Heart of Space

What kind of crack are you smoking? And can I have some? Lmao

Yea, hallucination is kind of a weird word to use. I understand what people mean by it when they use it, but I feel like its use is a bit dismissive.

It's not necessarily bias considering the reality that is referred to has a solid sense of consistency that the reality psychedelics produces simply doesn't have. There are fairly strict rules that supposed "objective" sober reality adhere's to, which is corroborated over and over again by experience and other people through language. I wouldn't call psychedelics random, that's a poor choice of word, but they aren't grounded in a consistent set of seemingly universal rules. It is valid, even important, to bring up the fact that a human only ever experiences its own subjective perspective and that certainly has implications on the knowledge one can have about reality. But regardless, you have to address the fact that there is in the very least an incredible amount of consistency, predictability, and a deterministic quality to sober reality. Based on those qualities I would say that it is very unlikely that trolls exist in the reality that I perceive.

Shadow of the Colossus 10/10 game and probably the most perfect and apt metaphor for the path to enlightenment there is in a video game.

I would assume simple evolved human creativity. Our ability to put multiple different idea's and things together in our heads from various things we see and experience in the world. I'm don't mean to be a hater on the open mindedness thing, I try to practice it myself. But I don't completely throw out my rational understanding of the world. It is perfectly valid to consider your possible explanation, but based on my observations on how the world works for me it is very likely that there are no actual trolls and they only exist in the imagination.

The hallucinations you get are influenced by your background and culture, hence people from that area of the world seeing trolls.

Man, who's cutting onions in this thread? Quit that, man.

I think inevitably this happens to everyone over time. Your most profound trips will be your earlier ones. After a while you kinda just get really epically stoned while on them.

In high school I gave a friend a mentos and told him it had LSD on it. He later acted high as fuck and talked about how he had mouths on his hands talking to him. Guess that mentos had LSD in it. Making scientific claims without scientific evidence = pseudoscience. There's no real evidence that binaural beats does anything.

Nah, I've used them with a very open mind. They don't do anything and the claims behind them working are complete pseudoscience.

I'm about 99% positive it's just placebo and there's really nothing special about them. I'm also 99.999% positive that regular meditation with no sound is better for you.

You sounds really unsure of yourself, OP, which is why you add the troll like bits and the "lololol" in your post. It's a defense mechanism for people who know they have no idea what they're talking about. Anyways, goodbye, thanks for that sage like wisdom at the end. I already feel enlightened after reading it.

Having an ego has an evolutionary advantage for human beings. Without an ego all beings would be in such extreme peace they would not care if they could not get their next meal, sexual partner, or even their next breathe of air. If you were in such an extreme state of peace you would have very poor chances of surviving and reproducing. Because of this, the ego is an advantageous creation for the soul purpose of making an illusory game of "I need (X) thing to be satisfied or happy." In the short term, the ego rewards those who give into its wants, but in the long run it is a bottomless pit of craving and aversion. This is the best way an organism with such a complex level of consciousness such as a human survives with the highest probability of reproducing. Seeing through this game will allow you to gain the peace that the ego promises but never delivers.

I would be more than happy to meet most anyone here, though it seems people are quite spread out. Houston, Texas here.

What is a man? (flings wine glass aside) A miserable little pile of secrets!

Enemy is the wrong word. Practice, practice, practice. There is no magic solution.

LOL Woooooah, totally gnarly telekinesis, braaaaaaaah.

It's not very good advice, because many people including myself need to seek to get initially motivated. I wasn't seeking it before in my life and it wasn't exactly getting me enlightened. Hey babe, you haven't been answering my PM's lately, is something wrong?

What's wrong with feeding your shelves? They do get hungry now and then.

It's been documented a ton. Google individual cases where people have ended up institutionalized because of usage. Google countless anecdotal instances where people have clearly poorer brain function and strange new neural connections which affect their behavior negatively, PTSD, hallucinations, or deep clinical depression from a neurochemical imbalance, and more. Are you looking for clinical scientific studies? As I said earlier our understanding of the human brain and our ability to study it is rudimentary. We can't measure or directly see the negative effects of many things on the brain with our current technology. Typical new age psychedelic users in denial will usually counter with the "there's no studies that directly show this," or when you show that the drugs clearly sometimes worsen and bring out life ruining latent mental disorders they'll respond with "that would have happened to them anyways." Sounds like denial to me. It's the same people that will constantly scream in your face that weed has absolutely zero negative effects and cures cancer. There's very little understanding of the negative effects from a scientific stand point, in fact, there's very little understanding of the effects in general. But, hefty personal experience and experience around people who've done a lot of these drugs shows that they very evidently do have negative effects when used too frequently, irresponsibly, or when you just happen to have particular genetics that form a brain that is not agreeable to the drugs. It's a shame there's so much woo woo, denial, and dishonesty around this aspect of the drugs. I think it harms many people. Even weed causes brain damage when used too much, now that I can show you clear study where with too much use it shrinks a part of your frontal cortex and causes more impulsivity and risk taking behavior. And that's a very new study to boot.

Yea, but he slept naked with young girls and tried to hide the fact. Then only later did he try to paint it in this really virtuous light where he was only doing it as an experiment with controlling sexual desire. I personally don't buy that at all. That doesn't strike me as fulfilling a basic human need in a healthy way. Again, it doesn't take away from anything he did. Overall good guy, who had a few weak moments in his life. He was just a man after all.

I'm not sure I buy that. From what I understand is that he actually tried to hide it at first, and then later talked about it. He did it with minors too. I'm saying this takes away everything he did, human beings and human beings after all. We are all not perfect angels.

He was also doing creepy experiments with young women sleeping with them in bed.

Texas. I'm a spiritual cowboy.

Good job, just keep it up. I'd imagine your negative symptoms will naturally subside with more practice. Do you think it's the anxiety that's the fundamental reason for the difficult session? That's a pretty natural response, but it eases and disappears with time. Don't worry about your "bad" meditation session. Relatively speaking you will always have the "bad" days, even when you're meditating 5 hours a day. Just do the best you can to get through it and don't give up.