These are the best posts on this site as well as those containing the core ideas, grouped loosely by category below.
Personal Development
- Playing the Game: How to Reconcile Spirituality and Self Improvement – How I reconcile the seeming tension between self improvement (constructive focus on the self) and spirituality (understanding of no-self)
- Doing Costless Good – How and why it makes sense to look for opportunities to do good at no cost to oneself
- How to Experience Heavenly Glory – About accessing the inherent meaning in everyday experience
Spirituality
- No-Self as Counterintuitive Truth – Explanation and argument for the idea of no-self, which I believe to be the core insight of spiritual practice
- How to Directly Experience Nonduality – What nonduality means (non)conceptually, and 3 ways to bring about nondual states
- Consciousness and its Contents – An alternative conception of subjective experience based on the idea of no-self
Psychedelics
- How to Have Mystical Experience: A Research-Based Guide – A comprehensive guide to having mystical experience, based on psychedelic research
- Mystical Experience & Psychedelics: Meaningful, Measurable, Life Changing – A literature review of sorts covering psychedelic research and mystical experience
- How Psychedelics Take Us Back to the Garden of Eden – Playing around with our evolutionary history, Adam & Eve in Genesis, and psychedelic phenomenology
- 7 Remarkable Things I Learned at Psychedelic Science 2017 – What I learned at the Psychedelic Science 2017 conference in Oakland, CA
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Meditation
- The Practical Benefits of Meditation – Positive phenomenal changes I’ve noticed from about 6 years of practicing meditation
- A Simple Body Awareness Meditation in 5 Steps – A basic meditation you can do anytime; good for beginners
- Why Life Tastes Better with Meditation – Explains many of the benefits of meditation and the “gift” that it gives you
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Health & Diet
- How to “80/20” Your Nutrition with 5 Simple Rules – How I think about nutrition; how to get 80% of the benefits of good nutrition by implementing the most essential 20% of information
- How to Make Tasty Salads for Better Health, Energy & Digestion – Ingredients and preparation for delicious and healthy salads
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Big 5/OCEAN
- How to Manage High Openness & High Conscientiousness – Strategies I’ve found useful for managing these opposing personality traits
INTJ
Myers-Briggs has issues but I have still found it valuable as an interpretive framework. I test as an INTJ, a type with a unique set of gifts and challenges, and here is a long post detailing my thoughts on that.
Productivity
- How to Destroy Procrastination in 10 Days – Review of a short book that was extremely effective in helping me overcome terrible procrastination problems
- How to Use Attention to Detail to Improve the Quality of Everything You Build and Make – Breaking down attention to detail as a meta skill; what it actually involves and how and why it’s useful to cultivate
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Lifting Weights & Gaining Muscle
Although now I mostly do other forms of exercise, lifting weights was a big part of my life for 5-6 years. Here’s a before and after picture:
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- How to Lose Fat & Get Lean Faster – Methods for fat loss that you can combine and stack to lose fat quickly and with relative ease
- My Awful Deadlift Mistake (and What You Can Learn From It) – Several years ago I badly injured my back deadlifting; this post explains how to avoid injury and deadlift safely
Misc.
More links:
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See an archive of posts by category
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Aaron Nesmith-Beck personal website
Atman Retreat – The legal psychedelic retreat I founded
Contact me directly here