dogson

good raw chocolate is underrated good with dem wack taoist herbs

In my early teens substances were useful, because they gave me a reference point for consciousness. A fish doesn't know it's in water unless it leaps out for a second. In my 20's, weed especially was useful because it "supercharged" my chi, thus letting me see what was really possible. This inspired me to train a lot harder and for longer periods of time. Ultimately everything is a tool to show you your own mind and body. As many have said, you don't need any of it. But I personally believe we're ATTRACTED to certain things specifically because they are useful. IE, I was really into weed for a long time, but I've never touched anything like cocaine. I intuitively knew where the line was. And ultimately, a tool can lose its usefulness. I don't smoke anymore. I drink coffee every so often (with a ton of herbs mixed in) just to see what a jolt of caffeine does to my mind and creativity. Usually I find myself doing deep breathing into my tan tien. Or walking around making epic eye contact with people, sharing my energy and presence. Or writing voraciously. It's good to keep a few key activities on tap... this was the main thing I noticed about "non-cultivator" friends who I used to smoke with. They didn't have any plan, or desire to use that surge in energy for anything. They were only doing it because they felt trapped by their ordinary conscious mind, but didn't think they were capable of ever changing it. That fundamental disempowered mindset is what creates addicts... it's not the compulsion or habit to use a substance per se. It's fundamentally believing that you aren't capable of changing your state at will.

This thread is so funny! From my perspective the focus isn't reality versus illusion, but rather, what should we do about it? I have so many experiences where my emotional energy seems to "create reality." Or to change reality. So these days, I really deeply subscribe to the idea of taking 100% responsibility for everything in life, literally, as though I had created it. I try to love what I'm doing as much as possible, and if something comes up which seems...off? Hard? Annoying? Frustrating? Or other than excellent, I just ask myself, what is it within me that this is happening? and I just say, I love you, I'm sorry, please forgive me. And I feel gratitude for everything around me. Try it, sincerely. Go to a sunday brunch, to a hyper-chaotic restaurant, and just go in there, "I love you." In Huna this is called "cleaning." It's so powerful.

I'm practicing a lot of Ho'oponopono right now - "What is it within me that's causing these people to lash out?" etc. Taking a hard line against the haters never really works... I'm in favor of radical forgiveness. <3

Glastonbury is legendary for these kind of power spots - stonehenge, the various Tor, crop circles, etc. High altitude areas in general have an enormous amount of chi. I moved to Boulder, CO for college when I was 19 and ended up staying for 10 years. The energy there is like doing an hour of chi gong per day just from being up there. Recently, I finally visited Sedona, AZ and definitely felt the Airport Vortex. There were a bunch of annoying tourists, so I didn't stay very long. I camped in a nearby valley and my mind was unbelievably clear. I was up all night, all three nights of that trip, writing voraciously - letters to old friends, future plans... something about the energy of Sedona just made my mind open completely. Volcanic areas are also known for this kind of energy - Mauna Kea in Hawaii is a major "earth chakra" point - Iceland, Bali... these places are world famous for a reason. I was in Egypt for 12/21/12, and toured a lot of the temples. Whatever they were built to do, they're still doing it.

This is my own personal take on taoism, having come close to renouncing the world for these kinds of reasons. The TTC was written thousands of years ago, based on living in harmony with nature. Unfortunately for most people, our modern lifestyle doesn't resemble nature at all. But the urban environment and situations we live in, that's our version of nature. Taoism to me is living in harmony with YOUR way - whatever you love doing, the way you know it works for you, do that to the best of your ability and try to enjoy yourself and appreciate life as much as possible. I got really into the "success technology" of tony robbins, reading books on navy seals and preparedness, business efficiency books, just to introduce myself to that way of thinking, because our world runs on a business model. It started as a "know your enemy" kind of attitude, but I found it actually sharpened my thinking quite a bit. A positive attitude trumps everything - every technique, every supplement, every spiritual practice. If you make up your mind to really enjoy yourself, you're basically invincible - it's like going to the last level of the video game. "Put yourself in heaven this moment" -Hafiz Especially when it comes to reputation in the workplace, if you have a really positive attitude, that ultimately becomes a "can-do" attitude. "Can do" people are usually running the place within a few years. It takes training and effort like any other skill, but I truly, sincerely believe that the laughing sages, the zen lunatics, the wild taoists, their endless positivity and serentiy came about because they made up their damn minds to love life. Part of it comes from cultivating their chi, sure, so they're vital enough to feel good. But it's very mental. What I've found in my own life is, if you live like that, problems and egos become very small things. The idea of the "humble taoist" - the taoist isn't humble out of some moral obligation not to stick out. I just think they're having so much fun, and feeling so good, that the details are just trifles. If you feel good everything around you is beautiful, because you transmute your surroundings with positivity.

i love cold showers! it gives you that exhilarated feeling that you just did something hardcore. and it's actually really, really good for you. http://impossiblehq.com/cold-shower-health-benefits http://betterbodyguide.com/the-extraordinary-benefits-of-cold-showers/ http://www.thefeelgoodlifestyle.com/how-i-crushed-the-30-day-cold-shower-challenge-the-great-life-secret-i-discovered.html

It all started with a cute girl at the smoothie shop offering to put spirulina in my smoothie one day.... now I roll with cases of weird stuff. I also sleep every other day... #worth it

crossing the border into canada with all of it was pretty fun though

pfft it's just a couple packets of stuff I plunge a teaspoon scoop into, and into the blender. Takes longer to make a sandwich.

My general herbal chocolate smoothie: 1.) raw coconut water + flesh as base. *insanely* effective at replenishing male essence. You can get coconut meat in the frozen section of many health food stores now. (goes bad very fast once thawed. use within 2-3 days) 2.) 2 heaping tablespoons Immortal Machine powder. This is basically raw cacao and hemp protein with trace amounts of herbs like maca, ashwagandha, mucuna pruriens, white kidney bean, shilajit, etc. It tastes really good and has no digestive heaviness of most protein powders. Nothing like it on the market that I've found. 3.) Add in various extra stuff based on intuitiion: more ashwagandha, astragalus, reishi, chaga, maca, celtic sea salt, raw honey, cayenne if I'm feelin' spicy. A smoothie like this lasts me hours. sometimes I just drink chaga/reishi tea and hit a few of these smoothies all day, maybe some wild blueberries. Other smoothie/superfood meal combos: 2 TBSP colostrum powder from surthrival.com mixed with frozen wild blueberries. Ridiculous. For sex energy, for muscle tone, and also a really ideal food for fasting, as both colostrum and blueberries are very easy on digestion. If you're starting out on colostrum though, start small and build up over a few weeks, just because it could have mild detox effects. I built up really fast and got addicted. Colostrum is really fatty and creamy and delicious When living in Brooklyn, I practiced sungazing twice a day and basically ate nothing but the colostrum/blueberries combo, the smoothie listed above, and a few raw cacao bars. For a year. Other stuff I find really powerful: royal jelly. powdered or fresh. it's very strong, you only need a pinky size dollop per day. pine pollen. also from surthrival. kinda weird in recipes and stuff, but damn, when i'm eating this regularly and I'm working out, it's intense. I'm a very "yin" chill kinda guy so I make it a point of finding all this stuff just to feel normal. Male energy and drive is really important in making stuff happen in our society. I'm so sensitive to energy I kinda have to be a badass just to walk around downtown in a city. The difference when I'm taking hardcore jing foods is night and day. I'm literally a different person. ~Raw almond butter and cacao~ Bliss. Can fill you up with just a few bites. My "Genius Stack" (also my "reduce sleep by half stack" 1. Bluegreen algae - usually E3Live BrainON in capsule form, or a liquid shot. 2. Krill oil (Mercola brand is my favorite) - 2X capsules. Very high antioxidant, omega 3, very good for eyes due to astaxanthin. 3. Phi sciences Megahydrate - strong antioxidant whose byproduct is water. Very hydrating, very healthy. Keeps the hyperoils like krill or fish oil from oxidizing, so your brain gets 90%+ instead of ~40%. These 3 alone taken together has cut my sleep need in half, assuming I didn't do anything stupid in the day, like drink coffee, eat gross food, etc. ~Bluegreen Algae + Medicinal Mushrooms~ I've found these supplements both supercharge cognition, but from very different directions. Bluegreen algae contains PEA in the blue fraction - the phyco-cyanin - PEA is "the love molecule" also found famously in dark chocolate. PEA is great for your mood but also contains stem cells and precursors to building neurons. IE, when you do something repetitively and build neuropathways - the actual building blocks you need to build those pathways in the brain are in bluegreen algae, in enormous amounts. Medicinal mushrooms works on the nervous system, so it reduces your overall stress level. Less stress changes the way you think and act. So you can do it from the inside out (meditation) or from the "outside in" (herbs that work on the nervous system). As above, so below - when your nervous system is strong, your body doesn't freak out as much about stresses, so neither does your mind. I find these two taken together is really powerful. My favorite is the 5 mushroom blend by Mushroom Science - I think it's called "Immune Support" now. finding link.. Immune Builder. I take 5 at a time right before bed. This is another one that seems to cut my need for sleep. http://www.mushroomscience.com/products/immune-builder/ Finally, coconut oil. topically, internally. It's a cure-all. Especially digestive distress, it's so good. So clean and healing. Use it in the kitchen, in the bathroom, and in the bedroom Enjoy. ~Doggy

I personally believe hate is actually love that's been frustrated from its full expression. Shifting focus gradually away from the source of hatred, to something you still really enjoy doing... that's the best strategy I've been able to come up with.

Orbital Insides One Spot Vajra Whammy (Sacred Relic, Teacher, or Object) Whammy ie Lotus Whammy. Mudra Whammy. etc. anything "whammy" is a winner.

I'm a chi maniac and a sugar crack whore, this shall be my testimonial... As a kid I was fat and always cracked out on soda and cookies and stuff. The turning point was when I switched from Surge to SoBe green tea, cut with ginseng. I feel like this subtly initiated me into herbs, even though I didn't properly get into it until way later. Sugar really helps get me in state for taking massive action. I wrote an 800 page novel in 2 weeks in the lobby of a hotel in Chiang Mai, eating pretty much nothing but sugar wafers and little cookies. It was my ritual. I'd sit down and have a little packet of wafers, and I wouldn't stop typing for three or four hours. I recently got into coffee as herbal medicine. I met David Wolfe and asked him the best way to neutralize the acids in coffee. He said cordyceps and reishi mushroom. So usually I spike my coffee with 3-12 drops of Dragon Herbs reishi extract and some cordyceps powder from three sigma - it's cut with star anise, which is annoyingly sweet. But it helps. They make alkaline coffee now, and this bulletproof stuff with ghee. That's a good transition food, as ghee is a slow burning fat that can hold you over for quite some time. Raw honey of course is the most legit sugar, because it has tons of enzymes. If you want to actually quit sugar but you're addicted, I suggest the honey drinking trick. Buy the most expensive, legit raw honey you can find. Do not buy any from Brazil or China. Brazil is re-branded Chinese honey. China doesn't have honest organic standards, so you don't know what you're getting. Farmers market local is best, local is second best. Get it liquidy and straight up drink it. Water and Minerals Hydrate. I can't stress this enough. If you're going hard on sugar, have a liter of spring water nearby. Sea salt too. Sea salt is like a mineral supplement. Sugar strips minerals from the body (as does coffee, unless you're putting herbs in it). The reason herbs taste bitter is due to their mineral content. This is also why lemon juice, although "acidic" is ultimately alkalyzing to the body. TL;DR I eat a lot of sugar. Mostly raw honey these days. I learned to use it precisely to activate creativity. Drink lots of spring water with a little sea salt and take bitter herbs to mineralize. The reason

Short answer, yes. Absolutely. Longer answer: it helps to specialize. The more you can offer the knowledge you're gaining back, the more people will support you in your dream. I suggest finding the most exciting area: is it martial arts? Nutrition? Superpowers? Something you can stay up late working on and get up early to keep working on. Go hardcore on this area as much as possible, doing anything to evolve your knowledge, whether it's forum rolling or reading books or going to seminars or waiting outside of seminars you can't afford to talk to people on lunch break about what they're learning... the idea is to advance your knowledge to be among the best in the field, and then go one step further. Learn the known field inside and out. Once you're at that level, every next step you go beyond that is a new innovation. If you think like that, you can become world class very quickly. The trick is to pick the most ridiculously exciting area, because it's going to take so much attention that it has to be fun to you, rather than work. If you can do that you will never need to "work." I wish my parents had taught me this when I was watching Highlander at 12 and pretending I was immortal. But I was able to gangster my way into doing this anyway on raw intuition. PM me if you're really serious, we can create a mastermind group and make it happen. Akatsuki style

You're holding back. Steal a motorcycle

Can we get the Lay / Lie edition? =) Good work sir. Make this into an ebook and you could make ONE MILLION DOLLARS *strokes cat*

Yo.

I'm a long-lived immortal. This topic is just so numerically based...so linear. What if years fold back upon themselves, so you take 80 from 120 and fold it back = look like 40 at 120. Soul is double thick. Then you wrap it a few more times, like the paper-folding trick. Eventually you can't fold it in half anymore, it's so dense, but novel qualities come to paper that dense. Bulletproof for instance. So instead of a hard number, something qualitative? Kinesthetic? What about how "plush" we feel? I feel like a mochi sakura blossom ice cream.

I think emitting your qi has everything to do with intent. I've had masters smack me with "healing intent" and I got some kind of empowerment / initiation from it, that basically changed my mindset into a warrior, and I feel like a lot of his experience was communicated through that gesture. He's from a hawaiian lineage where teachers pass on kinetic knowledge to students like that. And I've also sent just pure intent to people very strongly across distance with great effect, usually healing intent. Although I admit to having a few experiences transmitting other than positive energy and that gets results too. I really think we're meant to be able to create anything through our will, energy, intent. The question is what do you want to create? Just do it…. just experiment wildly, anything new that was ever created was done that way, in that spirit of, why not? Let's see what happens.

Hai everyone <3 I've been getting really deep into biohacking , minimalism, and the art of streamlining my life in general. I find that the "peak performance" / hacker mindset is in many ways directly opposite the chi cultivators, in terms of pacing. The biohacker often lives a frenetic, coffee-fueled lifestyle crammed full of to do items, while the cultivator at least energetically is seeking, and forgive me for grossly simplifying… peace. I think both are crucial life skills for a non-hermit who wants to thrive in our society. I'd love to hear any bums who study both sides of this (forgive me for saying "sides" so dualistically, they just feel energetically opposite to me) ---- is this too freakish? Anyone? Bueller?

Will Smith is pretty straight up immortal too, although his utterance of "Oh, HELL no" in every movie is a bit suspect.

Dreambliss, hey buddy. Respect for bringing sincerity and honesty here. In my experience, we are enlightened 100% all the time. It's like one of those salt lamps that you're supposed to leave on all the time. And then we drape a bunch of random stuff ON TOP OF THE LAMP, like Cindy Crawford centerfolds, the newest Batman trilogy, Liam Neeson gets draped on there, the Nissan GT-R "NISMO" edition, credit ratings, the karma from your Whole Foods Market peanut butter puffins, which secretly has GMO canola oil in it, stale air from being inside all day, EMF waves, random aggression from dudes like me blasting Skrillex as they roar past your block IN their Nissan GT-R (full disclosure), and finally, SPIRITUAL BOOKS WHICH MAKE YOU THINK ABOUT ENLIGHTENMENT INSTEAD OF EXPERIENCING IT I think that spiritual books could be the most dangerous thing ever. Really. If I had focused on becoming insanely good at playing music, for example, instead of reading taoist and zen and occult and metaphysical books from 13, I would have a huge family of people and I could be touring and offering value, and I wouldn't bother with all this crap, and it would be a good life. Tyler Durden: "You have to give up. You have to realize that someday you will die. Until you know that, you are useless." Meaning.............understand that your mind state will be totally different 15 minutes from now. Trying to figure it out is just chasing your own tail. Just give up. <3

Greetings telos. First place I'd look is to your diet. Are you getting enough healthy fats in your diet? This is crucial for cognition. There are lots of ways to add them in. If you're a tea or coffee drinker, the current trend is "Bulletproof coffee" which uses grass-fed ghee and MCT oil, which is a condensed form of coconut oil. This is supremely powerful for cognition, and the high quality fat also gives great energy for several hours. And it trains your body to burn fat for calories. I'm a biohacker, so a lot of my advice comes with the caveat - everyone has a different biology, a different diet, a different mindset. But I try to offer a lot of options. In my own struggles, I always feel better knowing I have a lot of options to try. Krill oil is good, especially with megahydrate, which is a high-grade antioxidant. Whenever you take refined oils, a portion of them oxidize in your system, so you don't get maximum bioavailability. But megahydrate keeps it from oxidizing, so you get closer to 90% instead of 50-60%. When fasting or eating minimally, I've also found megahydrate to cut my need for sleep down dramatically. What else... pranayama of course, in the freshest air you can get. Hydrating is really important. I live in Boulder up at 6,000 feet, so it's very dry at altitude, and I find that if I'm not hitting liter bottles of water continuously, my performance suffers. Also, read, man. Read all kinds of wild stuff. When I'm working on a novel, I keep books on architecture around. Because it stimulates a different aspect of my brain. A book gives you the ability to think like someone else for a while, and I find this totally addictive. Poetry is good for stimulating the imagination. Sudoku and word finds have helped me with dream recall. The point is to just be interested in things. Binge on information that you're curious about, and it will light up your brain more and more. Neuroplasticity is so cool. I personally believe the mind has the ability to keep growing forever, like that big pink monster in Akira, except less gross, and more on the psychic level. I try not to post links to other sites very often, but the subreddit on Nootropics and biohacking is a fun conversation I drop into every once in a while, even though this is more toward the hard geek-mode side of things: http://www.reddit.com/r/Nootropics/ Also, a note on fish oil - I suggest avoiding it unless it's extremely high-grade (pharmaceutical grade) because fish holds a LOT of toxins in their liver, which is what's used for the oil. And also because this oil is highly volitile, and will get damaged (oxidized) in processing, so a great deal of what you get is rancid. Which is why people get the fish oil burps, etc. A company called Dr. Dave's makes very high grade stuff, I just ordered it to see if it's legit or not. But krill oil is super legit and very good for eyesight also. I go with Mercola's just because I know it's on point. Feel free to PM if you wanna geek about brain cognition and meditation and various stuff. I'm super into it.

Okay, I know this sounds trollish, but I really want to get people's experiences. My fundamental understanding, beyond anything, is that Taoism is about harmony with nature - with the actual natural world, and with our inner nature as beings, and discovering how deep that goes. Much as there are many sects and schools of Buddhism, and how saying you are a "Buddhist" isn't really saying much (Zen? Vajrayana? Hinayana?) does the label "Taoist" mean anything? Would a true Taoist even think in those terms? I'm working on a book about taoism right now, and I'd really value some feedback on this. What does it mean to follow Taoism in the modern world? Especially in regards to technology and engaging with the modern world, pop culture, etc on its own terms. *braces for some hazing*