Carl-Richard

At your age your job is just to surround yourself with girls, take the opportunities when they come.

Anybody can pursue awakening. Whether you progress depends on your will, your intensity, your obsessiveness, your integrity, your authenticity, your inspiration, your devotion, your love. Intellect can help with using some tools. And don't underestimate your intellect. Often what people think is intellect is just knowledge. There is a psychological phenomenon I've identified where you feel less smart than somebody else when they talk about something you don't know about, but when you talk to them about something you do know about, you suddenly see that it was a lack of knowledge, not intellect that made you feel less smart. Or you might be called "smart" during a group assignment in school if you're one of the only people in the group who actually read the chapter before the group assignment and could understand what the assignment was about, even if you're at a similar level of intelligence and they could've understood it the same had they read it. Or professors who talk fast and with impressive language even though it's sometimes hard to follow are called "smart", maybe just because you have to think very hard to understand them, vs. an equally as impressive professor in terms of intellect who tries very hard to make themselves understood can come off as much less intimidating and less "smart". Although, yes, there are cases where you can talk to somebody where you understand everything they are saying, but they are just that brilliant, clear-headed, sharp, that you clearly feel that they are intelligent rather than simply knowledgeable. And there is a correlation between being intelligent in that way and being knowledgeable, but it's still very easy to mistake a lack of knowledge in yourself for a lack of intellect. So to summarize: math, physics, history are fundamentally knowledge, and even if you don't know about the math that Einstein used or the history of science leading up to Einstein being able to do that math (which is interesting, but that's the key; interest), that doesn't necessarily mean you're a dimwit (subtly hinting I know some math, physics and history: I essentially don't lol).

It's such an odd concept because you have no idea what would have happened otherwise, and the hardship you have experienced is integral to who you are now and there is gratitude for that, but one thing I surely could have benefited from in some facets at that moment in time (from like 12 years old) was fixing my diet and maybe dialing down the insane levels of masturbation lol. But that kind of high carb diet and frequent masturbation could've benefited my guitar playing (as it benefits from a more serotonergic/prolactin tone). If you actually regret something you did, it defines your life, and there is more to life than one thing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Egg_(Weir_short_story)

Don't give it too many instructions, and you meet morons without ChatGPT.

Not knowing applies to everything though 🤔

Young men with lots of testosterone make terrific meditators. The problem is only if your interests are not aligned. Your spiritual practice is to pursue what you want to do until you give up everything. That is the only spiritual practice there is.

@Ramasta9 Or perhaps the reductionistic lens of "nutrients" is the problem and a different lens like e.g. "prana" could be needed to explain what is going on. After all, if a fruit is a matrix of many thousands of different compounds (and some are not even considered "nutrients"), maybe the whole effect of those compounds taken together adds up to something different than single nutrients in isolation or even "nutrients" in any case. It's actually theoretically accepted in the mainstream that biological systems exhibit both bottom-up and top-down causality in terms of things like health (e.g. if you eat a compound that makes you less chaotic, that change in state will impact how much nutrients you utilize, and vice versa). But it is of course harder to map out a comprehensive map of this empirically (reductionism is the norm for a reason). And like prana is used to explain how breatharians putatively can go without food, it's that their different bodily parts as a whole work differently. Or even spooky quantum processes may be involved. Or maybe physical lenses don't do it justice at all.

@Ramasta9 I've recently had an insight about supplements that argues more in your favor. So I've done a dive into how nutrients interact with eachother ("systems nutritional science") and how these interactions can stunt nutrient uptake by ridiculous amounts. And of course some foods contain "anti-nutrients" which do the same thing. However, despite this, people who eat say a diet with a lot of anti-nutrients (i.e. more plant-based) or who even mix many different foods are able to give clear blood panels and also are statistically associated with longevity on a group level (as you yourself have argued). Also, I've thought about before that eating a fruit cannot be replicated in the sense that you get the nutrients presented in a particular matrix (the cell structures, the micro and macro tissue structures). When you e.g. remove the juice and only drink that, you change the form of what you're eating. And especially, when you eat a pill that has only a pure vitamin and some filler substances, that is certainly not the same as eating a fruit with that vitamin. I think it's possible that the matrix of the fruit (or the matrix of foods generally) is important for how nutrients are taken up, used, absorbed. And that when you only separate one chemical from that fruit and eat that (e.g. vitamin C), it's more like taking a drug than providing "nutrition". And that's the feeling I've gotten from many supplements in general (especially b-vitamins) is that they feel essentially like drugs.

God is everything.

New Age psych prog hello

I've never trusted these stupid bots. People should be educated to not trust them if they aren't capable of doing it themselves.

If you meditate regularly and really prepare yourself for the trip and do everything right, you won't even need a big dose.

Not more than working a 9-5.

Here is an insight I've rescued after deconstructing "science-based lifting" and the training style I had since I started training over 14 years ago: When you do a set, the entire set is like one rep. In other words, each rep you do is in a continuous flow with the next, such that your muscles are under a constant tension that builds throughout the set and then peaks when you hit failure and can't do anymore. This is really what I believe is intended with the cue of "controlling the weight". It's not about slowing down, not about limiting intensity, but about maximizing flow. The main pitfall of science-based lifting is the tendency to make divisions, e.g. between eccentric and concentric, and consequentially making prescriptions like "slow the eccentric, explode on the concentric". This limits flow, because in flow, only the body decides what the movement is, and it's one movement. There is no eccentric or concentric, and there are no reps. There is the set - the exercise - and rest. If the goal is truly just "stimulus", then letting the body perform the movement it knows best to reach muscular failure, that is the only job. Techniques like "deep stretch" or "pause at the bottom of the rep" are tools that can come in handy in some situations, but the main exercise, the main part of the workout, is in my opinion to maximize the smoothness of the curve to muscular failure. Whether you prefer fantasies like "2-3 reps in reserve" or taking on endless amounts of volume, the same goal still applies: approaching muscular failure. My claim is simply that maximizing flow is generally the best path towards this end. Why? Because we see this in professional athletes: flow is the best measure for performance. So if you're an athlete of hypertrophy, why would it not be the same? Flow is a synonym for doing something right, as right as possible. If you perform the movement as right as possible, focusing all resources on exactly what you need to perform the movement, then you will be more efficient, you will have more resources to use on exactly that movement, which gives more resources for hypertrophy. We know things like stress, doing cardio instead of resting, impact hypertrophy, because they require resources that could be used for hypertrophy. Flow limits the loss of resources to factors external to hypertrophy. It could be something as simple as flailing your arms a little too much, or indeed not controlling the weight in a way that targets the muscle. Maximizing flow streamlines the targeting of the muscles during the exercise, and it also maximizes rest during rest periods. If you spend your time during rest moving in a less efficient way, there will be less resources for the set. These may seem like inconsequential things that a scientific reductionist who is numb to anything slightly subtle will brush away as indeed inconsequential. But consider that the line between the mediocre and the best, is subtle. And it's rooted in a personal relationship to oneself as the best, which cannot be replaced by a scientific formula written in a book or spoken about in a podcast.

"It's not a drug, it's a natural plant". Level 1 stoner ego defense mechanism.

There is also an underappreciation in "pure bodybuilding" culture of the aesthetics of athletic movement. A sprinter moves, walks and even talks in a specific way that is much more attractive than a bodybuilder who can't walk up a set of stairs without losing their breath or can't reach halfway down to their toes or lift their hip without tearing a muscle. When your steps are light, when your legs are nimble but strong, that just looks much better than if you're a walking brick house.

I'm sorry I couldn't help.

@Ramasta9 I came to this forum to distract myself and seek guidance while dealing with a spiritual emergency. My academia was like your van. It's a way to drive around, explore, karma. Eventually I'll settle.

I think after my awakening, I understood nobody could actually give me advice about anything, because I knew what I wanted, so their misunderstanding doesn't matter. Of course they will misunderstand, they haven't had the same experience. So just getting really firm and connected with the feeling of what you truly want, that will make anybody else's input simply indeed useful suggestions, which do not perturb you existentially.

Why did you actually return to the forum?

The frame is undeniably Neo-Advaita based on context (you do talk about the non-existence of self a lot), but we can reduce it to apophatic theology (speaking about God using negations) if you like, but that assumes you're indeed talking about God or something divine beyond intellectual comprehension. But if you also want to object to even that, then maybe it's just absolute/radical skepticism. Regardless of the particular frame, my frame is challenging the need to stick to just one frame. There are also other forms of Advaita, or Westernized academic forms of idealism; there is cataphatic theology; there is realism, pragmatism, meta-theorism. You can say very similar things with these different frames. Hence also in some cases, disagreements may not be actual disagreements, just disagreements in how to state the same things. And that is very often what I see, where disagreements are simply at level of frame, not at the level of substance, and where there is no desire to connect beyond frame, being open, honest, seeking and generous, instead closing down and defending, asking "questions" performatively, feigning incredulousness, ironically placing so much importance on your exact words, wording, phrasing, choices of framework, when in fact your substantial point, is beyond that.

Performative incredulousness to protect frame.

More "I only use one frame" non-duality preaching and endless argumentation to uphold that frame. Non-duality is not cognitive development.