Carl-Richard

It's actually ridiculous how prevalent "it's all in your head" is as a heuristic for people. Even my mother who is a doctor, when I say I feel different after taking a multivitamin (and many other things), she has this knee-jerk response of "yeah, the placebo effect is real". And I'll have to say like "ok, if you're deficient in vitamin D, will you not feel that?". Also, even if something is "all in your head", it doesn't actually matter. If something has an effect you can notice, then that is incredible and should be celebrated. Secondly, literally everything is "in your head"; the placebo effect is constant. Even if you take a drug like heroin, you don't know how much of it is in your head and how much of it is "real". Certainly with drugs or vitamins, the correct assumption is that it has a real effect and a placebo effect, but you just don't know how much of which. Besides, SSRIs are only 2% better than placebo, so so much for "real" effects. So "it's placebo" is not really a good reason for doing anything, maybe unless you're a cancer patient who needs brain surgery and not apple juice.

Are you taking any medication?

People who don't smoke and get offered a joint are notoriously bad at getting high. It's mainly a mechanical skill problem of inhaling it. That's why I didn't think I got high the first time I tried it. There is also pharmacological sensitization that occurs after repeated use (your body becomes more efficient at responding to it), but I don't think matters a lot if you just inhale enough. I've gone from smoking weed multiple times a day without getting any "effect" from it (but I was of course perpetually high but adapted to it), and then I've also gone straight into ego death from it. It depends very much on your life situation, psychological and physical health, regularity of use, other psychedelic use, meditation ability, etc.

This video is so LA.

Spirituality is survival until you let go of your life.

If I ever change my name on here, it will be to "The Ghost of Nahm". I'm here to always remind you of the greatest era of the forum.

@Natasha Tori Maru@Keryo Koffa@r0ckyreed@PenguinPablo@Oppositionless@samijiben@Lews Therin@Jordan For you who have meditated deconstructively, please share the ways you have meditated deconstuctively and what happens when you do it. Your perspective is highly valuable.

Can a state become a trait?

You need something to hold yourself responsible to how you communicate if you want to be understood by others.

I don't think that's the reason. Photons travelling through a slit just has little to do with eyes focusing on an object.

Ok. Your topic makes sense if you treat everything you're saying as a metaphor. In a sense, focusing on an object is kinda like looking at a photon; it's concrete, discrete, obvious, while the background that is out of focus is kinda like a wave; amorphous, opaque, indistinct. But if you ask a physicist if focusing on an object can be explained by the double-slit experiment, he would disagree.

But I've tried! 😭 but 😴😴😴 Unironic best advice: if you can fall asleep during meditation, you didn't sleep enough. In fact, trying to actively fall asleep (or pretending like you're in deep sleep) during meditation is a good practice.

Deconstruct your entire life 😂 (not self-deletion, but meditation and letting go of attachments, notions, beliefs, etc.). And do happy and healthy things.

Breh, teachers have tried that and they keep asking. Again, if you understand that the spiritual path starts in form, you won't have this aversion to engaging with form, like speaking, instructing, pointing, conceptualizing. Shutting up and disaffirming pointers has its place, but it cannot be done absolutely, it's actually impossible unless you want to be essentially a rock that sits there and doesn't react to anything that happens around it.

I don't see a significant difference in the meta-ness of God, Truth and Suffering (or Emptiness). Then you shut up. But then the seeker keeps asking. Then you speak. Focusing on your breath can also make you sleepy. The slow, repetitive motions, like a calm sea washing into shore. By the way, I generally haven't done much mantra meditation. I prefer my mind to reveal itself in quiet.

That's not a common word.

You gotta learn to talk with concepts not words.

A very powerful pointer I got from Leo is "you are creating everything". It sort of flips deconstruction on its head: instead of trying to deconstruct the ways which you compulsively and indeliberately construct reality, you take full ownership of the construction, you make it intentional and conscious, you identify with it in its entirity. And that's really the goal of deconstruction, to come to a place where you're constructing everything intentionally.

@Jannes Not even top 100 😂 Jk.

Do you generally identify Shakti in people?

I'm simply clarifying how meditation is something you apparently do as a human being but the result is beyond being human. If that's poisoning the seekers mind, so be it. All teachings do that. The teachings point and then you do the deconstruction. That's why Zen is so shifty in its pointers, because they want you to do deconstruction while dropping the pointers. Here is notion, a concept, an expectation, a reward: “I teach one thing and one thing only: suffering and the end of suffering.” — The Buddha, Samyutta Nikāya 22.86

That's not how it works. Let's also be clear that enlightenment is when you operate in a state of non-duality as your baseline (it's your default state). You can be momentarily thrusted into states like deep sleep and psychedelically induced non-dual experiences or even organically induced ones without letting go of attachments, but they will not last very long or get integrated into your baseline functioning, as attachments are cyclical patterns that repeat over time and inhibit the non-dual state. But when you let go of an attachment and you are at a threshold of a non-dual experience say in meditation, that can often push you over the edge, if indeed that cyclical pattern is particularly active at that time. Again, this is mistaking the deconstruction I'm talking about for a more intellectualized and propositional / discursive form of deconstruction. It's one thing to deconstruct something in the realm of ideas. It's another to deconstruct something in the realm of embodied being. When you for example deconstruct the feeling that you are a body in space, it's more like noticing something rather than affirming something to yourself. Affirming can help in noticing it, but it's not fundamentally needed. Mantras can be beneficial when the patterns have very short cycles and they seem to reconstruct very easily (which the feeling of having a body is an example). Mantras can help direct your focus, just like choosing to focus on the breath. Directing your focus in itself is a form of deconstruction, but a more localized and implicit one (you have to let go of your attention wandering freely in the moment and focus it on something; you're breaking a cyclical pattern). Deconstruction and meditation is generally a recursive process, because some of the patterns seem to be sticky (particularly the very ingrained ones like the notion of the body). That's why it can take 6 years before they seemingly stabilize.

Dying once is not enough. Death has to pervade your being. Again, Leo is not enlightened despite 30 days of 5-MeO. And that is not to pooh-pooh his insights. He will admit this himself.

I considered trying it once but I suspected the way the method works would me make go insane 😂 I'm already too associative for my own good. Training my brain to become more associative would just make me end up as a poet. N-Back training works for me, I think I added a few points from that, but high-intensity cardio and sprint training (things that elevate lactate) are probably just as effective (as well as resistance training and other forms of cardio). Meditation is also super good, especially when done right. I would say try it and report back the results after a month or so 🙂👍

Is it possible that you primed it to mention Leo based on previous interactions?