I started about 1.5 years ago and it has been great. Strength training + cardio, planned by someone else, on a schedule, guided by a coach, with peers that encourage and motivate you. It pretty much addresses all of the psychological reasons people normally quit going to the gym after a month.
The fact that I still get snail mail spam catalogs in my mailbox each day, with no mandated option to opt-out, I see no way that marketers will respect DNT. The gov't seems to believe that the economy relies on its ability to market to consumers, even if they don't want to be targeted.
Ah yes, until now no one has had the idea to abuse comment forms and Web forums to promote products and services. You could become rich with this unique idea.
Reminds me of Richard Feyman taking LSD. He said he had an incredible breakthrough and a moment of pure clarity on a problem he had been working on mid-trip, only to come down and realize his breakthrough was really jibberish and not insightful at all.
Everyone probably has experienced dreams where they stumble upon a powerful, deep, great idea. Upon waking up, the idea generally turns out to be trivial.
Psychedelics and entheogenics often give you the feeling of profundity. They put you in the same mind state you have when you contemplate a truly deep thought, but that doesn't necessarily mean the thoughts are particularly deep.
That said, that doesn't make the experience entirely valueless. First of all, it's fun and interesting, just like riding a roller coaster, reading a book about optical illusions, or listening to music.
Second, many of the insights gained are actually valuable. Not as much as they initially appear under the influence of the drug, but still valuable afterwards. It's an occasion to explore thoughts under many angle, to make connections between unrelated topics. You'll end up throwing out more than half of the ideas the next day, but a few might stick.
We forget sometimes that the mind both thinks about stuff and thinks about thinking.
If you think about making a breakthrough, it is a two stage process. First you have to think the thing, then you have to assess that thing and come to the conclusion that it is a breakthrough. And that in turn makes you feel a certain way.
Often when we dream, or a hallucinate a 'breakthrough' - we're not actually dreaming or hallucinating the thing itself, we're dreamng or hallucinating either of the following stages, we're imagining the experience of assessing something as a breakthrough, or just directly feeling the emotion that would result from a breakthrough.
Because of the way our brains are wired to see causality, we assume that it must be because we actually had the thing that caused the breakthrough. But, tantalisingly, we can't remember exactly what it was. It was awesome, perfect, we remember that, but what exactly, that's gone now, damnit.
I think LSD can definitely expand the mind in the sense of letting you experience the mind in a different way. But I'm very skeptical that 'insights' can be brought back from a trip. The excitement and emotion of that insight, certainly, but the actual insight itself seems never to be quite explicit.
Reminds me of my first experience. The trip involved getting something huge, like a big sense of "oh, I finally get it" but now, 3 years later, I'm still trying to figure out what I actually got.
What I got from LSD upon reflection was that my mental pre-processor (what assigns learned categorical and pattern information to incoming data) limits my perception, leading me to overlook important details about the new data, and causing me to lazily follow the same old thought patterns as if on rails. It's often necessary to ignore everything we think we know and look at our current situation with fresh eyes in order to progress.
Interestingly, this was the same reaction Aldous Huxley had to taking psychedelics. He wrote about the experience in "The Doors Of Perception", the book from which "The Doors" (band) got their name. I believe the quote originally comes from William Blake.
> “If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern.”
Trauma and large life changes can also have a similar effect of reframing our views. Cognitive Behavioural Therapy is based around the idea of framing/context being important and largely habitual without applying concious effort
It's possible that certain insights, realizations, concepts, or thoughts are not easily transferable or translatable from one mind-state to another.
Also, selective amnesia is a common effect of various drugs, including high-dose LSD trips. Dreams are also easy to forget upon waking, leading some to recommend that you try to make what you do remember from dreams (and from trips) concrete in ordinary waking consciousness, through artifacts such as art, music, etc.
Some psychological theories posit that there is a mechanism of repression that occurs when the mind resists the brining of certain subconscious material to consciousness. This is one reason that some therapists recommend one does not venture too deeply in to the subconscious without a trained guide. You might not be ready to handle what you find on your own.
>Feynman was rumored to have used LSD in the late 1960s a handful of times. Feynman denied using hallucinogens, saying he was too scared to damage his brain, but there are credible reports that he did take LSD at least once around 1970.
LSD seems to disproportionately affect the mind's capacity to visualize complex systems and relationships, so even if you aren't being all that novel or insightful in your thinking, the ability to really see what you're pondering in a larger and more detailed way than you've ever experienced can feel like an incredible aha moment, even if you haven't actually figured anything out. The glamor of the vision can be seductive.
Another issue is that it can be very difficult to stay focused long enough to transcribe what you're experiencing mentally in any sort of comprehensible way. Just as you're a few words into your description of a vast and intricate concept, 5 completely new ones come rolling in.
Not that I'm any sort of expert, but the solution seems to be various forms of mental discipline. Meditation and trying to remain a dispassionate observer (versus an impassioned epiphany seeker) can help to slow things down and make the experience less chaotic.
