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5.4M views in 4 days. Search "Out of Shadows" on YouTube.. keep scrolling until you find the actual video. To me, the hiding is more peculiar than the act itself. Just like Jefferey Epstein. The media doesn't want to talk about it anymore. He "committed suicide" and now case closed. Think about where this is going. Something has to break. Either mass censorships are coming, or mass revelations. I remain optimistic.

https://afsp.org/suicide-statistics/ I'm looking at these stats and getting around a 3.3% death rate from reported suicides. I assume these numbers can be way off in either direction because of inaccurate attempts and inaccurate deaths by suicide. I might be wrong but I would guess my own success rate would be carefully planned and 100%, but who knows. I'm honestly wondering though if the thought of pain is the main reason people are unsuccessful? I often wished of a state of Nirvana/nothingness, but do not want to experience the thought of physical pain, the pain of others because of my action, etc.

@Danioover9000 Thanks for asking bro, DPDR seems to be going fine. However reading this thread just now made me almost physically sick, Leo saying that the current present moment im experiencing right now is the only thing that exists. How is this not solipsism. This thread is honestly the most disturbing thing ive ever read and honestly i dont know how i will go on with life now. I guess awakening or suicide is the only option now.

The journey of the heart Post in draft mode. The wounded heart The heart that feels pain and hurt and or anger. The heart that feels betrayal or loss In this state the heart is trapped When your emotions are in a knot, you are experiencing emotional entanglement which I described before in the previous draft posts. In this state you feel stressed. The stress keeps accumulating, you feel confused, unusual, you feel uncertain, your emotions are messed up. You don't feel good at all. This can happen during An argument Childhood trauma Work stress Bad toxic relationships Inability to achieve goals Bullying Getting trolled Ostracization Dehumanization Getting discriminated Having a bad day Financial issues General anxiety Feeling upset Feeling triggered Feeling provoked Feeling harassed Feeling tormented These are just a few examples where the heart is experiencing emotional entanglement which can feel like a knot as though you're tied up or your emotions are in a knot. image here. Once you realize that you are in a knot, its important to unravel this knot as fast as you can so you feel free. Being free is your original state. It takes some amount of time to unravel and untangle and undo the knot and come to the original state of freedom. This is what I call emotional liberation. There is a distinct difference between the words freedom and liberation. Liberation is the feeling of being set free of something. Freedom is an opportunity you have that you can use to do something. Without freedom you cannot get anything done. Without liberation you are trapped. Liberation is an essential component of freedom. Only when you are liberated you can actually have the freedom to do something. Let me explain this with an example.. Let's say you're kidnapped and trapped in a house. You do not have the freedom to leave the house for the first 4 days. Maybe after that you are allowed to go out for a period of 2 hours. But you have to be back home within the time. Or there will be problems. It's your 5th day and now you are free to go out for limited periods of time. This can be considered freedom. You have the freedom to do a certain thing under certain conditions. However you are not completely or unconditionally free. You have certain freedoms only. This is not liberation because you are still trapped in the same house where you don't want to be. You are still in captivity. The only way to feel liberated is to be taken out of captivity. So having freedom does not always mean being liberated. In order to have total freedom it's necessary to be liberated from the chains.. A simple definition of an emotional hostage is someone who is stuck feeling like they don't know what to do next in a particular situation or relationship. Both liberation and freedom are important. So now let's see a situation where you feel liberated but not free An example could be... Imagine you're a rich kid living in your dad's house. You have all the autonomy and everything at your disposal. But there are certain rules around the house. One of those rules is that you are not allowed to bring friends home. Or you are not allowed to drive at a certain hour. You are allowed a stipulated amount of money only when you specify your requirements in such a way they meet the criteria. This is an example where you feel liberated or you're liberated but not free. You aren't technically being confined or severely restricted but you are to follow rules and conditions to get what you want. Now these rules can be very trivial and easily dealt with or they can become a headache. When there are too many rules you essentially lose your freedoms. It's a covert way of taking away your freedom. You can free to do things but you are handicapped when something needs to be done. This is like you're free to walk but your legs are injured. You are free to fly but your wings are cut. This is not freedom nor it is imprisonment. It is basically "Control" not necessarily hostage or imprisonment but control. Your motions are controlled. Conditions are being put where none are needed. One way of putting this is... The previous situation can be described as "you're not allowed" And this situation can be described as "you're allowed but you will get this only if you fulfill the conditions" Both look same but they are not. The situation where you're not allowed you cannot do anything at all. Let me explain this further. Let's say you're in a third world country under a totalitarianism or dictatorial regime and you are not allowed to leave the country. You are not even allowed to leave your city. You are only supposed to do what the regime tells you. Basically you are denied your humanity. You are not allowed freedom of speech. So if you speak up, you will be imprisoned or face harsh punishment. This is a case where you need liberation (as well as freedom which will be needed subsequently) Now let's take the case of a person in a first world country. You're allowed to go wherever you want. You can leave the country if you want. You have been given your basic liberties. (statue of liberty comes to mind) but let's say you needed an important medicine and you don't have your prescription then you won't get it. There can be a lot of bureaucratic tape that must break through in order to just get daily necessities. But you do have the liberty to leave the country anytime and you can do whatever you want with your life because you are liberated, not exactly free but liberated. Your freedoms are still bound to conditions. Ill also include some portion on emotional freedom. To have emotional liberation, you need to cut through the knot that your heart is entangled in. Breaking the knot. Breaking the knot and setting the heart free is not an easy job. The first step in this direction is realization and awareness. You need to be aware that you are being held hostage to your emotions. You need to be aware that it's okay if you are being held hostage to your emotions as long as your emotions are happy and wonderful and supportive. But when you have negative emotions, things don't look great. Being aware that you are gradually falling into the trap of the emotional knot is the key. This knot is slowly getting stronger and firmer and even more convoluted and intricate. It can reach levels of complexity that are impossible to unravel. Before this happens, you need to break and undo the knot as fast as you can. Once you see yourself trapping into the knot, you have to back off from the situation and the emotions arising out of that situation. So let's say your classmate is bullying you and you feel angered and provoked. You need to be able to be calm and watch how your emotions are slowly enveloping to form that destructive knot. Before this happens, take action, back off from the situation, take time to gather yourself together and keep your emotional constitution intact and healthy. Don't let it form knots or get disrupted. One way is to break the knot early on during its formative stages. You can do this quickly and instantly. However, not all knots are this easy. They don't just go away with simply a thought or action. Some knots are formed over years and years of emotional abuse and psychological abuse as in an adult who has experienced child abuse during their formative years. This will need a lot of unpacking to be done. Also if you have not exactly suffered emotional abuse, you could have suffered years and years of tremendous emotional stress. Examples of emotional stress can be Bad relationships Too many fights in a relationship Too many fights in a family Financial problems Overbearing boss Bullying at college, school or workplace Stalking Narcissistic abuse from parents or authority Abuse at a church or cult An incident of racism, discrimination or humiliation which is public Living with a bipolar or mentally ill person Working as a nurse, doctor, psychiatrist, counselor or social worker Working in law enforcement dealing with crimes, criminals and crime victims families. Working as an actor in heavy duty emotional roles Suffering from a mental illness for years Listening to emotional music as a bad habit Constant crying or having severe loss of emotional control Having suffered parental neglect Drug addiction Raised in a violent neighborhood Exposed to some form of violence in formative years Abuse by a schoolteacher like physical beating or sexual or pressure or bullying Cyberbullying Having encountered suicide in the family or friends circle Having encountered single or multiple deaths of persons or pets in the family or friends circle Unable to cope with the loss of a person or pet Failed marriages and divorce Unable to cope with the divorce of parents Suffered loss of home or resources in an earthquake or disaster Suffered homelessness at some point in life Suffered PTSD due to one or a specific set of incidents Being wrongfully arrested, evicted, sent to prison or jail. Suffered sexual assault in the street or by family, neighbor, boyfriend or friend. Being sent to military at young age Military associated PTSD because of bad memories The list goes on and on. Over years these triggers and stressor build up and cause extensive damage to the heart and body. They accumulate. Remember, there'll always be some factor behind your emotional stress. It may or may not be on the list but it'll be something that is causing you stress. It's important to isolate these triggers and factors one by one and deal with them individually. One important word to consider here is the word avoid Some of the stressors are avoidable, not easily but still avoidable. Like for example you could give up a drug habit, you could counteract bullying either by a formal complaint or by switching to a different school. Whenever it's avoidable, Avoid.. When it's not, then you need to find strategies to minimize damage, strategies to cope with the situation, strategies to escape the situation, strategies to find a resolution to the situation if escape is not possible or unwanted or unhelpful. One example could be contacting child protection services or social services when you are stuck in a dysfunctional abusive relationship with your parents /family /neighborhood /church/cult etc. There is always a road ahead, a twist, a turn, a rope to hold on to during a desperate period, there is always a way to cope or get out and escape further damage or a way to find ultimate freedom. So there is two way approach to the problem of emotional stress Avoidance Resolution Dealing with Emotional Damage Once you have successfully avoided or resolved the problem of emotional entanglement or removed the stressor and untangled the knot, you have found the way to emotional liberation. Also explain emotional freedom blockage. emotional liberation different from emotional freedom and emotional and emotional entanglement, emotional distress, emotional damage, emotional abuse, emotional hostage, emotional independence, emotional healing, emotional disruption or emotional blockage. The focus of this particular post is more on emotional entanglement and emotional liberation and healing from emotional damage Dealing with emotional damage. Once you have successfully achieved emotional liberation, the next focus needs to be on dealing with emotional damage. This means healing the emotional constitution and bringing it back to its original state and then working towards the Regeneration phase. This phase is basically the Healing Phase. The earlier phase was the struggling phase or Coping phase. In this phase you need to start your journey towards a recovery and a full rebound. Now obviously you have PTSD symptoms and emotional distress symptoms EDS, you have unresolved aggression, and a bunch of symptoms arising from the situations you escaped/survived. Now it's time to get rid of these symptoms and remove the emotional agitation and replace it with happiness and a sense of peace. Also it's time to get your energy reserves back. I'll call them Emotional Energy Reserves. These have been depleted during your time of stress. It's time to fill them back. To replenish. Energy reserves are vital for motivation and stimulation to live life. These are what make you want to explore, have relationships, want a family, go to work, live your best life, create joy and pleasure and they create a natural enthusiasm to live life. When you are in a state of depression and emotional recession and emotional stress, these emotional energy reserves get greatly depleted. This causes agitation, nervousness, losing the will to live, suicidal ideation, and a general state of apathy. You just don't feel like doing anything. You don't think anything is useful... Healing the emotional constitution This is the phase where you get the emotional energy reserves back. You focus on replenishment. There are ways to heal the emotional constitution back to its original un-maladapted or unimpacted form, unadulterated form Some of the ways. Laughter therapy Focusing on a sense of achievement Achieving baby goals Taking baby steps Lot of sleep and adequate rest. Music Meditation Walking in the woods Talk therapy and venting Psychological therapy (professional) Change of place. Relocating Positive visualization Going on a vacation to an island Watching relaxing and comedy movies Positive distraction Exercise Massage Spa therapy Taking care of nutritional needs. Supplements for depression and other issues Making new friends Journaling Avoiding toxic people Taking care of the body and physical needs Building a robust health Listening to ASMR Nature therapy Listening to nature sounds Surrounding yourself with positive uplifting caring supportive people Laughter therapy Yoga Picking a hobby Dancing Walking meditation Spending time with pets Helping other people Staying happy Loving the self Staying peaceful Being happy with little things Keeping small goals Living in simplicity Retail therapy (don't let this be an addiction) Comfort food (just like retail therapy this is only okay for a short period) Sex (sex is the most powerful drug) Driving Self love Self care Confronting and Labeling emotions Labeling situations Metta meditation Playing games Being a part of an organization or community Psychedelics Spending time with family and friends Gratitude journal Humour Positive affirmations Building self esteem Setting Boundaries Rewarding self Seeking spirituality Prayers Finding love through God Growing in love Destroying and discarding negative emotions Looking and appreciating the beauty of life Creating the fountain of love and positive emotions in life Energy healing methods or Energy based healing methods like Chi Gong, Reiki, Chakra, acupuncture, etc Dealing with Emotional Damage.

Check this out. It's crazy that a relatively non deadly disease has shook us so much. If not from this, its very possible we could hit another recession or even depression soon. Even though generally the world was having less crime, and the economy was better than ever, it still seemed that people were becoming worse off, data showed increasing suicide, fear and unhappiness, I believe this manifested itself in things like the rise of Bernie Sanders and Trump. But if that happened when we were statistically better off, I wonder what will happen if things get bad. I know Eckhart Tolle exploded in popularity after 9/11 and the 2008 recession, could society struggling lead to a larger spiritual awakening?

I don't argue with that. That's why set and setting also play a role. But level all these out and you find that "effective/breakthrough doses" don't vary much. For example: I was close to committing suicide on my first medium-high psychedelics dose (ayahuasca) because of wrong internal believes (beside the intense drug-induced fear): I thought aliens would appear and torture me to death to prevent me from divulging my discoveries (yes, I know, WTF? See my signature). So why not kill myself instead of going through all that shit?

Also Grof disagrees about the "personal sensitivity level" you and Leo argue about. He did many trials and discovered that these drugs affect mostly the brain, and therefore doses do not vary much from person to person. I suspect Leo doesn't want people to commit suicide on the come-up of a proper rectal breakthrough dose when he says 30 mg rectal 5-meo is enough for him.

There is an irony, a cosmic humor that rings with a deep thunder in my being when I see people mention "nothing matters". When people take the time to express this notion, it is driven from a position of contemplation. A dedicated devotion to questioning and deciphering, making attempts to find reason. They have invested critical thought, passionate emotion. Why? Because it matters to them. They can say nothing matters but it is a false narrative. If it didn't matter time and effort would have never been spent expressing it. The fact that it is given attention means it matters to them. Even if nothing mattered, it would still matter to them. They are wrapped up in thoughts about it, feel the need to express it, they are clearly emotionally invested. You can't say nothing matters with a straight face... If you mean it... Then.. “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide.” - Camus I have walked the rim, dipped my toes within its reflection, and carried shame for my inability to proceed; I am grateful for such weakness... Nothing matters, the depths of this well; it is deep..

Sexual attraction and sex are two different things. Romantic attraction has a beautiful essence to it. It's like magic. Like two magnets pulling each other. There's something about a person's face that attracts you to them. In the way they speak, the way they make you feel. Romantic attraction is like charisma, a spell that's difficult to resist. Every time you see that person you want them, you desire them, you wanna play games, tickle their fantasies, it's a thrill. Often times romantic attraction causes partners to be passive aggressive with each other, each teasing the other, playing silly games, intensifying the feelings of craving, the constant push pull, fighting and making up after, and surrendering to their temptations. Romantic attraction is a temptation hard to resist. It's very different from trying to resist the temptation to buy an expensive car or that thing you cannot afford, it's a different feeling. Resisting or compromising with it can cause feelings of intense melancholy and dissociation. Not having the lover you so desperately desire can lead to feelings of emptiness and even suicide. Love is like a fever. It grips you. It's a spell and when you are under this spell, your heart wants what it wants, and your joy is fulfilled in the arms of the lover.

Am I allowed to end the physical existence of me? Commit physical suicide? Aught I?

@Nexeternity So Leo is still seeking then? Ramaji mentioned it recently actually that Leo isn’t in Non-Duality, therefore, isn’t awakened, can’t have it both ways. And, yes, very rarely are people asked their age when psyches are recommended, they just are recommended, I have no problem with psyches, my issue is with reckless recommendations to people too young for them. As I clearly stated I am not talking badly of psyches, they are great medicines for the right people, at the right time and when used responsibly of course. Never once did I dispute that. Of course “responsible use” is quite a blanket term, to me using a synthetic chemical weekly in quite high doses isn’t responsible, to others it may be. Maybe a safety post should be made on Psyches regarding the points you made, as I do see them recommended without any age questions. Ive even seen them recommended after by someone after they said they almost committed Suicide during a trip on here. My main point, is that I’m yet to see any awakened beings who are proponents of this 5MEO path, that’s all. Who knows, in a decade there could be 1000s.

I have had a lot of difficulty with moralizing myself, but in recent years my moralizing faded more and more. My main cure was self observation. I noticed how I was manufacturing my own guilt and how it made me hate myself. This is how I realized that I was lying to myself in my moralizing as I was hyper rational as well. One thought I never believed was that I should kill myself under any circumstances. First, by realizing how much moralizing hurts, you build a vision of how you would think and behave if you loved yourself. This can lead to you seeing that evil is created by your mind as you imagine values to compare yourself against. This applies to moralizing against others as well where you deny your similarities and look righteous. This further exposed the lies in moralizing. Secondly, you can realize that guilt is a dysfunctional survival strategy. Guilt is ineffective for achieving your goals and it drains your energy. This is not resourceful and I used guilt in order to get myself to act in a way that most people found pleasing and I still struggled. I constantly made people feel uncomfortable anyway. Finally, I often equated my immoral thought I had to the act itself. This false equivalency lead to me beating myself up more. Nowadays instead of pushing thoughts away, I observe what the thought is and without beating myself up, I explain how this thought can lead to moral anxiety. I notice the fear and judgement of builds up in me and if I love myself, then I would not do this to myself. The main cure is self observation, realizing the pain you cause yourself, and ultimately that your moralizing is not true, it is just self generated suffering. I don't mean to repeat spiritual teachings you heard, this was my direct experience from self reflection. I have become more and more disinterested in moralizing, and suicide caused by drowning ourselves in guilt is no longer a problem.

Posted this powerful essay in another thread but this one seems more suitable, much of the details did a fly by so I’ll definitely want to reread, enjoy ? https://charleseisenstein.org/essays/the-coronation/ The Coronation | Charles Einsenstein March 2020 For years, normality has been stretched nearly to its breaking point, a rope pulled tighter and tighter, waiting for a nip of the black swan’s beak to snap it in two. Now that the rope has snapped, do we tie its ends back together, or shall we undo its dangling braids still further, to see what we might weave from them? Covid-19 is showing us that when humanity is united in common cause, phenomenally rapid change is possible. None of the world’s problems are technically difficult to solve; they originate in human disagreement. In coherency, humanity’s creative powers are boundless. A few months ago, a proposal to halt commercial air travel would have seemed preposterous. Likewise for the radical changes we are making in our social behavior, economy, and the role of government in our lives. Covid demonstrates the power of our collective will when we agree on what is important. What else might we achieve, in coherency? What do we want to achieve, and what world shall we create? That is always the next question when anyone awakens to their power. Covid-19 is like a rehab intervention that breaks the addictive hold of normality. To interrupt a habit is to make it visible; it is to turn it from a compulsion to a choice. When the crisis subsides, we might have occasion to ask whether we want to return to normal, or whether there might be something we’ve seen during this break in the routines that we want to bring into the future. We might ask, after so many have lost their jobs, whether all of them are the jobs the world most needs, and whether our labor and creativity would be better applied elsewhere. We might ask, having done without it for a while, whether we really need so much air travel, Disneyworld vacations, or trade shows. What parts of the economy will we want to restore, and what parts might we choose to let go of? And on a darker note, what among the things that are being taken away right now – civil liberties, freedom of assembly, sovereignty over our bodies, in-person gatherings, hugs, handshakes, and public life – might we need to exert intentional political and personal will to restore? For most of my life, I have had the feeling that humanity was nearing a crossroads. Always, the crisis, the collapse, the break was imminent, just around the bend, but it didn’t come and it didn’t come. Imagine walking a road, and up ahead you see it, you see the crossroads. It’s just over the hill, around the bend, past the woods. Cresting the hill, you see you were mistaken, it was a mirage, it was farther away than you thought. You keep walking. Sometimes it comes into view, sometimes it disappears from sight and it seems like this road goes on forever. Maybe there isn’t a crossroads. No, there it is again! Always it is almost here. Never is it here. Now, all of a sudden, we go around a bend and here it is. We stop, hardly able to believe that now it is happening, hardly able to believe, after years of confinement to the road of our predecessors, that now we finally have a choice. We are right to stop, stunned at the newness of our situation. Because of the hundred paths that radiate out in front of us, some lead in the same direction we’ve already been headed. Some lead to hell on earth. And some lead to a world more healed and more beautiful than we ever dared believe to be possible. I write these words with the aim of standing here with you – bewildered, scared maybe, yet also with a sense of new possibility – at this point of diverging paths. Let us gaze down some of them and see where they lead. * * * I heard this story last week from a friend. She was in a grocery store and saw a woman sobbing in the aisle. Flouting social distancing rules, she went to the woman and gave her a hug. “Thank you,” the woman said, “that is the first time anyone has hugged me for ten days.” Going without hugs for a few weeks seems a small price to pay if it will stem an epidemic that could take millions of lives. There is a strong argument for social distancing in the near term: to prevent a sudden surge of Covid cases from overwhelming the medical system. I would like to put that argument in a larger context, especially as we look to the long term. Lest we institutionalize distancing and reengineer society around it, let us be aware of what choice we are making and why. The same goes for the other changes happening around the coronavirus epidemic. Some commentators have observed how it plays neatly into an agenda of totalitarian control. A frightened public accepts abridgments of civil liberties that are otherwise hard to justify, such as the tracking of everyone’s movements at all times, forcible medical treatment, involuntary quarantine, restrictions on travel and the freedom of assembly, censorship of what the authorities deem to be disinformation, suspension of habeas corpus, and military policing of civilians. Many of these were underway before Covid-19; since its advent, they have been irresistible. The same goes for the automation of commerce; the transition from participation in sports and entertainment to remote viewing; the migration of life from public to private spaces; the transition away from place-based schools toward online education, the decline of brick-and-mortar stores, and the movement of human work and leisure onto screens. Covid-19 is accelerating preexisting trends, political, economic, and social. While all the above are, in the short term, justified on the grounds of flattening the curve (the epidemiological growth curve), we are also hearing a lot about a “new normal”; that is to say, the changes may not be temporary at all. Since the threat of infectious disease, like the threat of terrorism, never goes away, control measures can easily become permanent. If we were going in this direction anyway, the current justification must be part of a deeper impulse. I will analyze this impulse in two parts: the reflex of control, and the war on death. Thus understood, an initiatory opportunity emerges, one that we are seeing already in the form of the solidarity, compassion, and care that Covid-19 has inspired. The Reflex of Control At the current writing, official statistics say that about 25,000 people have died from Covid-19. By the time it runs its course, the death toll could be ten times or a hundred times bigger, or even, if the most alarming guesses are right, a thousand times bigger. Each one of these people has loved ones, family and friends. Compassion and conscience call us to do what we can to avert unnecessary tragedy. This is personal for me: my own infinitely dear but frail mother is among the most vulnerable to a disease that kills mostly the aged and the infirm. What will the final numbers be? That question is impossible to answer at the time of this writing. Early reports were alarming; for weeks the official number from Wuhan, circulated endlessly in the media, was a shocking 3.4%. That, coupled with its highly contagious nature, pointed to tens of millions of deaths worldwide, or even as many as 100 million. More recently, estimates have plunged as it has become apparent that most cases are mild or asymptomatic. Since testing has been skewed towards the seriously ill, the death rate has looked artificially high. In South Korea, where hundreds of thousands of people with mild symptoms have been tested, the reported case fatality rate is around 1%. In Germany, whose testing also extends to many with mild symptoms, the fatality rate is 0.4%. A recent paper in the journal Science argues that 86% of infections have been undocumented, which points to a much lower mortality rate than the current case fatality rate would indicate. The story of the Diamond Princess cruise ship bolsters this view. Of the 3,711 people on board, about 20% have tested positive for the virus; less than half of those had symptoms, and eight have died. A cruise ship is a perfect setting for contagion, and there was plenty of time for the virus to spread on board before anyone did anything about it, yet only a fifth were infected. Furthermore, the cruise ship’s population was heavily skewed (as are most cruise ships) toward the elderly: nearly a third of the passengers were over age 70, and more than half were over age 60. A research team concluded from the large number of asymptomatic cases that the true fatality rate in China is around 0.5%. That is still five times higher than flu. Based on the above (and adjusting for much younger demographics in Africa and South and Southeast Asia) my guess is about 200,000-300,000 deaths in the US – more if the medical system is overwhelmed, less if infections are spread out over time – and 3 million globally. Those are serious numbers. Not since the Hong Kong Flupandemic of 1968/9 has the world experienced anything like it. My guesses could easily be off by an order of magnitude. Every day the media reports the total number of Covid-19 cases, but no one has any idea what the true number is, because only a tiny proportion of the population has been tested. If tens of millions have the virus, asymptomatically, we would not know it. Further complicating the matter is the high rate of false positives for existing testing, possibly as high as 80%. (And see here for even more alarming uncertainties about test accuracy.) Let me repeat: no one knows what is really happening, including me. Let us be aware of two contradictory tendencies in human affairs. The first is the tendency for hysteria to feed on itself, to exclude data points that don’t play into the fear, and to create the world in its image. The second is denial, the irrational rejection of information that might disrupt normalcy and comfort. As Daniel Schmactenberger asks, How do you know what you believe is true? In the face of the uncertainty, I’d like to make a prediction: The crisis will play out so that we never will know. If the final death tally, which will itself be the subject of dispute, is lower than feared, some will say that is because the controls worked. Others will say it is because the disease wasn’t as dangerous as we were told. To me, the most baffling puzzle is why at the present writing there seem to be no new cases in China. The government didn’t initiate its lockdown until well after the virus was established. It should have spread widely during Chinese New Year, when every plane, train, and bus is packed with people traveling all over the country. What is going on here? Again, I don’t know, and neither do you. Whether the final global death toll is 50,000 or 500,000 or 5 million, let’s look at some other numbers to get some perspective. My point is NOT that Covid isn’t so bad and we shouldn’t do anything. Bear with me. Last year, according to the FAO, five million children worldwide died of hunger (among 162 million who are stunted and 51 million who are wasted). That is 200 times more people than have died so far from Covid-19, yet no government has declared a state of emergency or asked that we radically alter our way of life to save them. Nor do we see a comparable level of alarm and action around suicide – the mere tip of an iceberg of despair and depression – which kills over a million people a year globally and 50,000 in the USA. Or drug overdoses, which kill 70,000 in the USA, the autoimmunity epidemic, which affects 23.5 million (NIH figure) to 50 million (AARDA), or obesity, which afflicts well over 100 million. Why, for that matter, are we not in a frenzy about averting nuclear armageddon or ecological collapse, but, to the contrary, pursue choices that magnify those very dangers? Please, the point here is not that we haven’t changed our ways to stop children from starving, so we shouldn’t change them for Covid either. It is the contrary: If we can change so radically for Covid-19, we can do it for these other conditions too. Let us ask why are we able to unify our collective will to stem this virus, but not to address other grave threats to humanity. Why, until now, has society been so frozen in its existing trajectory? The answer is revealing. Simply, in the face of world hunger, addiction, autoimmunity, suicide, or ecological collapse, we as a society do not know what to do. Our go-to crisis responses, all of which are some version of control, aren’t very effective in addressing these conditions. Now along comes a contagious epidemic, and finally we can spring into action. It is a crisis for which control works: quarantines, lockdowns, isolation, hand-washing; control of movement, control of information, control of our bodies. That makes Covid a convenient receptacle for our inchoate fears, a place to channel our growing sense of helplessness in the face of the changes overtaking the world. Covid-19 is a threat that we know how to meet. Unlike so many of our other fears, Covid-19 offers a plan. Our civilization’s established institutions are increasingly helpless to meet the challenges of our time. How they welcome a challenge that they finally can meet. How eager they are to embrace it as a paramount crisis. How naturally their systems of information management select for the most alarming portrayals of it. How easily the public joins the panic, embracing a threat that the authorities can handle as a proxy for the various unspeakable threats that they cannot. Today, most of our challenges no longer succumb to force. Our antibiotics and surgery fail to meet the surging health crises of autoimmunity, addiction, and obesity. Our guns and bombs, built to conquer armies, are useless to erase hatred abroad or keep domestic violence out of our homes. Our police and prisons cannot heal the breeding conditions of crime. Our pesticides cannot restore ruined soil. Covid-19 recalls the good old days when the challenges of infectious diseases succumbed to modern medicine and hygiene, at the same time as the Nazis succumbed to the war machine, and nature itself succumbed, or so it seemed, to technological conquest and improvement. It recalls the days when our weapons worked and the world seemed indeed to be improving with each technology of control. What kind of problem succumbs to domination and control? The kind caused by something from the outside, something Other. When the cause of the problem is something intimate to ourselves, like homelessness or inequality, addiction or obesity, there is nothing to war against. We may try to install an enemy, blaming, for example, the billionaires, Vladimir Putin, or the Devil, but then we miss key information, such as the ground conditions that allow billionaires (or viruses) to replicate in the first place. If there is one thing our civilization is good at, it is fighting an enemy. We welcome opportunities to do what we are good at, which prove the validity of our technologies, systems, and worldview. And so, we manufacture enemies, cast problems like crime, terrorism, and disease into us-versus-them terms, and mobilize our collective energies toward those endeavors that can be seen that way. Thus, we single out Covid-19 as a call to arms, reorganizing society as if for a war effort, while treating as normal the possibility of nuclear armageddon, ecological collapse, and five million children starving. The Conspiracy Narrative Because Covid-19 seems to justify so many items on the totalitarian wish list, there are those who believe it to be a deliberate power play. It is not my purpose to advance that theory nor to debunk it, although I will offer some meta-level comments. First a brief overview. The theories (there are many variants) talk about Event 201 (sponsored by the Gates Foundation, CIA, etc. last September), and a 2010 Rockefeller Foundation white paper detailing a scenario called “Lockstep,” both of which lay out the authoritarian response to a hypothetical pandemic. They observe that the infrastructure, technology, and legislative framework for martial law has been in preparation for many years. All that was needed, they say, was a way to make the public embrace it, and now that has come. Whether or not current controls are permanent, a precedent is being set for: The tracking of people’s movements at all times (because coronavirus) The suspension of freedom of assembly (because coronavirus) The military policing of civilians (because coronavirus) Extrajudicial, indefinite detention (quarantine, because coronavirus) The banning of cash (because coronavirus) Censorship of the Internet (to combat disinformation, because coronavirus) Compulsory vaccination and other medical treatment, establishing the state’s sovereignty over our bodies (because coronavirus) The classification of all activities and destinations into the expressly permitted and the expressly forbidden (you can leave your house for this, but not that), eliminating the un-policed, non-juridical gray zone. That totality is the very essence of totalitarianism. Necessary now though, because, well, coronavirus. This is juicy material for conspiracy theories. For all I know, one of those theories could be true; however, the same progression of events could unfold from an unconscious systemic tilt toward ever-increasing control. Where does this tilt come from? It is woven into civilization’s DNA. For millennia, civilization (as opposed to small-scale traditional cultures) has understood progress as a matter of extending control onto the world: domesticating the wild, conquering the barbarians, mastering the forces of nature, and ordering society according to law and reason. The ascent of control accelerated with the Scientific Revolution, which launched “progress” to new heights: the ordering of reality into objective categories and quantities, and the mastering of materiality with technology. Finally, the social sciences promised to use the same means and methods to fulfill the ambition (which goes back to Plato and Confucius) to engineer a perfect society. Those who administer civilization will therefore welcome any opportunity to strengthen their control, for after all, it is in service to a grand vision of human destiny: the perfectly ordered world, in which disease, crime, poverty, and perhaps suffering itself can be engineered out of existence. No nefarious motives are necessary. Of course they would like to keep track of everyone – all the better to ensure the common good. For them, Covid-19 shows how necessary that is. “Can we afford democratic freedoms in light of the coronavirus?” they ask. “Must we now, out of necessity, sacrifice those for our own safety?” It is a familiar refrain, for it has accompanied other crises in the past, like 9/11. To rework a common metaphor, imagine a man with a hammer, stalking around looking for a reason to use it. Suddenly he sees a nail sticking out. He’s been looking for a nail for a long time, pounding on screws and bolts and not accomplishing much. He inhabits a worldview in which hammers are the best tools, and the world can be made better by pounding in the nails. And here is a nail! We might suspect that in his eagerness he has placed the nail there himself, but it hardly matters. Maybe it isn’t even a nail that’s sticking out, but it resembles one enough to start pounding. When the tool is at the ready, an opportunity will arise to use it. And I will add, for those inclined to doubt the authorities, maybe this time it really is a nail. In that case, the hammer is the right tool – and the principle of the hammer will emerge the stronger, ready for the screw, the button, the clip, and the tear. Either way, the problem we deal with here is much deeper than that of overthrowing an evil coterie of Illuminati. Even if they do exist, given the tilt of civilization, the same trend would persist without them, or a new Illuminati would arise to assume the functions of the old. True or false, the idea that the epidemic is some monstrous plot perpetrated by evildoers upon the public is not so far from the mindset of find-the-pathogen. It is a crusading mentality, a war mentality. It locates the source of a sociopolitical illness in a pathogen against which we may then fight, a victimizer separate from ourselves. It risks ignoring the conditions that make society fertile ground for the plot to take hold. Whether that ground was sown deliberately or by the wind is, for me, a secondary question. What I will say next is relevant whether or not Covid-19 is a genetically engineered bioweapon, is related to 5Grollout, is being used to prevent “disclosure,” is a Trojan horse for totalitarian world government, is more deadly than we’ve been told, is less deadly than we’ve been told, originated in a Wuhan biolab, originated at Fort Detrick, or is exactly as the CDC and WHO have been telling us. It applies even if everyone is totally wrongabout the role of the SARS-CoV-2 virus in the current epidemic. I have my opinions, but if there is one thing I have learned through the course of this emergency is that I don’t really know what is happening. I don’t see how anyone can, amidst the seething farrago of news, fake news, rumors, suppressed information, conspiracy theories, propaganda, and politicized narratives that fill the Internet. I wish a lot more people would embrace not knowing. I say that both to those who embrace the dominant narrative, as well as to those who hew to dissenting ones. What information might we be blocking out, in order to maintain the integrity of our viewpoints? Let’s be humble in our beliefs: it is a matter of life and death. The War on Death My 7-year-old son hasn’t seen or played with another child for two weeks. Millions of others are in the same boat. Most would agree that a month without social interaction for all those children a reasonable sacrifice to save a million lives. But how about to save 100,000 lives? And what if the sacrifice is not for a month but for a year? Five years? Different people will have different opinions on that, according to their underlying values. Let’s replace the foregoing questions with something more personal, that pierces the inhuman utilitarian thinking that turns people into statistics and sacrifices some of them for something else. The relevant question for me is, Would I ask all the nation’s children to forego play for a season, if it would reduce my mother’s risk of dying, or for that matter, my own risk? Or I might ask, Would I decree the end of human hugging and handshakes, if it would save my own life? This is not to devalue Mom’s life or my own, both of which are precious. I am grateful for every day she is still with us. But these questions bring up deep issues. What is the right way to live? What is the right way to die? The answer to such questions, whether asked on behalf of oneself or on behalf of society at large, depends on how we hold death and how much we value play, touch, and togetherness, along with civil liberties and personal freedom. There is no easy formula to balance these values. Over my lifetime I’ve seen society place more and more emphasis on safety, security, and risk reduction. It has especially impacted childhood: as a young boy it was normal for us to roam a mile from home unsupervised – behavior that would earn parents a visit from Child Protective Services today. It also manifests in the form of latex gloves for more and more professions; hand sanitizer everywhere; locked, guarded, and surveilled school buildings; intensified airport and border security; heightened awareness of legal liability and liability insurance; metal detectors and searches before entering many sports arenas and public buildings, and so on. Writ large, it takes the form of the security state. The mantra “safety first” comes from a value system that makes survival top priority, and that depreciates other values like fun, adventure, play, and the challenging of limits. Other cultures had different priorities. For instance, many traditional and indigenous cultures are much less protective of children, as documented in Jean Liedloff’s classic, The Continuum Concept. They allow them risks and responsibilities that would seem insane to most modern people, believing that this is necessary for children to develop self-reliance and good judgement. I think most modern people, especially younger people, retain some of this inherent willingness to sacrifice safety in order to live life fully. The surrounding culture, however, lobbies us relentlessly to live in fear, and has constructed systems that embody fear. In them, staying safe is over-ridingly important. Thus we have a medical system in which most decisions are based on calculations of risk, and in which the worst possible outcome, marking the physician’s ultimate failure, is death. Yet all the while, we know that death awaits us regardless. A life saved actually means a death postponed. The ultimate fulfillment of civilization’s program of control would be to triumph over death itself. Failing that, modern society settles for a facsimile of that triumph: denial rather than conquest. Ours is a society of death denial, from its hiding away of corpses, to its fetish for youthfulness, to its warehousing of old people in nursing homes. Even its obsession with money and property – extensions of the self, as the word “mine” indicates – expresses the delusion that the impermanent self can be made permanent through its attachments. All this is inevitable given the story-of-self that modernity offers: the separate individual in a world of Other. Surrounded by genetic, social, and economic competitors, that self must protect and dominate in order to thrive. It must do everything it can to forestall death, which (in the story of separation) is total annihilation. Biological science has even taught us that our very nature is to maximize our chances of surviving and reproducing. I asked a friend, a medical doctor who has spent time with the Q’ero on Peru, whether the Q’ero would (if they could) intubate someone to prolong their life. “Of course not,” she said. “They would summon the shaman to help him die well.” Dying well (which isn’t necessarily the same as dying painlessly) is not much in today’s medical vocabulary. No hospital records are kept on whether patients die well. That would not be counted as a positive outcome. In the world of the separate self, death is the ultimate catastrophe. But is it? Consider this perspective from Dr. Lissa Rankin: “Not all of us would want to be in an ICU, isolated from loved ones with a machine breathing for us, at risk of dying alone- even if it means they might increase their chance of survival. Some of us might rather be held in the arms of loved ones at home, even if that means our time has come.... Remember, death is no ending. Death is going home.” When the self is understood as relational, interdependent, even inter-existent, then it bleeds over into the other, and the other bleeds over into the self. Understanding the self as a locus of consciousness in a matrix of relationship, one no longer searches for an enemy as the key to understanding every problem, but looks instead for imbalances in relationships. The War on Death gives way to the quest to live well and fully, and we see that fear of death is actually fear of life. How much of life will we forego to stay safe? Totalitarianism – the perfection of control – is the inevitable end product of the mythology of the separate self. What else but a threat to life, like a war, would merit total control? Thus Orwell identified perpetual war as a crucial component of the Party’s rule. Against the backdrop of the program of control, death denial, and the separate self, the assumption that public policy should seek to minimize the number of deaths is nearly beyond question, a goal to which other values like play, freedom, etc. are subordinate. Covid-19 offers occasion to broaden that view. Yes, let us hold life sacred, more sacred than ever. Death teaches us that. Let us hold each person, young or old, sick or well, as the sacred, precious, beloved being that they are. And in the circle of our hearts, let us make room for other sacred values too. To hold life sacred is not just to live long, it is to live well and right and fully. Like all fear, the fear around the coronavirus hints at what might lie beyond it. Anyone who has experienced the passing of someone close knows that death is a portal to love. Covid-19 has elevated death to prominence in the consciousness of a society that denies it. On the other side of the fear, we can see the love that death liberates. Let it pour forth. Let it saturate the soil of our culture and fill its aquifers so that it seeps up through the cracks of our crusted institutions, our systems, and our habits. Some of these may die too. What world shall we live in? How much of life do we want to sacrifice at the altar of security? If it keeps us safer, do we want to live in a world where human beings never congregate? Do we want to wear masks in public all the time? Do we want to be medically examined every time we travel, if that will save some number of lives a year? Are we willing to accept the medicalization of life in general, handing over final sovereignty over our bodies to medical authorities (as selected by political ones)? Do we want every event to be a virtual event? How much are we willing to live in fear? Covid-19 will eventually subside, but the threat of infectious disease is permanent. Our response to it sets a course for the future. Public life, communal life, the life of shared physicality has been dwindling over several generations. Instead of shopping at stores, we get things delivered to our homes. Instead of packs of kids playing outside, we have play dates and digital adventures. Instead of the public square, we have the online forum. Do we want to continue to insulate ourselves still further from each other and the world? It is not hard to imagine, especially if social distancing is successful, that Covid-19 persists beyond the 18 months we are being told to expect for it to run its course. It is not hard to imagine that new viruses will emerge during that time. It is not hard to imagine that emergency measures will become normal (so as to forestall the possibility of another outbreak), just as the state of emergency declared after 9/11 is still in effect today. It is not hard to imagine that (as we are being told), reinfection is possible, so that the disease will never run its course. That means that the temporary changes in our way of life may become permanent. To reduce the risk of another pandemic, shall we choose to live in a society without hugs, handshakes, and high-fives, forever more? Shall we choose to live in a society where we no longer gather en masse? Shall the concert, the sports competition, and the festival be a thing of the past? Shall children no longer play with other children? Shall all human contact be mediated by computers and masks? No more dance classes, no more karate classes, no more conferences, no more churches? Is death reduction to be the standard by which to measure progress? Does human advancement mean separation? Is this the future? The same question applies to the administrative tools required to control the movement of people and the flow of information. At the present writing, the entire country is moving toward lockdown. In some countries, one must print out a form from a government website in order to leave the house. It reminds me of school, where one’s location must be authorized at all times. Or of prison. Do we envision a future of electronic hall passes, a system where freedom of movement is governed by state administrators and their software at all times, permanently? Where every movement is tracked, either permitted or prohibited? And, for our protection, where information that threatens our health (as decided, again, by various authorities) is censored for our own good? In the face of an emergency, like unto a state of war, we accept such restrictions and temporarily surrender our freedoms. Similar to 9/11, Covid-19 trumps all objections. For the first time in history, the technological means exist to realize such a vision, at least in the developed world (for example, using cellphone location data to enforce social distancing; see also here). After a bumpy transition, we could live in a society where nearly all of life happens online: shopping, meeting, entertainment, socializing, working, even dating. Is that what we want? How many lives saved is that worth? I am sure that many of the controls in effect today will be partially relaxed in a few months. Partially relaxed, but at the ready. As long as infectious disease remains with us, they are likely to be reimposed, again and again, in the future, or be self-imposed in the form of habits. As Deborah Tannen says, contributing to a Politico article on how coronavirus will change the world permanently, ‘We know now that touching things, being with other people and breathing the air in an enclosed space can be risky.... It could become second nature to recoil from shaking hands or touching our faces—and we may all fall heir to society-wide OCD, as none of us can stop washing our hands.” After thousands of years, millions of years, of touch, contact, and togetherness, is the pinnacle of human progress to be that we cease such activities because they are too risky? Life is Community The paradox of the program of control is that its progress rarely advances us any closer to its goal. Despite security systems in almost every upper middle-class home, people are no less anxious or insecure than they were a generation ago. Despite elaborate security measures, the schools are not seeing fewer mass shootings. Despite phenomenal progress in medical technology, people have if anything become less healthy over the past thirty years, as chronic disease has proliferated and life expectancy stagnated and, in the USA and Britain, started to decline. The measures being instituted to control Covid-19, likewise, may end up causing more suffering and death than they prevent. Minimizing deaths means minimizing the deaths that we know how to predict and measure. It is impossible to measure the added deaths that might come from isolation-induced depression, for instance, or the despair caused by unemployment, or the lowered immunity and deterioration in health that chronic fear can cause. Loneliness and lack of social contact has been shown to increase inflammation, depression, and dementia. According to Lissa Rankin, M.D., air pollution increases risk of dying by 6%, obesity by 23%, alcohol abuse by 37%, and loneliness by 45%. Another danger that is off the ledger is the deterioration in immunity caused by excessive hygiene and distancing. It is not only social contact that is necessary for health, it is also contact with the microbial world. Generally speaking, microbes are not our enemies, they are our allies in health. A diverse gut biome, comprising bacteria, viruses, yeasts, and other organisms, is essential for a well-functioning immune system, and its diversity is maintained through contact with other people and with the world of life. Excessive hand-washing, overuse of antibiotics, aseptic cleanliness, and lack of human contact might do more harm than good. The resulting allergies and autoimmune disorders might be worse than the infectious disease they replace. Socially and biologically, health comes from community. Life does not thrive in isolation. Seeing the world in us-versus-them terms blinds us to the reality that life and health happen in community. To take the example of infectious diseases, we fail to look beyond the evil pathogen and ask, What is the role of viruses in the microbiome? (See also here.) What are the body conditions under which harmful viruses proliferate? Why do some people have mild symptoms and others severe ones (besides the catch-all non-explanation of “low resistance”)? What positive role might flus, colds, and other non-lethal diseases play in the maintenance of health? War-on-germs thinking brings results akin to those of the War on Terror, War on Crime, War on Weeds, and the endless wars we fight politically and interpersonally. First, it generates endless war; second, it diverts attention from the ground conditions that breed illness, terrorism, crime, weeds, and the rest. Despite politicians’ perennial claim that they pursue war for the sake of peace, war inevitably breeds more war. Bombing countries to kill terrorists not only ignores the ground conditions of terrorism, it exacerbates those conditions. Locking up criminals not only ignores the conditions that breed crime, it creates those conditions when it breaks up families and communities and acculturates the incarcerated to criminality. And regimes of antibiotics, vaccines, antivirals, and other medicines wreak havoc on body ecology, which is the foundation of strong immunity. Outside the body, the massive spraying campaigns sparked by Zika, Dengue Fever, and now Covid-19 will visit untold damage upon nature’s ecology. Has anyone considered what the effects on the ecosystem will be when we douse it with antiviral compounds? Such a policy (which has been implemented in various places in China and India) is only thinkable from the mindset of separation, which does not understand that viruses are integral to the web of life. To understand the point about ground conditions, consider some mortality statistics from Italy (from its National Health Institute), based on an analysis of hundreds of Covid-19 fatalities. Of those analyzed, less than 1% were free of serious chronic health conditions. Some 75% suffered from hypertension, 35% from diabetes, 33% from cardiac ischemia, 24% from atrial fibrillation, 18% from low renal function, along with other conditions that I couldn’t decipher from the Italian report. Nearly half the deceased had three or more of these serious pathologies. Americans, beset by obesity, diabetes, and other chronic ailments, are at least as vulnerable as Italians. Should we blame the virus then (which killed few otherwise healthy people), or shall we blame underlying poor health? Here again the analogy of the taut rope applies. Millions of people in the modern world are in a precarious state of health, just waiting for something that would normally be trivial to send them over the edge. Of course, in the short term we want to save their lives; the danger is that we lose ourselves in an endless succession of short terms, fighting one infectious disease after another, and never engage the ground conditions that make people so vulnerable. That is a much harder problem, because these ground conditions will not change via fighting. There is no pathogen that causes diabetes or obesity, addiction, depression, or PTSD. Their causes are not an Other, not some virus separate from ourselves, and we its victims. Even in diseases like Covid-19, in which we can name a pathogenic virus, matters are not so simple as a war between virus and victim. There is an alternative to the germ theory of disease that holds germs to be part of a larger process. When conditions are right, they multiply in the body, sometimes killing the host, but also, potentially, improving the conditions that accommodated them to begin with, for example by cleaning out accumulated toxic debris via mucus discharge, or (metaphorically speaking) burning them up with fever. Sometimes called “terrain theory,” it says that germs are more symptom than cause of disease. As one meme explains it: “Your fish is sick. Germ theory: isolate the fish. Terrain theory: clean the tank.” A certain schizophrenia afflicts the modern culture of health. On the one hand, there is a burgeoning wellness movement that embraces alternative and holistic medicine. It advocates herbs, meditation, and yoga to boost immunity. It validates the emotional and spiritual dimensions of health, such as the power of attitudes and beliefs to sicken or to heal. All of this seems to have disappeared under the Covid tsunami, as society defaults to the old orthodoxy. Case in point: California acupuncturists have been forced to shut down, having been deemed “non-essential.” This is perfectly understandable from the perspective of conventional virology. But as one acupuncturist on Facebook observed, “What about my patient who I’m working with to get off opioids for his back pain? He’s going to have to start using them again.” From the worldview of medical authority, alternative modalities, social interaction, yoga classes, supplements, and so on are frivolous when it comes to real diseases caused by real viruses. They are relegated to an etheric realm of “wellness” in the face of a crisis. The resurgence of orthodoxy under Covid-19 is so intense that anything remotely unconventional, such as intravenous vitamin C, was completely off the table in the United States until two days ago (articles still abound “debunking” the “myth” that vitamin C can help fight Covid-19). Nor have I heard the CDC evangelize the benefits of elderberry extract, medicinal mushrooms, cutting sugar intake, NAC (N-acetyl L-cysteine), astragalus, or vitamin D. These are not just mushy speculation about “wellness,” but are supported by extensive research and physiological explanations. For example, NAC (general info, double-blind placebo-controlled study) has been shown to radically reduce incidence and severity of symptoms in flu-like illnesses. As the statistics I offered earlier on autoimmunity, obesity, etc. indicate, America and the modern world in general are facing a health crisis. Is the answer to do what we’ve been doing, only more thoroughly? The response so far to Covid has been to double down on the orthodoxy and sweep unconventional practices and dissenting viewpoints aside. Another response would be to widen our lens and examine the entire system, including who pays for it, how access is granted, and how research is funded, but also expanding out to include marginal fields like herbal medicine, functional medicine, and energy medicine. Perhaps we can take this opportunity to reevaluate prevailing theories of illness, health, and the body. Yes, let’s protect the sickened fish as best we can right now, but maybe next time we won’t have to isolate and drug so many fish, if we can clean the tank. I’m not telling you to run out right now and buy NAC or any other supplement, nor that we as a society should abruptly shift our response, cease social distancing immediately, and start taking supplements instead. But we can use the break in normal, this pause at a crossroads, to consciously choose what path we shall follow moving forward: what kind of healthcare system, what paradigm of health, what kind of society. This reevaluation is already happening, as ideas like universal free healthcare in the USA gain new momentum. And that path leads to forks as well. What kind of healthcare will be universalized? Will it be merely available to all, or mandatory for all – each citizen a patient, perhaps with an invisible ink barcode tattoo certifying one is up to date on all compulsory vaccines and check-ups. Then you can go to school, board a plane, or enter a restaurant. This is one path to the future that is available to us. Another option is available now too. Instead of doubling down on control, we could finally embrace the holistic paradigms and practices that have been waiting on the margins, waiting for the center to dissolve so that, in our humbled state, we can bring them into the center and build a new system around them. The Coronation There is an alternative to the paradise of perfect control that our civilization has so long pursued, and that recedes as fast as our progress, like a mirage on the horizon. Yes, we can proceed as before down the path toward greater insulation, isolation, domination, and separation. We can normalize heightened levels of separation and control, believe that they are necessary to keep us safe, and accept a world in which we are afraid to be near each other. Or we can take advantage of this pause, this break in normal, to turn onto a path of reunion, of holism, of the restoring of lost connections, of the repair of community and the rejoining of the web of life. Do we double down on protecting the separate self, or do we accept the invitation into a world where all of us are in this together? It isn’t just in medicine we encounter this question: it visits us politically, economically, and in our personal lives as well. Take for example the issue of hoarding, which embodies the idea, “There won’t be enough for everyone, so I am going to make sure there is enough for me.” Another response might be, “Some don’t have enough, so I will share what I have with them.” Are we to be survivalists or helpers? What is life for? On a larger scale, people are asking questions that have until now lurked on activist margins. What should we do about the homeless? What should we do about the people in prisons? In Third World slums? What should we do about the unemployed? What about all the hotel maids, the Uber drivers, the plumbers and janitors and bus drivers and cashiers who cannot work from home? And so now, finally, ideas like student debt relief and universal basic income are blossoming. “How do we protect those susceptible to Covid?” invites us into “How do we care for vulnerable people in general?” That is the impulse that stirs in us, regardless of the superficialities of our opinions about Covid’s severity, origin, or best policy to address it. It is saying, let’s get serious about taking care of each other. Let’s remember how precious we all are and how precious life is. Let’s take inventory of our civilization, strip it down to its studs, and see if we can build one more beautiful. As Covid stirs our compassion, more and more of us realize that we don’t want to go back to a normal so sorely lacking it. We have the opportunity now to forge a new, more compassionate normal. Hopeful signs abound that this is happening. The United States government, which has long seemed the captive of heartless corporate interests, has unleashed hundreds of billions of dollars in direct payments to families. Donald Trump, not known as a paragon of compassion, has put a moratorium on foreclosures and evictions. Certainly one can take a cynical view of both these developments; nonetheless, they embody the principle of caring for the vulnerable. From all over the world we hear stories of solidarity and healing. One friend described sending $100 each to ten strangers who were in dire need. My son, who until a few days ago worked at Dunkin’ Donuts, said people were tipping at five times the normal rate – and these are working class people, many of them Hispanic truck drivers, who are economically insecure themselves. Doctors, nurses, and “essential workers” in other professions risk their lives to serve the public. Here are some more examples of the love and kindness eruption, courtesy of ServiceSpace: Perhaps we're in the middle of living into that new story. Imagine Italian airforce using Pavoratti, Spanish militarydoing acts of service, and street police playing guitars -- to *inspire*. Corporations giving unexpected wage hikes. Canadians starting "Kindness Mongering." Six year old in Australia adorably gifting her tooth fairy money, an 8th grader in Japan making 612 masks, and college kids everywhere buying groceriesfor elders. Cuba sending an army in "white robes" (doctors) to help Italy. A landlord allowing tenants to stay without rent, an Irish priest's poem going viral, disabled activitists producinghand sanitizer. Imagine. Sometimes a crisis mirrors our deepest impulse -- that we can always respond with compassion. As Rebecca Solnit describes in her marvelous book, A Paradise Built in Hell, disaster often liberates solidarity. A more beautiful world shimmers just beneath the surface, bobbing up whenever the systems that hold it underwater loosen their grip. For a long time we, as a collective, have stood helpless in the face of an ever-sickening society. Whether it is declining health, decaying infrastructure, depression, suicide, addiction, ecological degradation, or concentration of wealth, the symptoms of civilizational malaise in the developed world are plain to see, but we have been stuck in the systems and patterns that cause them. Now, Covid has gifted us a reset. A million forking paths lie before us. Universal basic income could mean an end to economic insecurity and the flowering of creativity as millions are freed from the work that Covid has shown us is less necessary than we thought. Or it could mean, with the decimation of small businesses, dependency on the state for a stipend that comes with strict conditions. The crisis could usher in totalitarianism or solidarity; medical martial law or a holistic renaissance; greater fear of the microbial world, or greater resiliency in participation in it; permanent norms of social distancing, or a renewed desire to come together. What can guide us, as individuals and as a society, as we walk the garden of forking paths? At each junction, we can be aware of what we follow: fear or love, self-preservation or generosity. Shall we live in fear and build a society based on it? Shall we live to preserve our separate selves? Shall we use the crisis as a weapon against our political enemies? These are not all-or-nothing questions, all fear or all love. It is that a next step into love lies before us. It feels daring, but not reckless. It treasures life, while accepting death. And it trusts that with each step, the next will become visible. Please don’t think that choosing love over fear can be accomplished solely through an act of will, and that fear too can be conquered like a virus. The virus we face here is fear, whether it is fear of Covid-19, or fear of the totalitarian response to it, and this virus too has its terrain. Fear, along with addiction, depression, and a host of physical ills, flourishes in a terrain of separation and trauma: inherited trauma, childhood trauma, violence, war, abuse, neglect, shame, punishment, poverty, and the muted, normalized trauma that affects nearly everyone who lives in a monetized economy, undergoes modern schooling, or lives without community or connection to place. This terrain can be changed, by trauma healing on a personal level, by systemic change toward a more compassionate society, and by transforming the basic narrative of separation: the separate self in a world of other, me separate from you, humanity separate from nature. To be alone is a primal fear, and modern society has rendered us more and more alone. But the time of Reunion is here. Every act of compassion, kindness, courage, or generosity heals us from the story of separation, because it assures both actor and witness that we are in this together. I will conclude by invoking one more dimension of the relationship between humans and viruses. Viruses are integral to evolution, not just of humans but of all eukaryotes. Viruses can transfer DNA from organism to organism, sometimes inserting it into the germline (where it becomes heritable). Known as horizontal gene transfer, this is a primary mechanism of evolution, allowing life to evolve together much faster than is possible through random mutation. As Lynn Margulis once put it, we are our viruses. And now let me venture into speculative territory. Perhaps the great diseases of civilization have quickened our biological and cultural evolution, bestowing key genetic information and offering both individual and collective initiation. Could the current pandemic be just that? Novel RNA codes are spreading from human to human, imbuing us with new genetic information; at the same time, we are receiving other, esoteric, “codes” that ride the back of the biological ones, disrupting our narratives and systems in the same way that an illness disrupts bodily physiology. The phenomenon follows the template of initiation: separation from normality, followed by a dilemma, breakdown, or ordeal, followed (if it is to be complete) by reintegration and celebration. Now the question arises: Initiation into what? What is the specific nature and purpose of this initiation?The popular name for the pandemic offers a clue: coronavirus. A corona is a crown. “Novel coronavirus pandemic” means “a new coronation for all.” Already we can feel the power of who we might become. A true sovereign does not run in fear from life or from death. A true sovereign does not dominate and conquer (that is a shadow archetype, the Tyrant). The true sovereign serves the people, serves life, and respects the sovereignty of all people. The coronation marks the emergence of the unconscious into consciousness, the crystallization of chaos into order, the transcendence of compulsion into choice. We become the rulers of that which had ruled us. The New World Order that the conspiracy theorists fear is a shadow of the glorious possibility available to sovereign beings. No longer the vassals of fear, we can bring order to the kingdom and build an intentional society on the love already shining through the cracks of the world of separation.

@Scholar This is an awesome question! There is a 'you' that resists reality. You might feel uncomfortable when meditating; like your ass hurts. This is resistance. You might feel pissed off by what someone did. That's resistance. Resistance is essentially, life is not going the way your agenda and that voice in your head wants. And this is why you don't like some things. And this is why you like some things. Its all about you. You are why you like some things and not other things. But then there is not things you like or dislike, but things that happen naturally. Things where the present moment autonomously and spontaneously strives towards. Like seeing an elderly person walking on the street with heavy bags, and maybe the urge to help them. Or seeing someone suffocating, and having the urge to call 911/000. Or seeing someone about to commit suicide, and having the urge to help them through it. You don't like doing that, there's just a flow to do it. It happens naturally. And this is what passion is (or should be hahaha, for some its not). Passion is what flows, what draws God in effortlessly.

Leo, then what's even the point to live and put up with aging, illnesses etc, indeed, why not just commit suicide? What was even the point in us existing as humans? We live as humans, we enjoy/suffer and we die/cease to exist? That's it?

@Leo Gura Does this mean that others are real, but only as ME/CONSCIOUSNESS/GOD/LOVE? You said "this Being does not exclude other beings", yet the suffering your prior words have caused me led me to believe that my personal self/mind is all that exists, that other beings are not real, only my personal self is real. Now you're saying, or at least seemingly suggesting, that all other beings are real, but only AS ME. If I truly am "intimate with all living beings", does that not mean they're real? Because my consciousness is the exact same as theirs? Do they not also exist as the same consciousness that I am? How could I be intimate with someone that doesn't exist? I am beyond exhausted of these mind games. You don't realize how close I have come to suicide because of what you've said. If oneness is the Truth, then surely my suffering is your suffering, is it not?

@zeroISinfinity Wow that's crazy. So how do you do the inversion? Do you have to be good person in devil land before God lets you wake up? So all people who commit suicide are ahead of me on the path because they are already with god.

In order to show off some validity of my post I present the first insight I got from 40 trips first. Reasons why I did the monster 100+ trips and the substance I used are presented afterwards. I got insights related to the mind, healing, women-sex and politics. I summarised all insights into 4 things: MIND, HEALING and the requirements to do healing, WOMEN, POLITICS First 40 trips: 1) The structure of the mind is magical. So magical that it becomes unique, individual. You can accurately write down the basic difference between 2 mind types or multiple mind types making lazy people admit that it's because of their laziness that their life is shabby, murderes and criminals admit to themselves they deserve their penalties but you cannot penetrate in one's way in a "technical" way in order to understand why they function the way they function. There's a simple but hard to accept reason for it which is the intelligent resistance - the wall God creates for his "complete" product. To a lesser extent, we can call it one's comfort zone even though it's just half true. "Resistance is the truest name". God puts resistance upon the mind at the last step. The mind is completely created. Mind becomes God when this resistance is pushed too much and gets destroyed. My language is abstract and I know it but I actually don't want to diminish the value of the insight by simple description. Intro : Reasons why I did 100 trips in 20 days, preparation and settings. It feels like it is intelligently predetermined as fuck, in other words, Reality is the intelligent push to me (1) Honestly I have not reached the level of consciousness where one becomes conscious of (1) yet. I just feel it may be the case. 1st reason: it's a long story but I don't want to waste your time hearing me brag about my accomplishment. I tripped with the substance I created. The excitement was irresistible. I never thought I could accomplish it since I don't know much about chemistry. It was not easy but I did it! The money I had to spend to do tripping went down a lot. I somewhat regret having shared a formula to create this substance with an acquaintance even though it's not guaranteed he can create my unique substance. It's obvious I am still a selfish ego. Albeit it's partly because there some dangerous side-effects about the substance and I am afraid other people cannot handle them. Some properties of my substance: For people who trip for pleasure my substance can fill their mind/brain totally with suicidal thoughts. ( no joke ) One "ironic" yet but interesting property of this substance is at a small dose one the side-effect is hardest to take but one can keep his selfish ego to avoid visual hallucinations but valuable insights still come to his dualistic consciousness in the unique way that he can clearly know those insights are not from the thinking pattern his brain does but what he becomes conscious of. My 1st rule is never take this substance when I am sad. 2nd reason is Sadness and frustration. I violated my 1st rule but it's what happened. Corona crippled businessess around the world. I have been out of work for 20 days. I feel pretty sad because I am already poor. Right now 2 dollars is the maximum I can spend a day. After having cried a few days I decided to do tripping. I think it's the legitimate way to feel better. My careful preparation and settings for the trip remained the same though. Enough for the intro, I will tell you guys what I got from 100+ trips ( I always prepare questions I need the answers for before I trip) 40 trips (2): You can have healing ability after the chakra in your chest is opened. This chakra is love chakra. I opened it and healed my bone injury and all the muscle discomfort. However, I don't like to love everything so I wished it to close and it closed. Don't be deluded into thinking this healing is omniscient. I still could not use it to completely heal my scars. My healing ability has not totally lost after this chakra is closed. I am still using it to heal my scars and there are signs it works. Muscle discomfort is healed pretty fast. I guess there are degrees of healing ability. And right now I cannot heal others yet. I'm trying to achieve it following the formula I got from tripping. The 1st requirement for healing to work is you have to truly love the injured part on your body. )For someone who severly hates his life and thinks about suicide all the time healing ability never comes to him). 2nd requirement is you have to really respect the alive nature of that body part, treat it like a person, a person that got hurt because of your fault. My substance is not the substance I got healing ability from. It just strengthens it. I believe if you are serious enough about healing, you can get it through other psychedelics. (3): Woman is a duality that already exists inside a man. An ordinary man does not know the priorities of woman types he himself already set. So usually men loves to have sex with a lot of women but in the end he still feels suffering. A woman would like to show her body to a man who show signs he's not interested in her body but for a man who uses petty tricks to look into her shirt she looks down on him. (4) Politics: Good results from a policy usually go unseen by majority of people even though they benefit from it. I got many insights about political tactics used by politicians but this is a sensitive area so I will not present them here

@Consilience Thanks. I should clarify, I never had a serious intention to kill myself. But I felt so bad and I had no solution. It was just emotional pain and I didn't know what to do. I want to live, I know life can be amazing and I have faith in a brighter future. I've never seriously struggled with suicide so this was new to me. I've tripped multiple times and I've had some break throughs into positive feelings but I just haven't done monster doses and I don't know what to expect,

@Nahm Also. during my trip i was really questioning my own existence. It doesn't make sense. I don't know why I'm here. If i were really god why would i put myself through this. It doesn't make sense. Infinitne intellgience, inifninte creative ability, why wouldn't I make it easier to just feel good and connected. Why would i veil myself from myself, this shit makes no sense to me. I felt a few moments during the trip where i felt like I was going to be gone forever. Whatever path i was going down was the end, and i wouldn't exist anymore. It was really clear when i got stuck on a paradox. It felt like the purpose of this whole life was to just wake up from the dream, but then i was afraid because it was basically suicide and that would be the end of the dream. Like i don't want to die. But should i want to die? Like maybe suicide is good, i have no idea. I always prided myself on not being suicidal, but maybe that's a mistake?

In my recent psychedelic experience (=p.e.) I really wanted to have deep insights into suffering and misery. After a friend of mine recently had his first p.e. and confronted himself with his shadow, I felt inspired to look at the dark side oft he moon, too. Raised in a christian kind of fundamentalist environment, beeing the only one of my generation to distance myself from church, I had to clear my mind from indoctrination. The hardest pill to swallow has always been the possibility to go to hell eternally, because I didn’t accept Jesus as my lord and savior and the bible as absolute truth. So I took the challenge to confront myself with hell, suffering and my inner demons during this p.e. Surprisingly I had no kind of bad trip, but deep insights into what suffering really is, as well as some interesting synchronicities I really want to share with you: Enforcing my sensory perception, the drug made me very aware of a little itch at my thigh. Trying to awake my inner demons and imagining what it’s like to be in hell, the itch kind of disturbed me to focus on the actual stuff. My attention more and more turned to the itch which became so intense until I couldn’t resist scratching myself. A moment later it started somewhere else to itch and I was a little annoyed by the distraction, as I actually wanted to confront me with the heavy stuff, not beeing distracted by a little itch. After scratching, it started somewhere else again, of course. So I mindlessly walked into the bathroom, intensively scratching myself all over the body, with the intention to get rid of the itching or at least to become aware of the fact that it doesn’t help at all so I would be able to resist the temptation. I wanted to see my inner demons, to know what hell and suffering is about, not wasting my trip scratching myself, I thought. Then I looked into the mirror when the curtains fell down. I saw myself completely red with almost bloody stripes all over the body. Seeing this annoyed, desperate, restless red devil in front of me witch his claws hurting himself in order to end the pain, I realized what confronting my inner demons really meant. „Only hurt people hurt people“ came into my mind. My whole body was littered with itch, in retrospect I know now that it was the beginning of something like hives (illness). I walked back to my bed and lay down, intending to completely stop scratching, having seen through the game. But the itching came back much stronger than before. Some parts of the body started to twitch around and after a while I gave up and started to scratch me again. The whole itching and scratching phases went on for almost eight hours, always in a harsh struggle between resisting and giving in to the temptation. Though I realized the mechanism, I wasn’t strong enough to embody the truth I have grasped. The whole time I introspected myself and wrapped my mind around what this experience wanted to tell me, so I took lots of notes between the phases: Hell is a state of consciousness in which you desire immidiate reward/release above everything else. Every scratching (effort and temptation) in order to end the itching (restlessnes and suffering) worsens the situation, because by whirling around one maintains the murky water instead of letting the dirt settle by itself. It is the attempt to end the necessary process of learning and growing prematurely. Learning and growing happens the more one is able to let go of the illusion that anything finite could ever satisfy the infinite desire for love, truth, peace and happiness. The human nature is at some level between heaven and hell, a stage where he can take huge steps towards both extremes by either attaching himself to finite objects or adjusting himself to god/the absolute by letting go of all illusions. Each person is on a different level, which reach from the desire to hurt others (and therefore the Self) coming from the deeper wish to end ones own excruciating existence, to the desire to accumulate knowledge to understand reality. In deed, even knowledge can be a temptation, and also lots of high quality spiritual teachers may sacrifice precious resources (time and energy) or their critical mind (and start again to believe in things the don’t know) in order to accumulate finite knowledge, instead of practicing the highest teaching – love. It’s not that knowledge is bad, but it may be just a stage which one can outgrow – but beware not to end the process prematurely! The persuit of rational wisdom may be a trap as everything else, just on a higher level, capturing philosophers and scientists, attaching them to the believe they could escape the necessity of selfless love. Every single of these hell-to-heaven-levels consists of some specific temptations, and at the beginning it feels like heaven, until the long-term downsides become obvious. As with a drug like heroin, you get used to the high so the finite object cannot truly satisfy you. With every time you take it you become more addicted and the vicious circle begins. It only ends when you stop keeping it alive, by redirecting your awareness to the next level or in general to the direction to god/heaven/the absolute (the Self, the resting point of your consciousness, the no-agent-observer, the state of peace, oneness and perfection). By withdrawing your attention and energy you take away its foundation so it loses the power to control you. The latest point to be capable to do so is when you finally break down and give up everthing (which explains some enlightenment experiences at the suicide level). I think that the Buddha, the truly awakened and enlightened one is someone who has outgrown these potentially hellish stages. He has seen completely through the illusion and keeps calm inside no matter what happens around him, for he knows that every reaction to a temptation creates more hell, and the natural growing process shifts him towards heaven, so no interference is needed. He doesn't pull on the grass in order to make it grow. It’s like god always offering you increasingly better stuff in order to make you happier, but if you take it and mistake it for the best/absolute/end, god/the infinite becomes the devil/finite. A true Buddha can even resist the temptation of knowledge so he can live the authentic spontanious life, not caring about yesterday or tomorrow, but deeply caring about the here-and-now, which is recognized as perfect smooth eternity, living life full of selfless love. As Gautama Siddharta said: „There are only two mistakes one can make along the road to truth: Not starting, and not going all the way.“ So don’t stop on a heaven-like level, for it becomes hell one day. Now I realized which heaven/hell lots of christians and religious people may probably experience, for they are attaching themselves to limited beliefs about god and reality. May everyone be blessed and see through the illusions, not trying to avoid a step or end it prematurely. Just let go, be calm and accept reality as it is (which does abolutely not mean to stop acting, actually you are created as an active creature with the intention to let grow love, so take care of your garden and weed the weeds!) There’s so much more to say but I already took much of your time (thank you), so I would like to read your thoughts about it. Just write anything meaningfull that comes into your mind, I love to get inspired.

I just want someone to put me out of this misery. I finally understand suicide lol. It's not that people want to die, it's that they want there old way of living to die. They want to find a way of living that feels good. That's the point of suicide, and the negative experience in genreral, it provides contrast/context from which to choose the next experience.

@Emerald @Serotoninluv@Apparition of Jack Look at the global situation. The developed countries (though they are not actually developed) have extreme wealth inequality, corruption, homelessness, health care (people die of illnesses because they can't afford it), 8-5 low salary jobs, depression, mass murder and self-murder (suicide) suffering or problems. The developing countries (though every country is actually developing), also have those problems (but to a more serious level) except mass murder, but with additional mass starvation and extra judicial murder. What else can be worse than this? Yes, Bernie can shake up the status quo from "above" but it will be certainly very slow, especially on a global scale. AS mentioned in one of my posts, it can take hundreds or thousands of years because societal evolution depends on the "consciousness" of the majority. Are you willing you to be that little girl whose mother recently died because she was forcefully sent home by the hospital because she couldn't afford the hospital bills anymore? Are you willing to be that wage slave who is living paycheck to paycheck but seriously thinking of murdering herself because she has anxiety and depression but can't receive therapy because of she is just one paycheck away from homelessness? Think, be sensitive, and embody their suffering. There are millions of these little girls and wage slaves around the world. Are you saying we should wait for hundreds of years for a significant global change to happen and relieve them of their suffering? The global situation is already and has been for many decades very ugly and unacceptable. It is a very slow, painful death. The world needs to take a gamble. It's sensible to try Trump and Stage Red because immediate change is needed.

@Serotoninluv But everything is situational. What is important now is immediate change, not change from "below' or "above". Look at the global situation. The developed countries (though they are not actually developed) have extreme wealth inequality, homelessness, health care (people die of illnesses because they can't afford it), 8-5 low salary jobs, depression, mass murder and self-murder (suicide) suffering or problems. The developing countries (though every country is actually developing), also have those problems except mass murder, but with additional mass starvation and extra judicial murder. What else can be worse than this? Yes, Bernie can shake up the status quo from "above" but it will be certainly very slow, especially on a global scale. AS mentioned in my most recent thread, it can take hundreds or thousands of years because societal evolution depends on the "consciousness" of the majority. The global situation is very ugly and unacceptable. It is a very slow, painful death. The world needs to take a gamble. It's sensible to try Trump and Stage Red because immediate change is needed.

@fridjonk No I’m 20 years old and my brain isn’t fully developed so Why would I want to risk damaging it? also, the endless use of psychedelics just promotes endless seeking. I’m not saying they can’t be helpful, but if every week someone’s saying “it can go deeper” “I need another trip” when does it end? Absolute peace and happiness is the synonym for realising the absolute. Why would I need to take a psychedelic when I’ve realised the truth of my own being and abide with absolute peace and happiness? to be honest, you know my age and shouldn’t be recommending Psychedelic Drugs to anyone under the age of 25, it’s literally a matter of time before all this drug taking results in some sort of repercussions whether it’s someone completely destroying their mental health, or someone actually dying, I genuinely feel there needs to be some guidelines put in place on this forum. Enlightenment isn’t an experience, psychedelic insights can help you, but without embodiment they won’t allow you to abide as the self. Im not meaning to sound harsh and I know you meant it as a joke, but I literally say someone saying how he almost committed suicide on a trip, then went on to recommend other people take the drug and handcuff themselves, like really? You don’t NEED psychedelics to realise you’re own being! @VeganAwake I’ve come to the realisation maybe we’re more on the same page than we think but just use different words and phrases to point out the exact same thing! it’s THIS! And like you say you’re then free to express THIS however you want, whether that’s with cookies on the couch, or going political, or becoming a teacher, we can express it however we want, but one thing will remain the same no matter what we do. Love.