Who here travels to the spiritual realm? This can include any methods such as meditation, theosophy, mysticism, mantra/kirtan, entheogens, astral planes, etc.

Let's try to stay outside the realm of religious dogma here.

*not affilated WRAL

12/2/2015 5:58:30 PM

The only one that's ever been effective for me is entheogens, especially if we are talking about "traveling to other realms." I'm guessing that pegs me as a simpleton?

12/2/2015 8:47:10 PM

i had a buddy from some engineering classes who moved to Asheville or somewhere and got way into this bullshit. what a loon.

12/2/2015 9:22:23 PM

Ayahuasca ftw

12/2/2015 10:45:40 PM

Quote :

"entheogens"

just say drugs dude

12/3/2015 8:47:14 AM

Is this an invitation to join a cult?

12/3/2015 9:53:38 AM

Who wants to talk about holotrophic breathwork

12/3/2015 11:30:57 AM

I'd like to try one of those sensory deprivation tanks.

I'm not sure if this is relevant to the topic: http://www.cnn.com/2015/10/27/health/cryotherapy-death-health-trend/

12/3/2015 12:20:49 PM

^Totally. Just started reading Center of the Cyclone. You can totally go through the bardos while floating and completely sober.

12/3/2015 12:21:56 PM

Also you can get affordable float tanks these days. Most of the places around here won't let you float for more than an hour or two.

12/3/2015 3:47:14 PM

Are we talkin bout like when you get really, really drunk and whatnot?

If so, I reckon I've made my trips. I didn't really enjoy them.

12/3/2015 11:04:57 PM

I've always been intrigued by Transcendental Meditation, especially since so many people have reported it as being very helpful for focus and relaxation. I'm still skeptical, though. Anyone tried it?

12/7/2015 9:24:56 PM

I'm curious about ego death, but I think I got very close to ego death during a dream last year, and I'm honestly afraid to attempt it now. Here is an email I wrote about the dream:

Quote :

"I had this dream that I was working on a virtual reality game where you could drive tiny RC cars around a gigantic household environment. The core gameplay was just another goofy kart racing game, but the visuals would be a quantum leap forward in VR. We had figured out this cool technique where we rendered some key features of the scene in stunning detail based on high-res scans of real environments, but the real innovation was that we'd figured out how to take advantage of pareidolia without a neural interface. So in effect, we were using the player's own brain to flesh out an environment much more believable and complete than any rendering. Setting the game in a house let use take a familiar setting that most players' brains would already have extensive experience with, and blowing that environment up for tiny RC cars let us toy with scale in a way that could really inspire awe. Unfortunately, even though we were able to get the brain to meet us halfway, all the computation that went into rendering the high-res scans and tracking eye movement and whatnot put us a little past the limit of consumer technology. I had figured out a way to relieve some of the overhead on the hardware, though. See, I had realized that in a game where you drive around the race track, there are only so many perspectives you can see, only so many fixed camera points. We didn't need to render a fully 3D environment--we only needed to worry about everything that could realistically be seen along a given track from the cockpit of a car. This meant that we could focus on partial scans of environmental features then dedicate the resources freed up to the pareidolic aspects: neural network simulations based on a broader sample of individuals for more effective immersion, more CPU cycles spent determining what the player was looking at so we could devote more computation to pareidolic simulation around the object, etc. For it to work, though, I needed to pre-compute information about the environment and my perceptions of it by pushing a toy car around a room mocked up to look like sections of the tracks. I had this harness that could feed environmental data straight to my brain, and I could also tweak the parameters of the pareidolic simulation in realtime. So I'm pushing this dumb car around a mostly empty room and fiddling with this helmet, and I see this door. We were only leasing the space, and I'd never had any reason to snoop around or anything, but I was very curious about this door and what was on the other side. We hadn't created any assets for whatever was in the next room, and I wondered what the simulation would use to fill it in. Since we were relying on the brain's ability to fill in the blanks, would I perceive a bedroom or a bathroom or something instead of the kitchen track I was working on? I felt strong apprehension when I touched the doorknob. When I opened the door, there was nothing, but like capital-N Nothing. I couldn't perceive anything, even the absence of anything, and I felt a real visceral fear of it. My brain couldn't even provide rudimentary perceptions of this unknown environment. If I had stepped through the door, I think that not only would I have never been able to find my way back out, I think I would have been annihilated. Cut off from the ability to perceive the world around me, there would be no world, then there'd be no me. I woke up anxious after that."

12/8/2015 10:48:58 AM

I also realized that I was approaching ego death after the opportunity was gone. Pretty much every mystic tradition suggests that on the other side of ego death is samadhi / satori.

12/8/2015 12:13:50 PM

wut

12/8/2015 4:47:01 PM

The gunas dawg

12/8/2015 5:17:47 PM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7_u0reE6bjI

Froshie Exposed????

[Edited on December 9, 2015 at 12:20 PM. Reason : .]

12/9/2015 12:20:22 PM

I like how I'm 420 smoke all day all of a sudden without the slightest hint or mention of drugs.

12/9/2015 2:21:39 PM

We can just ignore this disinformation agent

12/9/2015 2:38:50 PM

http://www.bwgen.com/

i think i got into a good meditation once with this thing like 13 years ago

12/9/2015 2:58:56 PM

I know what meditation is from yoga. What the hell are all the other things??

12/13/2015 6:54:44 PM

^bullshit

12/13/2015 9:28:43 PM

Well, I'll grant you that most things people would describe as spiritual are bullshit. But I don't think ego death is. Your brain does wonderful things every day. Why shouldn't dissolving your sense of self be one of them?

12/14/2015 6:56:00 AM

Ego Death IS what 'enlightenment' is. Is it not? I think that all of the other practices (meditation, etc) are basically ways of training your mind to see what is the Ego or The Judge and what is not. For the record I'm referring to the true meaning of Yoga. Hatha yoga is what white broads do.

[Edited on December 14, 2015 at 10:15 AM. Reason : ]

12/14/2015 10:11:54 AM

*also known as dying

2/25/2016 3:02:05 PM

"Stopping the world"

3/1/2016 2:11:03 PM

People Who Do Drugs, explain wtf astral planes, theosophy, etc. is in practice. If I knew what it was, I wouldn't ask, or would ask The Google.

3/1/2016 7:19:54 PM

Theosophy is attempting to understand through direct experience rather than through language. IMO its what the last line of Prufrock is pointing towards. Its like Zen I suppose in that as soon as you start talking or making judgements about it you're NOT doing it.

I'm not really sure of the uses of Astral Projection but there's a million youtube videos claiming to have various benefits. I'm sure some work and some don't like anything else.

[Edited on March 2, 2016 at 2:02 PM. Reason : ]

3/2/2016 2:00:16 PM

So I guess I shouldn't have made this thread

3/2/2016 3:01:18 PM