Leo's Blog: Infinite Insights — Page 114

Here's a little bonus that goes with the The Topic Of Mindfuckery video.

Antichamber is a game designed to fuck your mind. You, as the nameless 1st person protagonist, are dropped into a complex of Escher-like rooms filled with strange-loopy puzzles that bend the laws of physics, geometry, and logic. To me it's a poem to how epistemology, metaphysics, logic, strange loops, nonduality, and infinity work.

I find it sad that as a culture we don't celebrate the mind fuck nearly enough. It is, after all, the very essence of our existence. And yet we bend over backwards to deny it.

Reality is a strange loop.

"A human being is a part of the whole called by us 'universe'. A part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection to a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature and its beauty. Nobody is able to achieve this completely, but the striving to such achievement is in-itself a part of the liberation and a foundation for inner security."

 — Albert Einstein

"The master has still one trick more than he teaches."

-- British proverb

How does one get into psychedelics, practically-speaking? Well, you have to start by doing lots of research to familiarize yourself with the field because mainstream culture certainly never taught this to you. And your buddies in high school or college were very poor sources of information.

So you may think of turning to books, but books about psychedelics aren't very helpful when it comes to practical wisdom, learning tripping protocol, dosages, ROAs, potential complications, etc.

I've found that the field of psychedelics is similar to the field of online marketing or pickup: there are no good books about it because the field is so new and constantly evolving. What's required is getting information directly from the community, directly from people in the field, directly from seasoned psychonauts. Luckily, this is very easy and free!

Here's a handy tip for how to research about any psychedelic in a very pin-pointed and efficient way.

Go to Google and type in:

• site:reddit.com XXXXXX
• site:erowid.org XXXXXX
• site:bluelight.ru XXXXXX
• site:dmt-nexus.me XXXXXX
• site:shroomery.org XXXXXX

Replace XXXXXX with whatever specific thing you're searching for. Here are some examples:

• site:reddit.com 5-meo-dmt vs dmt
• site:reddit.com lsd first time dose
• site:reddit.com mushroom tea
• site:reddit.com dmt breakthrough
• site:reddit.com psychedelics and depression
• site:reddit.com lsd comprehensive guide
• site:erowid.org dmt dosages
• site:erowid.org mescaline trip reports
• site:shroomery.org easiest way to grow mushrooms
• Etc.

You get the idea. Through this process you can basically educate yourself about EVERYTHING you need to know about psychedelics. But it will take you some weeks of reading and sifting. As with any online forum, much of the things you read will be garbage, as many people there are using psychedelics extremely irresponsibly, so you have get good at cross-referencing sources, sorting the wheat from the chaff, and assembling a sort of meta-picture of the field. But in the end, it's fun and interesting to learn about, and it's very worth it over the long-haul as you will become an expert psychonaut within a year or two of tinkering around with this stuff.

This is a great field to study for autodidacts and nerds.

As extra credit, if you're applying the technique from this week's video, I can't recommend enough also looking up your words in Wikipedia. Dictionary look-ups are good, but Wikipedia look-ups are where you can really hit intellectual pay-dirt. You will learn so much more about a concept via Wikipedia.

Which is not to say that Wikipedia has all the answers, or that all the information there is factually correct, or that it's unbiased, or that I'm telling you to believe Wikipedia's answers in lieu of your own contemplations. Wikipedia does tend to have a rationalist, materialist bias, but as a rule-of-thumb, Wikipedia is a good general introduction to a concept. Don't make it the end of your inquiry, but the beginning.

If you spend the next 10 years gradually looking up every existential concept you run across in Wikipedia and following all the links, your understanding of life will start to approach genius-level. So give it a shot. You never know what kind of interesting and invaluable concepts you'll stumble upon.

Here are some examples of words you might want to look up in Wikipedia:

• Experience
• Concept
• Emotion
• God
• Magic
• Awareness
• Enlightenment
• Spirituality
• Absolute
• Wisdom
• Existence
• Reason
• Illusion
• Delusion
• Essence
• Occult
• Insight
• Being
• Entheogen
• Contradiction
• Etc.

Be sure to follow all the branching links that pique your curiosity. That will geometrically multiply your gains.

The problem with Jacques Derrida's deconstruction (and post-modernism as a whole) isn't that it goes too far — as many people think — but that it doesn't go far enough!

This here is a nerdy topic for people who are really into philosophy and nonduality. In the future I will talk at length about the parallels between Derrida's deconstruction and nonduality — I don't have time to explain it all right now — but I wanted to share the following paper with you anyway, because it's so damn profound. Hopefully you can comprehend some of what it says, and if not, don't worry, Derrida is notoriously difficult to read (don't bother reading him), and I will shoot a video about in it the future. It's a bit technical but oh so delicious! This is the kind of stuff that 1 in a billion people understands.

The Deconstruction Of Buddhism, by David Loy

This paper is written by an enlightened Zen practitioner who also happens to have a deep grasp of Derrida's deconstruction! Quite the intellectual feat.

Read the entire thing very carefully.

This paper explains why reality cannot be grasped using philosophy, language, or logic, including Derrida's deconstruction. This 25-page paper puts the nail in the coffin of 2,000 years of Western philosophy.

It is a work of intellectual genius, hitting the nail square on the head.

Enjoy ;)

"That one big question of our origin unites us, not because we agree on the answer, but because we all agree on the importance of finding the answer. Throughout history, it has been the foremost question of people searching for understanding: What is the source from which everything else came? Or, to put it closer to home: What, or to whom, do we owe our existence? This has to be the starting point for people who take life seriously — scientists and non-scientists alike. We cannot rest without the answer because absolutely everything of importance is riding on it. To know where everything came from, is to know where we came from. And where we came from has everything to do with who we are. And who we are has everything to do with how we ought to live."

-- Douglas Axe, Undeniable

"Experience is a hard school, but a fool will learn no other way."

-- Irish proverb

If you're getting discouraged with the nondual path because you just haven't been able to get that huge breakthrough moment, remember, you don't need to wait until enlightenment to start seeing significant benefits from this work.

I've experienced enormous growth in the last year even though I don't consider myself enlightened.

This work is, hands-down, the most significant thing you can do in your life, regardless of who you are. No other accomplishments will come close. Everything you interact with will change in subtle ways. I'm starting to feel like a Jedi attuning to The Force. Your reality gradually becomes mystical in a very tangible and permanent way.

I know what it's like to spend years in self-inquiry and seemingly getting nowhere. The first few years are the hardest because you're not seeing big gains yet.

Keep at it. You are growing even if you don't notice it yet. Remember, gains in this work are highly non-linear.

And if you feel totally stuck in your self-inquiry, psychedelics are the answer. A few trips can save you a few years of mental-masturbation on the cushion.

The easiest thing to take for granted is existence itself, because everything else you know is predicated on it.

This is the tragedy of spirituality: it's the most obvious thing, but 99% of people just overlook it because it is about existence itself, which they take for granted. The game of life — survival — has to do with manipulating the content of existence, without concern for the substance of existence. This makes awareness of existence itself a pointless pursuit from the point of view of the survival paradigm. Since existence is the one common factor behind every piece of content, it is the first thing the mind filters out. For the purposes of survival, what existence is, doesn't matter! Which is why it's so critical to stop letting survival run your life. The game of survival cannot be won.

They call it "transcendence" because you're transcending the game of survival. Survival in this case is everything you do on a weekly basis: getting a coffee at Starbucks, feeding the kids, brushing your teeth, going to work, having sex, shopping for make up, getting a haircut, going to school, watching TV, fixing your car, etc.

For the average person, survival is priority #1. For a spiritually-developed person, BEING is priority #1, and survival is priority #2.

The top reason why psychedelics are so powerful is that they let you see just how much you've been taking existence for granted. Just to get a sense of that is life-transforming because it put the game of survival into proper perspective, proper priority.

Life sucks when your priorities are backwards.