How I accidentally discovered the pill to enlightenment but I wouldn’t recommend it.
Brief teaser...
Eastern enlightenment is not what you think. I mean, maybe it is. But it’s probably not. There’s a reason it’s so elusive, and there’s a reason that it hasn’t joined western science and the western world the way that curiosity and discovery have as a driving force.
This is the story of my mistake accidentally discovering enlightenment.
February 2017
I was noticing some weird symptoms. I felt cold. Which was strange because I have never been cold. Nicknames include “fire” and “hot hands”, my history includes a lot of bad jokes about how I am definitely on fire. I am known for visiting the snow in shorts and a t-shirt. I hit 70kg, The least fat I have ever had in my life. And that was the only explanation I had. I asked a doctor about it, I did some reading – circulation problems. I don’t have circulation problems at the age of 25. I am more fit than I have ever been in my life. I look into hesperidin (orange peel) and eat myself a few whole oranges including peel. No change. I look into other blood pressure supplements, other capillary modifying supplements… Other ideas to investigate. I decided I couldn’t be missing something because there was nothing to be missing. I would have read it somewhere already. So I settled for the obvious answer. Being skinnier was making me colder.
Flashback to February 2016
This is where it all begins. I move out of my parents house into an apartment with a girl I have been seeing for under 6 months. I weigh around 80kg (that’s 12.5 stones or 176 pounds or 2822 ounces for our imperial friends). Life happens and by March I am on my own. I decide to start running. Make myself a more desirable human.
I taught myself a lot about routines and habits and actually getting myself to run. Running is hard. Actually, running is easy. Leaving the house is hard. But I work that out too.
For the rest of the post please visit http://bearlamp.com.au/how-i-accidentally-discovered-the-pill-to-enlightenment-but-i-wouldnt-recommend-it/
For what it’s worth, I had a super negative reaction to being sent away to a different page to read the rest. I didn’t want to downvote the post into the negative, but I did feel a sense of betrayal.
Also curious why you are hesitant to post the whole thing on LW, and whether that might point to a problem in our site design.
I’m not Elo, but, as a content creator, there’s really no replacement for owning my own content publishing platform (rather than being tied to someone else’s). I can edit post formatting as I see fit, change old posts, create arbitrary complicated/interactive link structures, and add signup forms, things I’m selling, or other forms of reputation and sales monetization. I also never have to worry about a platform suddenly locking me out or deleting old posts, or otherwise doing things in their interest and not mine.
Yeah, all of these are things that I think are reasonable motivations (and I am fine with link posts, just not in the way they were done here, which felt sudden and abrupt to me). I am curious whether any of those apply to Elo, since we have the ability to mitigate most of them.
Loved the narrative structure; lots of interesting insights that I felt like I was having right along with you. Towards the end you start making some pretty strong claims though; do you have any articles handy that measure the effects of vasodilation on psychological outlook?
That was quite fun to read actually :) And reminded me that I have to sort out my non-existent exercise routine.
As to its connection to enlightenment if enlightenment really exists.… I would personally recommend reading books from Idries Shah. Maybe his psychologically framed works first ‘Knowing how to Know’ and ‘Learning how to Learn’. If you are overly intellectual you are going to attempt rejecting them quickly. This is by design. The books play with over-intellectualisation and over-emotionality in an instrumental manner. The content is not always something to learn but something to observe yourself against. Read at least a few of the books in full, suspending judgment, to get a glimpse of what is really going on with your experiments.
Good luck :)