Would it surprise you to learn I'd recently spent two weeks swing dancing in a pop-up shanty-town in rural Sweden? That I clock up around thirty miles a week on foot in one of the world's largest metropolitan conurbations? That I nearly joined a travelling circus school a few years ago? That I've given solo vocal performances on stage for six nights a week in front of hundreds of people?

With respect, you have no knowledge of my "situation". Please don't presume to offer me advice on the basis of whatever assumptions you've incorrectly conjured up.

they sit down and barely move. That's pretty much the antithesis of what normal people enjoy.

You know there's a huge fraction of the people in the developed world who willingly spend a sizeable fraction of their waking time watching TV, right?

I've downvoted this for being bad advice that I explicitly requested you refrain from giving.

From personal experience the best advice is to date a lot and get hurt a lot and build up a thick enough skin to where you don't care anymore about the rejections.

Worrying about the rejection will only make rejection more likely.

Act as if you are a confident person, then other people think you are confident, and you'll become more confident. While of course actually trying to do things to actually become more capable too, since that improves your confidence as well.

The other ideas here also are good techniques too, but what I found is that when I had been burned enough to stop caring about rejection was when I suddenly became successful at dating. The main thing that had changed was not worrying about it.

A one hour informal lecture by Alexander Shulgin, the chemist who invented most of the modern "psychedelic" and "entheogen" drugs

Part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z14oZqon5NM (others linked from youtube)

He talks about how remarkable it is that a fairly simple molecule such as mescaline can be so transformative to our subjective experience. So what happens when you tweak the molecule in various ways? What do the variations do, in turn? Can we find any rules that govern this relationship?

More generally, his idea is that if we want to study this thing we call "consciousness" --- our subjective experience --- then it's useful to be able to twiddle the knobs a little, and these drugs potentially give us a way to do that. He sees himself as a tool-maker, developing experimental apparatus that other researchers ought to be able to use productively.

This is probably the best all round training article on LW.

Still, I wonder if most people here would/could do even this. Perhaps a video tutorial that explains how to build a tire weight sled and shows someone dragging it would be more accessible. Sled dragging is basically walking on steroids, and as it seems the typical LWer has almost no athletic or movement base whatsoever, walking is a good place to start.

Perhaps even EY could improve his physical health and work capacity with sled dragging, despite his absolutely absurd claim that he is unable to adapt to exercise.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tG1CchZaa0s

This explains how to build a sled.

A while back, some people in this community were pondering whether it "altered the personality forever" which I haven't seen be the case for any of my companions, so unless that came from scientific studies rather than anecdote I think that isn't a concern of the rationalist either.

Studies I have seen reported a positive and long term alteration of mood.

What tricks do you use to control yourself while tripping when you dont have people you trust to help you? I have a inkling that the reason I have a harder time teaching role play control to girls is somewhat to do with gender roles but insofar I've failed at deducing why.

I'm pushing my bodyweight up and increasing strength. On July 22nd 2012 I was back squatting 90 kilos for 3 sets of 5. Last week I was able to squat 297lbs(134.7kg) for a single. I've also pushed my deadlift up to 130k for a single. In this time my bodyweight has increased from 150lbs to 167lbs.

My goals for Halloween are to deadlift 400lbs and squat 315lbs. I'd like to get up to a bodyweight of around 200lbs at 5'8" as a long term goal but that will probably take much longer than till Halloween.

Why?

• Because it's fun
• Because strong men are harder to kill and more useful in general than weak men
• Because I have an undying fear of being a pussy
• Because I want to increase my bone density
• Because I want to compete in Olympic weightlifting competitions one day
• Because I want increased strength for playing BJJ
• Because I want to look AND BE strong and sexy for the wimminz(and possibly some guyz too)

What I will be working on come Fall semester: Intro to Abstract Algebra 501, Advanced Calculus 407 and spanish 101

Why?

• Because I want my mind strong like my body and I need to major in something

Yvain, a professor named Steven T. Katz argues that mystical states of consciousness are always culturally informed, although I personally believe that is incorrect.

The problem talking about this sacred stuff is that a higher state of consciousness is attainable, but the experience of is not rationally describable to people who haven't attained it. There is a severance of rationality that is necessary for the change in consciousness. So we get the Zen koans and the talking burning bushes. Yet the ability to use the tools of rationality re-enters after complete attainment. That is the meaning of “First there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is.” Religious theologies are almost entirely composed of attempts to describe, using the scientisms of their olden days, the conditions in the universe that would explain all of this.

Then, a new circumstance entered. Since the Enlightenment, i.e. over the last 300 years or so, religious institutions have lost the esoteric meaning of theology, and both established religion and science became almost entirely ignorant of the existence of a higher state of consciousness. Or else they call it “hallucinations,” etc. Only very recently has science started to raise questions, largely as a result of the comportment of some psychedelic experience with descriptions from the mystical paths of the Eastern religions. So we will get better descriptions as science starts to investigate. There are accidental and fleeting attainments (such as the girl who has the "brainstorms") vs. practiced and held attainments. This practice is called mysticism. (Zen is historically a mystic path out of Buddhism. Otherwise the mainstream religions have almost entirely eliminated any mention of their mystical practices -- even though these are the bases of their theologies!)

Notice I wrote “some” psychedelic experience. A real problem for scientific analysis via psychedelics is that many or most people who have taken psychedelics believe they have had the full experience, but they have not. This is exhibited in some comments here, and all over the internet, all the time.

For example, most people don't know the following: there are NO hallucinations in the final state. In fact, final transcendence on psychedelics includes a complete return of all rational and calculative faculties. Go check the older clinical literature on this. (This is also indicated by the greatest religious mystics: Sankara, Buddhaghosa, John of the Cross.) Nowadays, most psychedelic users expect to see colored patterns or to get crazy drunk. It's dangerous, it’s debilitating, and it's a shame. One of the biggest mistakes was Tim Leary's promotion of LSD to the streets -- it would have been better to have kept it categorized as a psych med.

People shouldn't get the wrong idea about psychedelics. They are general brain amplifiers. Each session is very likely to be vastly different. One session is not indicative of the effect of the drug, although that is a common opinion. The first few trips can be painful and can even turn into bad trips. A beginner should only do it with a very experienced person who is a guide or a sitter. Psychedelics bring everything to the surface in an abreaction, by an order of occurrence that is specific to each individual, and which includes a lot of repressed memories that cause neuroses and body tics. Without a guide, you can hurt yourself, and you can also get the wrong idea about what is going on, as evidenced in comments all the time.

Back in the days when it was legal, the standard course of LSD psychotherapy was around 5 to 10 sessions, eyes completely covered with a blindfold for most of each session, with earphones piping in instrumental music without lyrics (usually classical.) These sessions were spread out over a year or more, with non-psychedelic therapy sessions in between. Among people who took this route, around 70 percent or so finally came to an "illumination," a full transcendent experience, and their descriptions are very close to those recorded by the great religious mystics. (And as with all the great mystics, there is no particular theological content, but rather a certain realization that all religions are in search of this same state of consciousness.) Cary Grant is a famous example of someone who realized he was a terrible egotist who hadn’t been living a full life, and threw away his day job: i.e. being a movie star.

The best two books on the subject are both by Stanislav Grof: Realms of the Human Unconscious (1975) and LSD Psychotherapy (1980).

But now, most users ruin their value as psych meds or "sacraments." As mentioned above, a lot of people think you can experience it “all” in one session. This never actually happens, and it can actually damage you. You can have a "cosmic" experience -- but it will be without abreacting all of the repressed material in your life, which takes a lot of clock-time to do -- and then you can be more or less stuck in that ego-situation throughout subsequent trips. This is epistemologically hazardous and may lead to a life of related misunderstandings. We all know the case of the insufferable old hippie who tells everybody how to run their lives: a typical casualty.

Another big mistake is taking the early trips without blocking off the outside, so then your environment triggers visual and aural hallucinations. This is enormously counterproductive because it impels you away from necessary introspection, and then you get stuck in that mind-set, and it has reduced many a person’s understanding of psychedelics to "party drugs." Rationality won’t even re-enter, here.

But what can you gain rationally from a real and COMPLETE mystical, “sacred” experience, with or without psychedelics? In essense, there is no change in the tools of analysis, but synthetical ability and the license to creativity are greatly improved.

There is no difference at all in the analytics: splitting, counting, weighing, mathematics all remain the same (although, like the mystic Brouwer, you may come across a new idea of what mathematics is.) It also won't make you a more talented artist, although it can release you from deeply buried and unsuspected inhibitions, to develop your talent. Many people think that there is at least a slight increase in IQ although I am not sure that a full study has ever been done. But there is a known improvement to the synthetic integration of rationality, and some of those people already disposed to having scientific talent are led to reintegrate knowledge beginning from the current historical level of analytic understanding. There are a fair number of self-identified examples. Kary Mullis is one. Psychedelic use was reportedly widespread throughout the early Bay Area / Silicon Valley computer community. Among known historical examples of creativity initiated by a reported mystical state, Descartes is an astonishing case of creative invention and synthesis at the level of primary symbolic understanding.