The benefits of meditation can be hard to parse, because the practice is often presented as one of two extremes. Meditation and mindfulness are either a panacea, a kind of one-size-fits-all solution to all life’s problems, or an overhyped fad with little or no tangible benefits. So which is it? As is often … [Read More...] about The Practical Benefits of Meditation
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Psychedelics and Doing Good (Presentation Slides)
I recently gave a talk to Effective Altruism Toronto on psychedelics and doing good. The slides are available on Slideshare, and I've also posted them here along with the event description. The links from each slide are also included below. I hope you find this interesting … [Read More...] about Psychedelics and Doing Good (Presentation Slides)
How to Directly Experience Nonduality
Experiencing nonduality means cultivating or creating a state of nondual awareness. These states are tranquil and open, free of judgement and full of possibility. Anyone can experience nonduality, at any time, and in this article we'll explore three ways of doing so. But … [Read More...] about How to Directly Experience Nonduality
More on Freedom and Fulfilment
How to Make Friends in a New City
For about three years I was a “digital nomad”, travelling around and working online. I moved cities every 4-6 months on average, and so during this period I ended up doing certain things most people only have to do a few times in their lives many, many times. Among these were logistical tasks like finding […]
Psychedelic Research as a Potential Cause Area for Effective Altruism (Presentation Slides)
Back in July I gave a talk on psychedelic research as a potential cause area for Effective Altruism. If you read this blog, you probably know something about psychedelic research already. If not, see the following posts for a refresher: Psychedelics, Personality Traits, and Values: A Closer Look at the Research Mystical Experience & Psychedelics: […]
The Truth Will Set You Free
I wanted to break a bad habit so I sent a friend some money. If I do this thing again any time within the next month, I told him, don’t send the money back. It was a nontrivial sum – enough to deter me, I thought. After all, I’d done this before and it had […]
How to Become a Digital Nomad (OpenSourced.com Interview)
A couple months ago I did an interview with Ian from OpenSourced.com, a website providing information and resources about how to succeed in the new digital economy. The interview was released recently in line with their site launch. We talk about: The benefits of imagining your worst possible future Methods for managing high openness and high […]
How to Choose a “Career” When Facing Massive Uncertainty
I recently received a message from someone who had watched this video and then gone on to read some of my posts. He explained how he felt his personality is similar to mine and asked specifically about career advice – what kind of career might suit someone like him? As it turns out, I’d thought […]
Cryptocurrency Learning & Resources
Update March 2021: This post was written in 2018, and while some of the details may be outdated, the general information is still relevant today. Lately I’ve been spending a lot of time learning about cryptocurrency. The opportunities currently available in this space, it seems to me, are too good to pass up. 2017 was […]
Try Audio Journalling
For both time and convenience’s sake, a few years back I started audio journalling along with writing in a paper journal. What is “audio journalling”? Just recording yourself talking. This is easy with an app on your phone. Audio journalling has some advantages: – It’s faster than typing or writing by hand – You can […]
Final Thoughts for 2017
It’s about that time – I hope you’ve had a good year. Here’s mine in brief: I lived in San Francisco for about four months, which was quite an experience. There I (self) published a book and attended Psychedelic Science 2017. I applied to a master’s program in New York, got in, then was convinced […]
How to Have a Mystical Experience: A Research-Based Guide
After reading the last post on this topic, you may be wondering how to have your own mystical experience. That’s understandable, as mystical experience is widely considered one of the most profound and meaningful someone can have. Mystical experience is characterized by feelings of self-transcendence and direct connection with the divine, a sense of cosmic unity, […]
Choose Beliefs That Are Beneficial (Even If Not Necessarily True)
It has often seemed a hidden truth that people can choose their beliefs much more freely than they think. Beliefs seem or feel concrete, but in reality they are quite arbitrary and liable to change based on time or circumstance. For example, imagine a person born several hundred years ago but otherwise identical to you. […]
How Psychedelics Take Us Back to the Garden of Eden
A few weeks ago I saw a talk by Dr. Robin Carhart-Harris about using psilocybin to treat depression. It was fascinating and the video is below if you want to watch. Carhart-Harris works at Imperial College London as head of their psychedelic research group, and at around 28:00 he says something very interesting that I […]
Mystical Experience & Psychedelics: Meaningful, Measurable, Life Changing
In the last post we saw that there are some significant, lasting changes in personality traits and values that come as a result of psychedelic experience. It appears that the catalyst for these changes is something called mystical experience. What is mystical experience, and why is it so powerful? A mystical experience, as we will […]
Psychedelics, Personality Traits, and Values: A Closer Look at the Research
The last post asked the question: Can we derive values from psychedelic experience? That is to say what, if anything, does psychedelic experience tell us about how to live our lives? Some related questions came up: Is there a common set of values that unites the psychedelic community? To what extent are values actually imbued by the […]
Can We Derive Values From Psychedelic Experience?
It’s a sort of spider-like creature, but a spider with gaping jaws. It crawls towards me on the floor – right towards my face as I’m lying on my back. Now a swarm of these creatures completely cover my body and begin to eat me alive. It started simply from seeing the closet on the […]
How to Manage High Openness & High Conscientiousness
When I was 21 I was living in Thailand and thinking about my future. I thought, I could be the barefoot hippie running in the woods. And that seemed like a viable path for my life. I also thought, I could be the shiny-shoed salesman working in a big city. And that seemed viable too. […]
Self Authoring Review – Jordan Peterson’s Self Authoring Suite
This is a review of Jordan Peterson’s Self Authoring Suite, which includes the Past, Present and Future Authoring programs. This Self Authoring review will cover what the program is, my experience with it and some of the insights I gained, as well as some suggestions if you want to do it too. What is Self […]
How Love Might Feel
It’s funny, I was writing a post by the same name, wondering how you might know if it’s love. How can you be sure, I thought, when you don’t know your subjectivity is the same as someone else’s? How do we know we’re all talking about the same thing? And so on and so forth, philosophizing. […]
Focusing (Introspection Technique)
Hey, you haven’t heard from me in a while. Today I wanted to share something interesting I learned recently – it’s a technique for introspection called Focusing. Focusing was created by a psychotherapist named Eugene Gendlin who, in the 1950s and 60s, did research analyzing thousands of recorded therapy sessions in an attempt to find […]
Explaining Psychedelic Creativity with Sliding Scales of Perception
The more psychedelics I take the more I have the desire to “bring something back” – a little for myself but mostly in order to be better able to convince more people to take psychedelics. The more one can parse out the details of the experience, I think, the more able one is to explain […]
Doing Costless Good
At Psychedelic Science 2017 I briefly interacted with one of the most warm and welcoming women in the world. She was volunteering at the tea house, serving tea at low tables with cushions spread around on the floor. Whenever someone sat down, this woman was ready with tea and a gracious smile. When she smiled at you it was like being […]
Consciousness and its Contents
No-self calls for an alternative model for conceptualizing reality as a human being. This post outlines what I think is the most accurate model for individualized subjective experience – at least the most accurate I have come across so far. In this model experience consists not of a self and that which is other than self, but […]
7 Remarkable Things I Learned at Psychedelic Science 2017
I recently attended Psychedelic Science 2017 in Oakland, California. Overall it was a highly encouraging and impressive event, put on by MAPS and the Beckley Foundation. Here’s what I discovered at the conference. 1) There’s more psychedelic research going on than I’d ever imagined Psychedelic Science 2017 was the largest psychedelic research conference ever. There were […]
No-Self as Counterintuitive Truth
The lack of a substantive self is the core counterintuitive truth of the human experience. No-self runs counter to our habitual thoughts, feelings, and beliefs, as well as our experiences interacting with one another and the world. Nevertheless, it is true. The sense of being a distinct, independent self – a conscious actor who thinks […]