📌2024 (starting in February!):
• Impossible Problems and Spiritwork now $1500/hour*
• Anything directly meditation-related is always free (donations gratefully accepted).**
• If you've worked with me prior to Feb 2024, you have Legacy status and nothing changes.*** 1/4
Handful of old studies like this where kids get offered a selection of foods, and they apparently make up their own really weird but medium-run nutritionally complete meals
For the Vitamin A (and D) Toxicity people
This baby was part of a self-feeding study and got no guidance of what foods to eat. He had rickets, so was offered cod liver oil, which he took until he healed, then stopped.
I usually don’t do stuff like this bc I focus on fundamentals, but I tried apolactoferrin as an antiviral once, for ten days, and it made me eat 20-40g extra protein per day while on it, and I’m annoyed to say that it is true that my digestion permanently improved fwiw.
Researchers have called it a “miracle molecule”
It supports digestion through its incredible antibacterial, antifungal, and anti-inflammatory properties.
It’s even treated colon cancer and Crohn’s.
Why LACTOFERRIN might just be the answer to your gut problems:
I’m starting to get a little suspicious that Taoism might be low key the strictly superior product but Buddhism has both extensive technical manuals and better marketing. Buddhism sells the problem and then the solution and Taoism is just like “It’s useless ¯\_(ツ)_/¯"
Once again I am appreciating how the written word automatically pauses when you look away
unlike video and audio
what a great feature five stars kudos to the design team
As best I can tell, I sort of think that "regret" is just a signal that there's relevant learning left to be mined from past experiences, and as far as I can tell, it goes away when that learning is complete. /
Robert Irwin apparently went to a cabin alone and stayed there until he could look at things without the things getting in the way of looking at them or something like that
Starting to suspect that the most straightforward way to make friends with small groups of people, cutting through any and all other complexity, is just to regularly feed them meals prepared by your own hand (can rotate but keep cooking for them until rotation). Deep smthg here.
Seriously what is up with the
All is One
We are all One/the Same
The Source
…
insights??? What is the brain inferring? Something super esoteric or something retrospectively really obvious? I guess not mutually exclusive
untangle your Original Toilet Training Trauma, gain ten IQ points
epistemics are embodied
societal cringe-enforced taboo makes you dumb
scatological deep-dives make you smart. unraveling unspeakable fetishes contain ten IQ points each for the unlocking
I don’t make the rules
I’m starting to suspect that shaking off or working through unhealthy societal and social and familial and religious and financial expectations (which can take decades, at worst) does unleash genius
Meditation is safest when undertaken w a very large surplus—3-15+ years—of health, money/food/shelter, relationship capital& no critical kid duties. Hard to have all this! Insanely privileged & selfish in some ways tbh, and/but also some ppl have no choice but to do it regardless
There's that whole discourse that uses the MCU as one of the main examples of how pop culture currently does "hot" but not "horny."
So here's a Q, what movies or tv shows from the past 70 years—particular scenes, anything—exemplify gracefully navigating aroused or horny? /
Possibly they’re genetically gifted (in addition to doing the work), but I’m p sure this is real. It’s in the deep buteyko lore. I wasn’t able to sustain it bc I had some other health stuff to work out, but I will probably try again if feels good/safe. Incredible feeling to wake
Crazy that I used to sleep 9 hours a night before reducing my average sleep time over 4 hours with Buteyko breathing
I did breathing exercises 1H/day for 2 years. Now only 10 min daily
I have slept 4H30min on average for the last 3 years. Natural waking, no forcing. This month:
if you sit a lot w/o exercising, you slowly lose mitochondrial density, which reduces glucose/fat burn rate, which sheds insulin receptors & increases insulin resistance, to throttle glucose uptake into cells. then you have to eat sugar/fast carbs to have energy → vicious cycle.
I am starting to strongly suspect that a good meditation system ultimately turns you into a horny extrovert with a lot of optionality around “need for cognition.” If your meditation system does not turn you into a horny extrovert possibly return it to the store and get a new one.
Please like this tweet to get in my twitter circle. I'll use it for sending out zoom room password and livestream stuff. Next time I stream or start a zoom room, if you don't see a circle tweet (with a password) closely following a non-circle tweet (with a public link), DM me!
Buddhism: “hanging out with people who want to be happy and who believe it’s possible to be happy, or who are happy, and who want you to be happy and to celebrate being happy together with you,” since ~500 B.C.
A good meditation method (which will be some simplicity on the far side of complexity) will facilitate (1) disclosure of “supramundane” truths, (2) untangling of deepest core childhood misconceptions (like-ability, worthiness, safety), (3) unlock expert mundane skill acquisition.
In high school, our chemistry teacher accidentally wrote on a transparency (I'm old) with permanent marker, instead of dry erase. And then she nonchalantly wiped it off with the right solvent. It was a lightly electric moment for some, a beginning. STEALING FIRE FROM THE GODS
What’s the most polite or respectful (and compact) way to say, in non-professional contexts, “I hear/acknowledge you said something, though I don’t necessarily agree or disagree?” It can be slightly awkward or unusual in phrasing.
I’ve been experimenting with, “I hear you.”
What are examples of "positive masculinity" in tv and especially movies?
Looking *less* for virtue, duty, dominance
and *more* for maturity, wisdom, discretion, optimism, playfulness, compassion, creative/intellectual desire
while preserving worthiness of dignity and respect
🔊I'm soft-launching a meditation podcast today!🔊 There are no posted episodes, yet—but that's where you come in. Please read; action requested (and please RT):
In this day and age, many people learn meditation from MULTIPLE sources (teachers, books, websites, etc.)....
🧵1/8
This is probably wrong, but, so, it's been hypothesized or observed that people keep eating carbohydrates until their protein needs are met.
I hypothesize that people keep eating fat until their (sometimes conditionally) essential fatty acid needs are met. So/
tl;dr: rambing and poorly edited (234 words)
one way to do this is... wait for it... meditate! (all risks and opportunity costs withstanding)
over time you become more and more contingently (as in, not arbitrarily) liquid/fluid---
---in that the interaction between you and the
there comes a moment in a man's life as he holds a shovel and 20 fruit trees in his pocket and thinks "do i want to arrange all the trees on my island in grid fashion"
How does one make formally polite, single-sentence requests in text w/o sounding sarcastic or passive aggressive or exasperated or annoyed?
Could you please do X?
Could you please do X
Please X
Would you X?
Could you X when you Y [best?]
Can English just not do that anymore?
I suspect most people have not only untapped intellectual potential but also untapped “metabolic potential,” effortless mental/physical energy. The latter is a actually intellectually gated, in some sense—energy budgeting is deeply cognitive. Bootstrapping problem if in the red.
I’m srsly thinking of trying a “meditation competition” inspired by Bake Off / Great British Baking Show. I feel like leveraging irony/absurdity (“u have 2 hours remaining!”) of judging (tho precedent tbf) rigorous wu wei + nondoing + inexplicitness wld be illuminating+cool
Periods in my life where I “just didn’t feel like doing anything” were partially due to not eating enough saturated fat e.g. in the form of yogurt, butter, or cheese. (Milk isn’t that healthy.)
“I don’t want to do something that I usually want to do. Am I eating enough cheese?”
I’m sort of MAYBE first-pass self-convinced now that 3 square meals a day is bad & ppl are meant to alternate FEAST-maxx (as many meals as it takes to fill tanks) & FAST-maxx. Key piece is normal diet doesn’t have enough B vitamins & electrolytes+minerals to do it. Maybe.
OK not my usual posting style …………………………………….you are more likely to think that people in general are boring if you mistakenly believe that everyone is the same as you in ways that they are not
an analogy i need to put somewhere: we all sort of start at 5 and meditate our way to 0. and meta protocol is sort of checking where one is twisting and where one is untwisting. and can be doing “blocky” things that are twisting and untwisting in different places...
I am writing a novel:
Warring post-singularity intelligences (because of physics-grade, entropically-based objective morality) need to pseudo-resurrect entire counterfactually historical coherent galactic civilizations seeded by pre-singularity surviving historical records. 1/🧵
I don't teach or practice jhana, and I mostly don't refer to primary source suttas, but I have HUGE respect for original systematic technical jargon and translations. This is cool:
WHAT YOU MIGHT NOT KNOW ABOUT JHĀNA & SAMĀDHI PUBLIC DRAFT (10 FEB 2022)
I'm now starting to strongly suspect that maybe the real enlightenment along the way is being able to have deep friendships with other men and to get married to the woman of my dreams and be best friends with her too (important: can your meditation system do that, if not, etc.)
I am starting to strongly suspect that a good meditation system ultimately turns you into a horny extrovert with a lot of optionality around “need for cognition.” If your meditation system does not turn you into a horny extrovert possibly return it to the store and get a new one.
Four years ago, a scientist I'd never met approached me and said: "I think you are probably wrong."
Instead of arguing, we collaborated on a study to see if humans possess "nutritional wisdom."
What we learned will surprise you! 🧵
I think the evidence is at least not-terrible that "calorie restriction" extends lifespan in humans; but, anecdotally, it also reduces quality of life, and that makes me really suspicious in that, not only might that be a poor tradeoff, but maybe it misses in even better regime.
"I've been doing this guided meditation for months, w/ body scanning, etc. Good stuff."
Me in my head: beginning meditator
"I tried this guided meditation, & it was ok. I tried it again the next day & it didn't work at all. What the fuck"
Me: intermediate or advanced meditator
meditating is ultimately procedural knowledge, like learning to ride a bike, just a hyperbike on an n-dimensional hypersurface and you're the hyperbike and the hypersurface
Eating like 160g of protein per day made me smell bad and was probably straining my kidneys, and I wonder if I had taken some iron that the insatiable protein thing wouldn’t have happened. Also it surprisingly wasn’t too unpleasant but motility reduced by like 70% while on it.
reasoning, for most people. mostly happens in a “virtual machine” and there’s only a trickle from that down to preference changes, behavior changes, and goal changes, even if one comes up with “right answers.”
1/2
If you're solo working w/ Internal Family Systems Therapy (IFS; e.g. w/ the Self-Therapy Jay Earley book) or Feeding Your Demons (see appendices in the back of both books), & they've come to feel laborious or heavyweight, you can do them NONVERBALLY & SELF-TELEPATHICALLY, too.
@acesounderglass
I want to understand how to build communities within capitalism that have abundant resources & also facilitate care & intimacy better than the atomized norm, while still supporting the individual autonomy that was one of the successes of markets (modulo individual exploitation).
Writing, meditation, and experimental design are three examples of things that have essentially no skill ceiling and that one can get better and better at over the course of an entire lifetime without bound
I think we’ve somewhat lost the ability to tell stories where the protagonist, at least initially, lacks the concepts and words to understand and articulate what’s happening to them and around them and why.
hot take: the reason extremely skilled people in the same esoteric field are instantly dismissive of each other (when they are) is because they instantly assume different (and therefore mutually incoherent) meanings for the other person's technical terms than that person uses.
After 8000+ hours of meditation, it seems like I no longer mind writing software (still very modulo opportunity cost), and I no longer mind writing fiction under popular genre conventions.
Now that I’m almost an arhat, it seems like, first pass, all my attention is going towards making hundreds of millions of dollars, hot sex, intimacy, family, extreme non-naive kindness, artificial intelligence,molecular-scale universal construction, worldly power & life extension
I can’t really speak to the quality of this research but it seems to argue towards my conception of intelligence being more software than hardware; that is, learnable software upgrades completely wash out small differences in wiring statistics & ion channel efficiency & whatever/
This is the most mind-blowing thing I have ever read in intelligence research. It completely trolls everything that's conventional wisdom in the intelligence/heritability/g-factor literature
[1]
[2]
Progressive nonverbal consent is clarified thru a) querying eye contact, b) deliberate, clear & telegraphed movement, c) responsive touch, & d) a noncoercive frame (e.g. u don’t have power/resource access over them & ur not physically or logistically blocking them from leaving).
Enlightenment is sort of(!!!!!) literally global fractal (meta-)perfect self kindness (tho words sort of fail here bc centerlessness and bc perfection isn’t real etc etc etc)
Like can you comfort yourself, support yourself, baby yourself, accept yourself? Dovetails/enables.
Yes! >90% of interventions are conservation-of-cope, but some interventions slightly net-decrease the amount of global cope. Meditation is the art of systematically, nonmonotonically decreasing global cope, infinitesimal fraction by infinitesimal fraction, enabled by action and
Sad that ppl are taping their mouths shut when they sleep when instead they could simply meditate 6000 hrs to deconvolve their volitional breathing from their autogenic breathing so as to let CO2 blood levels self-normalize, so as to restore smooth muscle tone & a “magnetic” jaw.
One craving I don't know how to analyze is for burnt/charred food. What's going on with that? Iron? Carbon? Based on its dynamics, it seems to be for a specific nutrient and *not* an evolutionary proxy for something else ("this was cooked and has nutrients"), but maybe not.
I don’t like making “med-“ as an abbreviated prefix for meditation, like “med hall.”
In propose ‘tation. You are a ‘tator. You are ‘tating. Yes yes
Brought to by ‘potle
I haven’t watched thousands of hours of meditation youtube, but I have read thousands of pages of relatively contemporary meditation books. I’m not saying anyone has to do that; my point at least is that meditation or at least learning how to meditate is thinky and conceptual and
most people I know who have made the most “meditative progress” have watched an absurd amount of dharma talks on youtube. Even though they’re really all repeating the same ten points, the thousand and first hour of hearing it seems to have benefit over the thousandth hour
What activities (jobs, careers, hobbies...) require extreme emotional & social health? Like who are the Olympic athletes of emotional intelligence, resilience, self-care, compassion, social grace, win-win, never forgets your birthday, kid’s name, even while everything is on fire?
I'm toying with the idea of suffering as original sin, like the deepest and oldest generational trauma of humanity (or mammals), or something like that. As far as I can tell, suffering is not a foregone "strategy"; it's not baked into the system (pain is, but not suffering).
meditation salesman: *slaps roof of meditation* this bad boy can fit so much fuckin phenomenology in it
reality salesman: *slaps roof of reality* this bad boy can fit so much fuckin WHAT IS in it
awareness salesman: *slaps roof of awareness* this bad boy can fit so much fuckin
@nickcammarata
Speaking super loosely, it seems like the body wants homeostasis & the mind wants enlightenment. Enlightenment is at the bottom of some high-dimensional energy well & the right experiences and meditation (also an experience) unstick from local minima. Enlightenment is “natural.”
I think it’s problematic to recommend meditation for small- and medium-size problems because some percentage of people will encounter debilitating sequelae in their practice that can sometimes only be resolved with much additional practice and further mediate sequelae.