I just learned that in Korea, a lot of folk tales start with the line "when tigers used to smoke pipes," sort of equivalent to "once upon a time." https://t.co/P66WappXq7
The thing about Adderall and other stimulants is that they don't actually give you focus. What they do is chemically numb the separation you feel from your work, so it becomes bearable. They're an emotional analgesic - not artificial concentration, but a pharmaceutical merger of Being.
This is also why speed dampens memory. Memory requires contrast, and it's hard for anything to stand out when you are caught up in the effortless, non-conceptual Dao. Longtime meditators will tell you the same thing - the world becomes intensely interesting but your brain treats it all with very low salience. It doesn't grab onto much, if anything. When you're in flow you are in flow, it doesn't occur to you to try to fix anything in time.
For this reason alone, methamphetamine could be considered psychedelic: Mushrooms can show you suchness, MDMA can show you oceanic love, ketamine can show you stillness-in-motion, LSD can bring you to the border of egolessness. Adderall cleanly demonstrates the basic motion of mystical union.
The move here is not to spend your life taking speed to grind code, or ingesting huge doses of psychedelics on weekends to tally up peak experiences. What individuals can do, and what psychiatry could do for the mentally ill in a saner world, is to study the subtle mental motions these drugs incur, and then learn to reproduce them in sobriety.
At that point, you have the insights you need, and you are left only with your karma - understood here as your biological and genetic constraints plus your accumulated psychological habits of compulsion, alienation and willful ignorance. These are the last obstacles remaining to integration and continuing to use drugs unskillfully will only make them harder to overcome.
With respect to Alan Watts, once you get the message, you can hang up the phone.
@pli_cachete It's just as likely that inmates tend to be high in narcissism, which is on the psychopathy scale, and narcissism tends to be fixated on finding hypocrisies and eeking out marginal symbolic social victories to maintain an illusion of self-superiority
Every now and then I look at the way sidewalks are slightly pitched for drainage, and I remember there are thousands of little details like this hidden in plain sight - incalculable love and effort that past generations put into improving life that we now benefit from
Once again: There's no such thing as an NPC. Talk with any "normie" for 10m. They're perfectly capable of thinking for themselves.
They just don't find independent thought as *meaningful* as well-worn discourse grooves, because social pressures are highly emotional for them.
You won't hear this in therapy culture, but something men have known for millennia is that an accusation of cowardice, in the right context, can be a truly empowering act of kindness.
It immediately moves someone out of contraction (fear) into expansion (anger), which they can then choose to use to overcome the frightful object (courage). On the other side of that obstacle, that personal exercise of power, is glory, growth and joy.
(The spirit is first a camel, then a lion, and finally becomes a child.)
Of course you can't do this with most strangers, you have to already have a relationship that can bear occasional antagonism. But between soldiers, say, or spiritual friends, or brothers, it can be a potent reminder of your shared values, a powerful actuator, a poem of the breath that moves the heart toward greater truth.
Years ago, I shot my shot with one of the most beautiful & intelligent women I've ever known. It was unlikely - she was much younger and lived far away - and she did turn me down.
Later, after we'd built a friendship, she told me, "if you hadn't tried, I wouldn't respect you."
If it's not obvious, this is a metaphor for male desire, which is one of the most strictly tabooed drives in contemporary American culture https://t.co/GhtwzQIB1r
There's a moment when a person starts fearing the shoddy, half-lived life of indulged anxiety more than the cold millstone of courage, and something instantly changes in them. They become spiritually taller and three times as attractive
I can't stress this enough
If your spiritual practice is not deepening your honesty, making you braver in relationship, bringing you closer to the beautiful mess of real human connection, it's not helping you
Chasing holiness, righteousness and bliss will keep you shallow
A proper banger tweet now gets 200-400 likes: it is elegant, aristocratic, restrained. A tweet that gets over 1,000 likes is pure opulence, catered to the infantile appetites of the mass market