain is what causes enlightenment experiences. While this is not only a very simplistic understanding of the brain, there is actually no conclusive evidence for the idea that 1. DMT is produced in the human brain whatsoever, and 2. that this DMT is what mediates the endogenous experience of non-duality. 1:48:50 While the first point is rather unproblematic, there are both technical and intuitive reasons for why the second point is absurd. The most intuitive one is that DMT is notoriously known for producing A LOT of psychedelic visuals. The idea that these visuals would somehow disappear when functioning endogenously in the body while also promoting the non-dual experience should already make you very skeptical. The idea that you can trace something as complex as a permanent change in baseline consciousness to the secretion of one specific structural analogue of serotonin would be so surprising that it would indeed deserve its name as "The Spirit Molecule" and that every neuropharmacologist and evolutionary biologist in the world would instantly fall to their knees and convert to whatever psychedelic mystical tradition that is the most responsible for this hypothesis. Why this would be so surprising has a couple of reasons. Arguably the most important is that the brain has so much more going on than the production of serotonin-like substances, and very rarely will you ever come across anything brain-related being fully explained by the functioning of one neurotransmitter. This is for example why there are so many competing theories of which neurochemical is involved in mediating conditions like schizophrenia (dopaminergic, glutaminergic etc.) and why none of them are able to give a comprehensive explanation (hence the various side effects of highly selective anti-psychotic medications). If DMT was in fact the sole cause of non-dual awareness while basically functioning as an on-off switch, that would also raise another question: how would such an on-off switch evolve through natural selection in this specific case? Why would it be adaptive to have just one chemical produce such an effect and for it to lay dormant up to a certain point? It's much more likely just from a purely computational perspective that it would be mediated by a slight overall change in the trillions of interactions that are already happening at micro and macro levels; at the level of networks, singular neurons and molecules. If you were to look at any other biological system, it's never like you suddenly get the software update of the Gods containing ONE brand new signalling substance that revolutionizes the entire functioning of the system. I would love to hear anybody give an example of something like that occuring in nature just anywhere. Then you have the research on the Default Mode Network (DMN) which zooms out and looks at larger neural networks. They've done substantial research on 10 000 hour expert meditators and compared their DMN activation with novice and advanced meditators with some promising results. I believe this approach provides the most conclusive evidence for a mechanism behind mystical experiences that we've seen so far: The irony is of course that the DMT model is the epitome of scientific reductionism. That it has somehow found its way into the culture as the explanatory heuristic for spiritual experiences is a symptom of how much work we have to do collectively both in terms of technical education and spiritual development. With that said, it's certainly possible that if DMT were to be produced in the brains of humans that indeed it would play a role in producing whatever experience of consciousness we're currently having and that maybe also it would be involved in facilitating the non-dual experience, but I would confidently bet that this effect would be so insignificant as to be dismissed as homeopathy.

Joe Rogan basically

AMAAAZIN' ? That's an openminded Tier 2 interviewer right there.

(Non-duality) -----------------WOOOSH----------------> (You)

Does anybody know what causes body load on a biochemical/physiological level?

Speaking of online Red: It goes from 0-100 right out the gate ?

Go beyond reasoning. There is nothing reasonable about what you've been doing up to this point.

Have you ever had an awakening?

@Leo Gura mmm yes, mAmMALiAn pROTUBeRaNCEs ?

It does seem sort of obvious when it's laid out like this, but you can't stop the trendiness of DMT ? Here is another example: let's say DMT was somehow a main catalyst. How would that relate to spiritual practice? So you would work at something for let's say 10k hours like the Theravadan meditators in the DMN study and then suddenly out of nowhere DMT starts secreting? What prompted that? Certainly not DMT. We can easily assume that the practice must have changed the body or brain somehow. If that's true, that proves that it's possible to ignite a drastic change in mental state through a slow and steady overall structural change. Then why isn't that a satisfying explanation on its own? Why is the DMT part emphasized or even needed? ?

Do it then! ?

You don't know that.

Never understood how you do this intentionally. Nowadays it happens for me naturally to some extent which is another reason why I fap less. In fact, I feel the build up of sexual energy more in my spine than anywhere else.

Transmutation happens naturally when you do stuff. Like Leo just said, if you spend less time doing stuff, you'll be more inclined to use that energy towards procreating.

Models are supposed to simplify. That is not a mistake. There is always a balance between comprehensiveness, validity and neatness.