Sage

@Forza21 You might just have low testosterone my man, go get some comprehensive blood work done

Protein is absolutely essential for gaining muscle, between 0.7 - 1.2g per lb/bw based on the research, sa mall calorie surplus of 300 calories is enough for a sustainable gain without too much excess fat

@caelanb Read The Breathing Cure by Patrick McKeown, you should have it sorted within a couple of weeks if you follow the exercises diligently

@Gregory1 Mushrooms don't have seeds...

@Virgo "Psychedelics don't work on stupid people" - Terence McKenna

@Ilan You might want to try checking out Dr Joe Dispenza's work and give his meditations a crack, maybe attend a retreat if you can. It's a kind of meditation specifically geared towards practicing elevated emotional states and sustaining them (gratitude, joy, love, empowerment etc). I found that these were very helpful for me to maintain a will to live and passion to keep on the path when it got difficult. I'll link a an interview where you can listen to his view on spirituality and meditation and I'll link his books in the order I think best to read them. Take care and be gentle with yourself, these periods of darkness are par for the course, you will come out the other end. Podcast Interview: Books: You are the placebo: 1. https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1E422blWS9kJ_mFVlUA30vBD5d6Xz5-ZK?usp=sharing Breaking the habit of being yourself: 2. https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1wQhcWpRV6zrAdMxd2N7uYiCSFVBmyvs0?usp=sharing Becoming Supernatural: 3. https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1BBrGKPdMYgxdrwlr41sL42mmfAdKGM5y?usp=sharing

This was a journal entry that I wrote tonight, I guess I'm posting it here because I don't really know of anywhere else I would find someone involved in this work and having my current experience. To anyone feeling alone and desperate, I hope this can at least alleviate your loneliness. I can't shake the feeling that I'm letting my life pass me by, that I'm not taking full advantage of the opportunities that are available to me. I feel like I'm spinning my wheels, wasting my time and wasting my potential. I am so idealistic in regards to what I presume I will take action on in the future; but when the future arrives, I don't do what I know I should do. I guess I'm more disciplined than lots of people, but I really don't do what it is I need to do to achieve the things I need to achieve and become the person I know I can become. On top of that, I spend the time that I could be using to contemplate, do yoga, make music, read, write etc beating myself up for not doing said things. There's an almost constant undercurrent of pain pervading my entire existence, I know this is self-created, and yet I cannot stop it. I feel lazy. I do not want to get out of bed in the morning. I don’t want to stretch. I don't want to meditate and I don't want to exercise. I am a lazy hedonist and all I want is the fruits of these labours without getting my hands dirty and putting in the hours. It's like I cannot accept the fact that results occur following long and dedicated periods of hard work and concerted effort. I know this to be true, but I can't seem to accept it. And so what is the result? The result is that I am unsatisfied with my life and the person that I am. I am bored. I am unable to summon enough enthusiasm to put an authentic smile on my face. I'm not depressed, I wouldn't even say I'm particularly sad at this moment. I'm apathetic, fed up, unable to come up with a good enough reason to explain why someone would want to continue to live the life I'm living. That is not to say that I don't think life itself is not worth living, just that the current way that I live my life sucks a massive pile of dicks, to use an apt metaphor. My boredom and lack of action leads to incessant social media and YouTube addiction. Scrolling again and again and again for hours, days and weeks on end. Sometimes I think there's something wrong with my brain, that I'm just catastrophically low on some key neurotransmitters that has made me an apathetic, useless, unenthusiastic pile of dogshit. This could be true, but that doesn't really help the situation. It's a deflection of responsibility unto everything but myself. There just is no passion in my life anymore, and that is really what I want at the end of the day. I want to wake up in the morning and feel genuine gratitude for being alive. I don't want to feel like I'm just running out the clock, chewing at the bit for the next little hit of dopamine until one day my receptors look like daffodils in autumn. I want to write in my journal someday about how awesome life is and how wonderful it is to have this experience, but when I look back at literally every journal entry I've ever written, they are all tainted with sadness, despair, anger, confusion and frustration. I just feel like I don't care about much anymore, I enjoy things, but I could really take them or leave them. That intimate love and connection I used to have for my family is all but gone, I seem to be unable to feel genuine heart-felt love for my girlfriend, I have no more passion for books or creating music anymore. I feel like I've slipped back to the same life I was living years back - albeit in a new environment and without the drugs. It's painful to think that all that 'work on myself' was for nothing, meaningless nonsense, but I feel like that is probably the case - I don't really know how I would verify that anyway. What effect did all that meditation have really? All that contemplation, journaling and reading, was it all bullshit? The rapture of psychedelic insight is but a distant memory and what I feel now is a sense of complete meaninglessness. I'm stuck, I don't know which direction to go, everything I would normally do when I find myself in this state seems useless. All techniques suddenly seem like distractions from the gaping hole inside. I've spent years experimenting with all sorts of supposed spiritual methods in the hopes of breaking through into some abiding embodiment of absolute truth. Tonight, I am feeling vulnerable, humble and very human. Floating in a void with nothing to hold on to, no signposts and no more ideas. I'm not one to pray, but if I were I would just ask for one thing, it would be clarity.

This interview had some great insights. I love Daniel's ability to go meta and think from an unbiased perspective. You can tell he has contemplated many of the issues he mentions here in-depth. This channel is a great resource for epistemic issues, philosophy, sociological dynamics and other related topics. Check it out. I particularly recommend the interviewee, as well as Jordan Hall and Jamie Wheal.

I don't often post on the forum. The reason is that when we're talking about matters of consciousness, nothing is going to be brought into the light on an online forum. If we're going for direct consciousness, which I'm hoping we all get by now is the point - running around the endless merry-go-round of the mind on a forum is just a wild goose chase. Throughout this 'journey', if you want to call it that - you will run into a fucking batshit crazy amount of cul-de-sacs and dead-ends. Just when you think you've got it all figured out it'll hit you that you actually just deluded yourself. If you're 'serious' about this work you will read countless books, watch thousands of videos and listen to hundreds of people spewing their conceptual version of the truth. At the end of the day, only one thing is true in regard to waking up, and it's a quote from Jed McKenna: "Sit down, shut up and ask yourself what's true until you know." The truth must be the truth now, it must be the truth right here. For all things and at all times. If you can't find it right here and now you ain't gonna find it anywhere else. Forget the critiques. Forget the judgments. It's all a waste of time. You'll find, in the end, that it's all you anyway. The dream is the point. It's all good. You're already home.

@Leo Gura I'll try to word this as best I can. What is it that seeks enlightenment? It seems to me that the ego is a fundamental and necessary evolutionary step, without which awakening would not be possible. To say it differently, without the foundation of the lie, the truth could not be realized. Is there an agency built into consciousness that causes it to gravitate towards the pursuit of the absolute truth, or is it really the case that the ego is unconsciously clawing towards its own death? All the while under the illusion that truth will 'get something' for it, and the laundry list of things that fall under that distinction. What confuses me is that it definitely seems that there is something innate pulling us towards awakening, a natural inclination towards truth and away from falsity (eventually), but this is contradicted by the fact that awakening is absolutely not normative, and few actually GET IT.

@DrewNows This guy is full of shit. He's hospitalized many people with his advice. I almost killed myself following his advice. Don't share this nonsense, it's dangerous information. For your own good stop following his advice asap before the real deficiencies and blood sugar issues begin. @Leo Gura I'd appreciate it if you would remove this post and save anyone naive enough to follow it some real health issues

Hey, I'm curious to see if anyone here has consistently used binaural beats every day (preferably a structured program of increasing intensity) for at least a few years and wanted to share their results/side-effects. I've been using 'HoloSync' for about 3 years now. With the exception of 2 months off while I was traveling around Asia, I've listened pretty much every day. With something like this, it's difficult to tell how much of a specific effect it's had on my growth because I've done so many other things along with it (Vipassana, Kriya, Psychs, Reichian Therapy and Taoist versions of tantra/kundalini yoga). I'd be interested to hear your experiences.

@OBEler How's the kriya going for you? How long have you been doing it?