My Indian Shivoham Tantra teacher kindly shared this powerful healing and protection mantra for the Corona (COVID19) and other viruses.

This mantra can help individuals and the world.

Guidelines

You can repeat this mantra as often as you’d like and in any kind of a situation where protection or heeling is needed.

Women should not do it in their first 5 days of the menstrual cycle.

Anyone can use this mantra, so of you’re inspired, you may share it.

Mantra for Self-Protection

Om harum juum saha

Here is an audio version of the mantra.

If you feel inspired, you may share this powerful tool with others.

The post Special Mantra for Protection and Healing from Viruses appeared first on Experience Life.

Warning: The information in this article is for educational purposes only.

Background

Some years back I stumbled upon a very controversial book “The Sacred Mushroom and The Cross: A study of the nature and origins of Christianity within the fertility cults of the ancient Near East” by John M. Allegro. The book is based on the information found in the Dead Sea scrolls that were unearthed around 1946 and which brought force evidence conflicting with the other Christian texts. I will leave you the joy of discovering what those conflicts were by reading the book, but let’s just say that mushrooms were involved.

While I was raised in a culture where mushroom picking and eating was as routine as going to a supermarket, I was always taught that Amanita Muscaria is a poisonous mushroom. And until recently I have never questioned this belief.

I started researching this subject matter, only to find very little information about it. By spending some time on reddit forums I slowly started to encounter individuals that claimed that they used A. Muscaria for healing work. I learned that typically it’s done in one crazy intense experience where one consumes a few dry mushroom caps (directly or by making tea), then typically vomits for the first few hours and then an intense healing journey starts, continuing for 5-10 hours. And that you absolutely have to have a sitter for doing this process. That didn’t sound very appealing to me.

I then started looking into the toxicity of this mushroom and discovered that the main poisonous compound it contains is Ibotenic acid, a neurotoxin. I learned that a deadly dose for a human is about 15 caps of fresh A. Muscaria, and that by using a specific technique of drying the mushroom most of the dangerous Ibotenic acid gets converted into muscimol, which is also present on its own in the mushroom and which is much less toxic to a human. This compound is responsible for the healing work. A. Muscaria also contain small amounts of muscarine and muscazone, which are also toxic compounds.

Besides the drying of the caps, our bodies also decarboxylate the Ibotenic acid into muscimol. A large proportion of muscimol gets excreted in urine. This is important because in the Siberian Shamanic tradition, shamans collected their urine and shared it with others who wanted to partake in the healing ceremony. In his book “Drugged: The Science and Culture Behind Psychotropic Drugs”, when discussing A. Muscaria, Richard J. Miller writes:

Interestingly, it was observed that the drinking of drug-containing urine could continue for up to 5 cycles passing from one individual to another before the urine lost its capacity for intoxication. This was apparently often done because of the relative scarcity of the mushroom, and so preserving its hallucinogenic properties in this way had important practical benefits.

He also makes references to A. Muscaria urine drinking in the Indian folklore. Urine therapy is one of the components of Ayurveda.

Then I watched the 7th episode of season 2 of Hamilton’s Pharmacopeia, where Hamilton, a chemist, travels to Ukraine and learns how to prepare and safely consume A. Muscaria and partakes in the ritual.

At this point I knew that the mushroom has to be cracker-dry and some people suggested to wait for another 2-3 months to ensure most of the Ibotenic acid is converted to muscimol.

Finally, in search of reliable information, I turned to Russian mycology literature, and was able to find concrete traditional recipes for healing that didn’t require eating the mushroom, but, instead, instructed on how to work with a tincture, which was very easy to make.

Now I felt I was ready to start my healing work with A. Muscaria.

This article covers multiple topics, so, please, feel free to jump directly to the section you need using the following Table of Contents.

Let’s Harvest Amanita Muscaria

As explained in wikipedia, while originally A. Muscaria was found only in the Northern hemisphere, currently it can be found almost anywhere in the world. Therefore, chances are, that if you go into your local forest in its rainy season, usually in the late summer and even more so during the fall, you will find some Amanitas. Amanita is a family of fungi, which contains a large number of sub-species.

What you want is Amanita Muscaria, which has a distinct red cap and which is sprinkled with whitish speckles. Here is a photo of A. Muscaria I took this last fall.

This article doesn’t go into the details of identification of A. Muscaria. I was raised in a culture, where mushroom picking was a very common practice and I have been picking mushrooms since I was a toddler, so I have a solid identification skill of Amanita Muscaria. But, if you’re new to this, it’s the best to find someone experienced, which you can always find at your local mycology club. Alternatively, you can buy the dehydrated caps online. While there are books that teach you how to correctly identify mushrooms (and even mobile apps), it’s best to rely on someone you trust. A misidentification may cost one’s life.

One other type of Amanita that some people use for healing is Amanita Pantherina, which tends to be 3 to 5 times more potent than A. Muscaria.

For some reason it took me several years to stumble upon A. Muscaria in the wild. Recently, I even found some growing right in the middle of the city! I believe I simply wasn’t looking for them until this last fall and therefore they were invisible to me. I set an intention to find them last summer and in the fall I found at least 3 locations where it grew in abundance.

Typically, you will find them growing under conifer and deciduous trees and often next to swampy areas. But they can grow away from water bodies just the same.

When you harvest mature mushrooms you’re very likely to find them infested with maggots. Worry not, you don’t need to remove them to proceed. Some people soak the caps in salty water to get the maggots to leave the mushroom, but then you have to dry the water off, I just use them as is. Just don’t leave the gathered caps for long unprocessed since the maggots will simply eat them up. At the very least refrigerate them. If you need to preserve the caps long term, use the food dehydrator. When you do, the maggots will leave as soon as you turn the heat on.

How to Make A. Muscaria Tincture

The highest concentration of Ibotenic acid and muscimol is in A. Muscaria’ cap, therefore the stems are usually discarded and only the caps are used for making tinctures, so you can leave those in the forest for slugs to feed on. Do not peel the caps, since the slimy top is where most of the goodness found.

The Amanita Muscaria tincture making protocol that I followed comes from the book “Ego velichestvo muhomor” (translated literally as “His Majesty the Fly Agaric”) by a renown Russian mycologist Mihail Vishnevskij. On page 100 of the 2013 edition, he writes (translation and re-formatting here and later is by yours truly):

1. Place 3-4 caps of Amanita Muscaria in a cool place, like a refrigerator for 2 days
2. Chop up the caps into small pieces, and place the pieces into a jar
3. Fill the jar up with vodka so that the liquid covers the pieces and then add some extra so that the mushrooms are fully submerged and there is perhaps another 1-2cm of liquid above it.
4. Seal the jar and keep it in the fridge for 2-6 weeks. The longer the brewing time, the more potent brew you will get. The book suggests 2 weeks, but other places up to 1.5 months. I went with 40 days.
5. Filter the solids out. First remove the large bits using a strainer, and then use a coffee filter to remove any small bits. You will end up with brown-colored liquid without any sediments.
6. Pour the tincture into dark glass bottles
7. Store in the fridge and it’s ready to use

Notes:

• You can of course use as many caps as you’d like. So for a big batch you will need some 10-20 caps.
• It’s important that it’s dark in the fridge most of the time. You can wrap the jar in a towel or aluminum foil if it’s not the case.
• Traditionally the jar was getting buried deep in the ground in the fall and then dug up some 1-1.5 months later.
• I peeked inside the jar every week or so and pushed pieces that floated up down under vodka to ensure that it won’t get mold.
• The book doesn’t specify how pure the vodka should be. From reading on the subject of making tinctures, the stronger the better (i.e. more goodness will be extracted). I used 75.5% 151 proof EverClear vodka (where I live this is the highest purity one can buy).

More notes:

• As you can tell the preparation recipe is very imprecise, since it doesn’t tell how many grams of the caps to use, how much vodka to use, what alcohol purity, etc.
• Moreover, mushrooms don’t have a consistent alkaloid concentration, and those can vary wildly, depending on the season, the area they grew in, the nutrients they had access to and many other factors. So, even if the exact prescription were to be given, the outcome concentration could still vary quite wildly.

None of these matter for external application, but it’s quite a different story for internal use. I will discuss the nuances later in this article.

Here is my “brewing” jar. As you can tell I have used probably 10-15 caps (some were huge, some were tiny), to make a large batch and now I can share the goodness with my family and friends. They can all use the external application safely.

I also didn’t follow the recipe to leave some empty space above the mushrooms and greedily packed it to the brim. But that’s why I made sure to submerge whatever was floating up every few days (otherwise if left unchecked mold could grow).

The total cost to produce about 1.2L of tincture was the price of a 1.5 bottles of 75.5% EverClear vodka (CAD$40/750ml bottle, alcohol is very expensive in Canada). Of course, you will need a lot less of Vodka if you process just 3-4 mushroom caps.

Then I re-used some dark glass liquid Stevia dropper bottles that I saved, so alcohol was really the only cost.

Finally, I clearly labeled and stored the tincture in the refrigerator. It should keep the potency for at least 2-3 years, perhaps even longer.

Do note, that you may use quite a lot of tincture for external use if you have a lot of body pain, but for internal use you will need a tiny amount, as it’s extremely potent. So even if you find a single cap, that might be sufficient for internal use.

Buying Dry A. Muscaria Caps

It’s possible that you have no access to fresh mushrooms, or perhaps you don’t trust yourself to identify them (wise!). In which case, you should be able to purchase the dehydrated caps online. You will be able to use those to create the tincture, except you will need to grind them to powder first (a cheap coffee grinder will do the trick). But the same idea applies, the alcohol should cover the powder and perhaps you’d want to shake it up every few days, since the powder will be more dense than fresh mushroom chunks.

There are multiple online shops that sell A. Muscaria. Since I harvested my own, I don’t have any specific recommended shops for you at the moment. You will have to Google to find one.

I did look around though. Typically, you will get much better prices if you order directly from Russia and ex-USSR republics, than fancy western online shops. It’ll be much cheaper if you buy bulk, so pull your resources together with some friends and buy together. Most of the Western online shops source the caps in around Russia, so you bypass the middle-man. On the other hand, you usually get a more reliable service when you pay premium in Western online shops.

Some of those shops sell tincture too. As you can tell it’s quite trivial to make your own, and you know exactly what went in, but, of course, buying a pre-made tincture is a valid option.

Legality

With the exception of a few countries A. Muscaria is not a restricted or prohibited mushroom.

Most people consider A. Muscaria a poisonous mushroom and therefore the governments didn’t have to consider it as a dangerous substance to control as the population self-regulates here.

The rest of this article will talk about external and internal application of the A. Muscaria tincture.

Healing Pain with External Application of A. Muscaria

External application of Amanita Muscaria provides an excellent pain removal medicine in situations like muscle and joint pain, sprains, inflammation, colds, etc.

You can just pour a few drops of the tincture into your palm and massage it into the area of the body where you have pain. This works, however, this is not a very efficient method.

A much better way is to create a compress.

1. Sprinkle some tincture on a thin clean cloth
2. Apply this cloth to the body area that’s in pain
3. Cover it with a supermarket or garbage plastic bag to prevent the tincture from evaporating and keeping the heat it. You may need to use some kind of belt to keep it in place or simply lie down on it (e.g. if it’s your back that hurts), so that your body weight keeps it in place.

Keep the compress in place for at least 2 hours. Traditionally it was applied before going to bed and kept on for the whole night. Chances are very high that when you wake up the next day, the pain will be either greatly reduced or completely gone.

I have used it for lower back pain, keeping it in place for about 3 hours, with amazing speedy healing.

A. Muscaria Internal Application Protocol

The internal application protocol is somewhat similar to Hydrogen Peroxide Therapy (H₂O₂), which is described in The One-Minute Cure: The Secret to Healing Virtually All Diseases and in many other books on healing with Hydrogen Peroxide. In this type of therapy one starts with a small amount of a substance and then gradually increases the intake for several weeks until the maximum desired quantity is achieved. Then some protocols stop there, whereas others repeat the same process in reverse, that is going from the maximum amount reached back down to a tiny amount. I call this approach – a ladder, as this is how a ladder is typically used, starting from the first step, one progresses one step higher until the top is reached. And then one may remain at the top, or traverse the same steps downwards.

The specific protocol described in Mihail Vishnevskij’s book suggests to start with just 1 drop of the tincture and then daily increment by one drop, culminating at 20 drops, and then decrement by one drop until 1 drop is reached again. Such therapy will take 39 days where you’d be taking the following amount of drops increasing/decreasing daily: 1-2-3-4…19-20-19…3-2-1, that is:

• day 1: 1 drop
• day 2: 2 drops
• …
• day 19: 19 drops
• day 20: 20 drops
• day 21: 19 drops
• …
• day 38: 2 drops
• day 39: 1 drop

Number 21 is considered magical, so I pushed the protocol a little bit up, culminating at 21 drops instead of 20, so mine was 1-2-3-4…19-20-21-20-19…3-2-1 and took 41 days in total.

I wrote all the 41 entries on a peace of paper, using ‘date quanitity’ format for each line, e.g.:

Dec 10 1
Dec 11 2
etc.

And as soon as I took the daily amount I’d cross out that line. So I have never mixed things up.

You’re to take the daily amount of drops first thing in the morning, 1 hour before first food intake (in another book 30min was given). Mix the tincture drops in a cup of water or milk and drink it. I used about half a cap of water. I could only taste alcohol a bit, there was no aftertaste.

When I finished the protocol I calculated that overall I took 441 drops, but since alcohol is so thin (low viscosity), the drops were tiny and I think I consumed about 20-30ml of the tincture in total. This corresponds to probably around 1/4 of a single fresh cap. That is, it was a tiny amount of A. Muscaria spread over 41 days! But, boy, what a journey it was.

As I mentioned earlier, the potency of A. Muscaria can vary wildly and depending on the strength of the alcohol used, and the duration of the brewing, it is very hard to tell whether what you will end up with will be stronger or weaker from the brew I made.

The author then suggests that you can repeat the same process some time later but going all the way up to 40 drops.

Another variation of this protocol suggested in the book is to do 1 drop 3 times a day for 20 days, mixing it with just a single table spoon of distilled water, 1 hour before eating. Breaking for 10 days and then starting again. Note that this is quite a different protocol – there is no incremental dosing.

Another Russian book “Muhomor-celitel’ i drugie jadovitye lekari” by A. V. Korodeckij (I translated the title as “The healer Amanita and other poisonous remedies”) on pages 34-35 of the 2005 edition suggests yet another variation of the “ladder” protocol, which is similar to the details I shared at the beginning of this section, except he suggests doing it 3 times a day (i.e. first day 1 drop 3 times a day, 2nd day 2 drops 3 times a day, …, 20th day 20 drops 3 times a day, and then all the way down to 1 drop 3 times a day). Then doing a one-week break. And repeating this course 3 times in total! As you can tell it calls for 3 times the intake! My feeling is that depending on your strength and the potency of your brew it may be too much. I had a very difficult time with just taking the drops once a day, I can’t imagine what I would have gone through doing it 3 times a day. I have a feeling that my mushrooms and my brew was extra potent.

Since most of this traditional knowledge has been passed orally over the centuries, the precise details must have been lost, as you have just seen 3 very different protocols. But on the other hand the variations also indicate that the details don’t matter that match. Most likely the healers of that time knew their brew, and thus knew how much to give to those they worked with. Unless you find a shaman in your neighborhood or you choose to travel to some remote place to be with one, my suggestion is to pick a protocol that resonates with you and that your body supports. Choose sustainability and repeat the process several times if needed, rather than going for a very strenuous approach and then choosing not to do it ever again.

Disclaimer

If you are crazy enough to do this experiment yourself, I trust that you’re sane enough to closely monitor your wellbeing, as you start with a tiny amount of the tincture. While it’s very unlikely that anything physiologically bad will happen to you from such a tiny amount of A. Muscaria, since a fatal dose has been calculated as 15 caps, and each drop in this recipe is about .0006 of a cap (24,000 times smaller), this is still a not well-enough researched mushroom to take anything for granted. For example, what if you misidentified the mushroom and used one of the deadly poisonous sub-species of Amanita?

I’m just sharing my experience, while trying to include as many details as possible, since there is very little information on internal use of A. Muscaria out there, but in no way I recommend that you do it unless you know what you’re doing and obviously do it at your own risk.

The Journey

Surprisingly, despite the low doze, the first 3 days were the most difficult for me. Perhaps it was so, because, it was the first time I ingested the brew and I wasn’t quite sure whether it was safe. My feeling is that worrying amplified everything. I’m not sure how to describe the experience, other than that I wasn’t feeling comfortable. I was expecting nausea, but I only experienced it for about 1 hour on the 2nd day before going to sleep and even then it was very mild. I ate some ginger and it went away. I have not experienced any nausea for the rest of the journey.

I completely stopped worrying after the first 3 days as overall I felt totally fine, so I knew I wasn’t poisoning myself. And it was a much easier going from that moment on.

The next two weeks were quite easy. For a big part of the day I felt a lot of physical and mental energy, which felt really nice. In the late afternoon I would start to get tired. I knew that my body was processing stuff and re-wiring itself, so I tried to do my best to support it and would stop working when I felt tired. (I watched a lot of TV-Series during those 41 days.)

Alas, some 15 days into the process my body got exhausted from all the processing and remained fatigued till about a week after the 41-day process was over. Next time I do it, I think I’d attempt a shorter process, with faster increase in the amount of drops, i.e., 1-3-5…19-21-19…3..1, which would require only 21 days. 41-days of intense every day processing proved to be too strenuous for me. It’s also possible that this is just how the first time was, and it’ll be much easier in the future.

I slept well, with perhaps an extra hour than normal.

During the 41 days I felt hungrier than normal, and ate more than usual. I did gain may be 1-2kgs over my average 80kg, but the need for more food has disappeared with the completion of the protocol, and I quickly lost that extra weight and then some. So, a month later, I am a few kgs below my typical weight.

One notable aspect was sexuality. A. Muscaria had a strong impact on my sexuality. With the progressive increase of the dosage my sexual energy was getting progressively stronger. It felt I could make love for hours without any tiredness (when I wasn’t already tired that is). I was able to see that my partner was experiencing an increasingly stronger sexual energy from me. Towards the 21 drops, my whole body was super-charged with sexual energy and it was enough to just touch me to get “zapped”.

I also stayed away from socializing, since my energy levels were unpredictable, and I didn’t want to create any unnecessary additional stress, hence I resumed my social contacts upon the completion of the process.

Supporting the Grind

Because I knew my body was doing a lot of rewiring and cleansing I decided to reuse parts of the support protocol from heavy metal chelation, that I have done some years earlier. In particular, focusing on liver support, as it was getting stressed, while processing the A. Muscaria compounds.

I’m not a big fan of supplements, so my approach was quite simple, using just a few basic, but nevertheless essential supplements to support my body:

• Supplements:
  • Vitamin C (2gr 3 times a day)
  • Magnesium citrate (250mg 2 times a day)
  • Milk Thistle Extract (300mg 2 times a day)
  • An occasional mega doze of Vitamin D with K2 (as it was winter time and there was little sun), I was also using the SAD lamp a lot.
• Coffee enemas twice a week – supporting elimination. I was also hoping A. Muscaria will help me to get rid of intestinal parasites I acquired while living in Asia, but, alas, that didn’t happen.
• Copious rest/sleep

Outcomes

I am writing this article 4 weeks after completing the 41-day journey, to allow my body and mind to settle and integrate, so that I can now observe the long lasting outcomes.

I didn’t have any big asks, other than trusting that this work with A. Muscaria would improve my physical and mental well-being.

The first week after the end of the journey was a recovery time, and then over the next few weeks I noticed a great variety of improvements in my physical and mental wellbeing:

• Depression: Almost none, it’s so wonderful to be much more cheerful and it’s now so much easier to see adversities for what they are and not getting affected negatively. It’s a strikingly new experience for me.
• Anxiety: I now experience almost no anxiety on a daily basis.
• Procrastination: Gone! It makes sense since procrastination is a symptom of anxiety.
• Motivation: I’ve been studying machine learning as of recent and I had very little interest in doing so before I did the journey. Now I feel in a totally different place and have been enjoying wrapping my head around this complicated domain.
• Energy levels: This is a completely unexpected outcome. I have so much more energy through the day, as compared to low lethargic energy levels I was experiencing almost daily before I started the journey. I have a much better mental clarity and a lot more energy to go through the day.
• Physical strength: I feel much improved physical strength. I feel much more robust.
• Patterns: this was an unexpected change – many negative habits aren’t there any more. I can now clearly see the ghosts of those mental patterns, but they no longer have compulsive power. I watch those patterns trying to rise, but they are very weak and I don’t have to fight with almost any of them. They now feel like a distant memory of what I used to do in the past.
• Sexuality: I now have a much improved sensual awareness during sex. It’s like I have acquired a new sense of feeling for my partner during sex, to which I had no access before. It feels very new and needs to be developed more, but it’s a delight to have. It fits really well with the energy work I have done (shared on experientialsexlab.com).
• Emotional sensitivity: Over the last few years I have been working on getting back in touch with emotions and becoming more alive, and I received many gifts in these domains. I feel I have become very sensitive in my interactions with others. It’s new to me and feels slightly overwhelming at times, but I’m welcoming and integrating it well, because I want to be alive and there is no aliveness without allowing the full range of feelings. Of course, I’m taking it in small steps, while growing the capacity to feel.
• Sleep: I tend to have super-fantastic dreams and usually wake up exhausted and it takes me some 3-4 hours to recover from sleeping before I can function normally. While it hasn’t fully changed, I can definitely feel an improvement in the mornings. While it still takes me time to recover, it’s has been a much quicker process.
• Physical pain: I used to be a professional sportsmen in my youth (Modern Pentathlon) and it ruined my body, so I have been struggling with a lot of body pain for many decades now. I do feel a lot less pain after this journey, but it’s not completely gone.

Recently, I have been reading on healing with Iboga and I found that the transformations that I received from my extended healing experience with A. Muscaria are quite similar to the shifts attributed to working with Iboga.

As I mentioned earlier I was hoping A. Muscaria would also eradicate my intestinal parasites, along with the other magic, but that didn’t happen.

There is this delightful practice of Holotropic Breathwork, which comes from yogic pranayma, and which very quickly puts you in altered states of consciousness. So during the journey I started to add some of that breathwork at the end of my daily yoga practice, with delightful results. Not only it feels fantastic during and right after doing it, while I am in those high states of consciousness, I start to visualize how I want to feel, think and be. Surely, I have experimented with affirmations and manifestation in the past. This feels completely different – it requires no words and it feels much more powerful, because this is done while strong subtle (Kundalini) energy is circulating though my body. It only takes ~10min, but just 2 months into it, I’m already feeling great noticeable positive changes.

To conclude, it was a difficult experience, and there is no way I would have been able to do it if I wasn’t self-employed, but the outcomes have been worth many times the endured short term strain. I will definitely repeat this process to continue improving my mental and physical well-being, and experience more joy to be alive.

Recommended Reading

There is very little practical information to be found on A. Muscaria. Here are some interesting suggestions for you to read, but most of those books talk about things you can’t immediately apply.

Books:

• “The Sacred Mushroom and The Cross: A study of the nature and origins of Christianity within the fertility cults of the ancient Near East” (2009) by John M. Allegro
• “Amanita Muscaria. Herb of Immortality” 2ed (2007) by Donald E. Teeter (free download)
• “Soma: Divine Mushroom of Immortality” (1972) by R. Gordon Wasson
• “Drugged: The Science and Culture Behind Psychotropic Drugs” (2013) by Richard J. Miller
• “Mushrooms Demystified” 2ed (1986) by David Arora
• “The Sacred Mushroom: Key to the Door of Eternity” (1974) by Andrija Puharich
• “Magic Mushrooms in Religion and Alchemy” 2ed (2002) by Clark Heinrich

• A. V. Korodeckij – Muhomor-celitel’ i drugie jadovitye lekari (2005)
• Mihail Vishnevskij – Ego velichestvo muhomor (2013)
• Olard Dikson – Misterii Muhomora – Primenenie Galljucinogennogo Griba V Shamanskoj Praktike (2005)

Perhaps you could run the text through Google translate and still make sense out of the automatic translation.

Scientific papers:

It seems that slowly slowly some A. Muscaria research is starting to appear. Here are a few starting points:

• science.gov
• scholar.google.com
• ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

Insightful blogs and forums:

• Fly Agaric Tincture – a very detailed blog dedicated to using A. Muscaria for healing chronic diseases like Lyme, ME, MS, CFS, dementia.
• r/AmanitaMuscaria @ Reddit
• Amanita Research Forum

Sharing is Caring

If you have done similar work with A. Muscaria, please, kindly share your experience and outcomes in the comments below.

Please don’t ask me to add your website/video/blog – this is not a link directory. But you’re welcome to use the comments section to mention your resources which will be approved if they are A. Muscaria-related.

Please note that I always share everything I know in my articles, therefore if it’s not covered here it means I do not know it. So if you have a question that is not covered here, please try to find the answer elsewhere and then you’re very welcome to share your findings below in the comments section.

tl;dr: In this article I share how I made Amanita Muscaria tincture, used it externally and internally for self-healing and what outcomes and transformations I received at the end of the process.

Warning: The information in this article is for educational purposes only.

Background

Some years back I stumbled upon a very controversial book “The Sacred Mushroom and The Cross: A study of the nature and origins of Christianity within the fertility cults of the ancient Near East” by John M. Allegro. The book is based on the information found in the Dead Sea scrolls that were unearthed around 1946 and which brought force evidence conflicting with the other Christian texts. I will leave you the joy of discovering what those conflicts were by reading the book, but let’s just say that mushrooms were involved.

While I was raised in a culture where mushroom picking and eating was as routine as going to a supermarket, I was always taught that Amanita Muscaria is a poisonous mushroom. And until recently I have never questioned this belief.

I started researching this subject matter, only to find very little information about it. By spending some time on reddit forums I slowly started to encounter individuals that claimed that they used A. Muscaria for healing work. I learned that typically it’s done in one crazy intense experience where one consumes a few dry mushroom caps (directly or by making tea), then typically vomits for the first few hours and then an intense healing journey starts, continuing for 5-10 hours. And that you absolutely have to have a sitter for doing this process. That didn’t sound very appealing to me.

I then started looking into the toxicity of this mushroom and discovered that the main poisonous compound it contains is Ibotenic acid, a neurotoxin. I learned that a deadly dose for a human is about 15 caps of fresh A. Muscaria, and that by using a specific technique of drying the mushroom most of the dangerous Ibotenic acid gets converted into muscimol, which is also present on its own in the mushroom and which is much less toxic to a human. This compound is responsible for the healing work. A. Muscaria also contain small amounts of muscarine and muscazone, which are also toxic compounds.

Besides the drying of the caps, our bodies also decarboxylate the Ibotenic acid into muscimol. A large proportion of muscimol gets excreted in urine. This is important because in the Siberian Shamanic tradition, shamans collected their urine and shared it with others who wanted to partake in the healing ceremony. In his book “Drugged: The Science and Culture Behind Psychotropic Drugs”, when discussing A. Muscaria, Richard J. Miller writes:

Interestingly, it was observed that the drinking of drug-containing urine could continue for up to 5 cycles passing from one individual to another before the urine lost its capacity for intoxication. This was apparently often done because of the relative scarcity of the mushroom, and so preserving its hallucinogenic properties in this way had important practical benefits.

He also makes references to A. Muscaria urine drinking in the Indian folklore. Urine therapy is one of the components of Ayurveda.

Then I watched the 7th episode of season 2 of Hamilton’s Pharmacopeia, where Hamilton, a chemist, travels to Ukraine and learns how to prepare and safely consume A. Muscaria and partakes in the ritual.

At this point I knew that the mushroom has to be cracker-dry and some people suggested to wait for another 2-3 months to ensure most of the Ibotenic acid is converted to muscimol.

Finally, in search of reliable information, I turned to Russian mycology literature, and was able to find concrete traditional recipes for healing that didn’t require eating the mushroom, but, instead, instructed on how to work with a tincture, which was very easy to make.

Now I felt I was ready to start my healing work with A. Muscaria.

This article covers multiple topics, so, please, feel free to jump directly to the section you need using the following Table of Contents.

Let’s Harvest Amanita Muscaria

As explained in wikipedia, while originally A. Muscaria was found only in the Northern hemisphere, currently it can be found almost anywhere in the world. Therefore, chances are, that if you go into your local forest in its rainy season, usually in the late summer and even more so during the fall, you will find some Amanitas. Amanita is a family of fungi, which contains a large number of sub-species.

What you want is Amanita Muscaria, which has a distinct red cap and which is sprinkled with whitish speckles. Here is a photo of A. Muscaria I took this last fall.

This article doesn’t go into the details of identification of A. Muscaria. I was raised in a culture, where mushroom picking was a very common practice and I have been picking mushrooms since I was a toddler, so I have a solid identification skill of Amanita Muscaria. But, if you’re new to this, it’s the best to find someone experienced, which you can always find at your local mycology club. Alternatively, you can buy the dehydrated caps online. While there are books that teach you how to correctly identify mushrooms (and even mobile apps), it’s best to rely on someone you trust. A misidentification may cost one’s life.

One other type of Amanita that some people use for healing is Amanita Pantherina, which tends to be 3 to 5 times more potent than A. Muscaria.

For some reason it took me several years to stumble upon A. Muscaria in the wild. Recently, I even found some growing right in the middle of the city! I believe I simply wasn’t looking for them until this last fall and therefore they were invisible to me. I set an intention to find them last summer and in the fall I found at least 3 locations where it grew in abundance.

Typically, you will find them growing under conifer and deciduous trees and often next to swampy areas. But they can grow away from water bodies just the same.

When you harvest mature mushrooms you’re very likely to find them infested with maggots. Worry not, you don’t need to remove them to proceed. Some people soak the caps in salty water to get the maggots to leave the mushroom, but then you have to dry the water off, I just use them as is. Just don’t leave the gathered caps for long unprocessed since the maggots will simply eat them up. At the very least refrigerate them. If you need to preserve the caps long term, use the food dehydrator. When you do, the maggots will leave as soon as you turn the heat on.

How to Make A. Muscaria Tincture

The highest concentration of Ibotenic acid and muscimol is in A. Muscaria’ cap, therefore the stems are usually discarded and only the caps are used for making tinctures, so you can leave those in the forest for slugs to feed on. Do not peel the caps, since the slimy top is where most of the goodness found.

The Amanita Muscaria tincture making protocol that I followed comes from the book “Ego velichestvo muhomor” (translated literally as “His Majesty the Fly Agaric”) by a renown Russian mycologist Mihail Vishnevskij. On page 100 of the 2013 edition, he writes (translation and re-formatting here and later is by yours truly):

1. Place 3-4 caps of Amanita Muscaria in a cool place, like a refrigerator for 2 days
2. Chop up the caps into small pieces, and place the pieces into a jar
3. Fill the jar up with vodka so that the liquid covers the pieces and then add some extra so that the mushrooms are fully submerged and there is perhaps another 1-2cm of liquid above it.
4. Seal the jar and keep it in the fridge for 2-6 weeks. The longer the brewing time, the more potent brew you will get. The book suggests 2 weeks, but other places up to 1.5 months. I went with 40 days.
5. Filter the solids out. First remove the large bits using a strainer, and then use a coffee filter to remove any small bits. You will end up with brown-colored liquid without any sediments.
6. Pour the tincture into dark glass bottles
7. Store in the fridge and it’s ready to use

Notes:

• You can of course use as many caps as you’d like. So for a big batch you will need some 10-20 caps.
• It’s important that it’s dark in the fridge most of the time. You can wrap the jar in a towel or aluminum foil if it’s not the case.
• Traditionally the jar was getting buried deep in the ground in the fall and then dug up some 1-1.5 months later.
• I peeked inside the jar every week or so and pushed pieces that floated up down under vodka to ensure that it won’t get mold.
• The book doesn’t specify how pure the vodka should be. From reading on the subject of making tinctures, the stronger the better (i.e. more goodness will be extracted). I used 75.5% 151 proof EverClear vodka (where I live this is the highest purity one can buy).

More notes:

• As you can tell the preparation recipe is very imprecise, since it doesn’t tell how many grams of the caps to use, how much vodka to use, what alcohol purity, etc.
• Moreover, mushrooms don’t have a consistent alkaloid concentration, and those can vary wildly, depending on the season, the area they grew in, the nutrients they had access to and many other factors. So, even if the exact prescription were to be given, the outcome concentration could still vary quite wildly.

None of these matter for external application, but it’s quite a different story for internal use. I will discuss the nuances later in this article.

Here is my “brewing” jar. As you can tell I have used probably 10-15 caps (some were huge, some were tiny), to make a large batch and now I can share the goodness with my family and friends. They can all use the external application safely.

I also didn’t follow the recipe to leave some empty space above the mushrooms and greedily packed it to the brim. But that’s why I made sure to submerge whatever was floating up every few days (otherwise if left unchecked mold could grow).

The total cost to produce about 1.2L of tincture was the price of a 1.5 bottles of 75.5% EverClear vodka (CAD$40/750ml bottle, alcohol is very expensive in Canada). Of course, you will need a lot less of Vodka if you process just 3-4 mushroom caps.

Then I re-used some dark glass liquid Stevia dropper bottles that I saved, so alcohol was really the only cost.

Finally, I clearly labeled and stored the tincture in the refrigerator. It should keep the potency for at least 2-3 years, perhaps even longer.

Do note, that you may use quite a lot of tincture for external use if you have a lot of body pain, but for internal use you will need a tiny amount, as it’s extremely potent. So even if you find a single cap, that might be sufficient for internal use.

Buying Dry A. Muscaria Caps

It’s possible that you have no access to fresh mushrooms, or perhaps you don’t trust yourself to identify them (wise!). In which case, you should be able to purchase the dehydrated caps online. You will be able to use those to create the tincture, except you will need to grind them to powder first (a cheap coffee grinder will do the trick). But the same idea applies, the alcohol should cover the powder and perhaps you’d want to shake it up every few days, since the powder will be more dense than fresh mushroom chunks.

There are multiple online shops that sell A. Muscaria. Since I harvested my own, I don’t have any specific recommended shops for you at the moment. You will have to Google to find one.

I did look around though. Typically, you will get much better prices if you order directly from Russia and ex-USSR republics, than fancy western online shops. It’ll be much cheaper if you buy bulk, so pull your resources together with some friends and buy together. Most of the Western online shops source the caps in around Russia, so you bypass the middle-man. On the other hand, you usually get a more reliable service when you pay premium in Western online shops.

Some of those shops sell tincture too. As you can tell it’s quite trivial to make your own, and you know exactly what went in, but, of course, buying a pre-made tincture is a valid option.

Legality

With the exception of a few countries A. Muscaria is not a restricted or prohibited mushroom.

Most people consider A. Muscaria a poisonous mushroom and therefore the governments didn’t have to consider it as a dangerous substance to control as the population self-regulates here.

The rest of this article will talk about external and internal application of the A. Muscaria tincture.

Healing Pain with External Application of A. Muscaria

External application of Amanita Muscaria provides an excellent pain removal medicine in situations like muscle and joint pain, sprains, inflammation, colds, etc.

You can just pour a few drops of the tincture into your palm and massage it into the area of the body where you have pain. This works, however, this is not a very efficient method.

A much better way is to create a compress.

1. Sprinkle some tincture on a thin clean cloth
2. Apply this cloth to the body area that’s in pain
3. Cover it with a supermarket or garbage plastic bag to prevent the tincture from evaporating and keeping the heat it. You may need to use some kind of belt to keep it in place or simply lie down on it (e.g. if it’s your back that hurts), so that your body weight keeps it in place.

Keep the compress in place for at least 2 hours. Traditionally it was applied before going to bed and kept on for the whole night. Chances are very high that when you wake up the next day, the pain will be either greatly reduced or completely gone.

I have used it for lower back pain, keeping it in place for about 3 hours, with amazing speedy healing.

A. Muscaria Internal Application Protocol

The internal application protocol is somewhat similar to Hydrogen Peroxide Therapy (H₂O₂), which is described in The One-Minute Cure: The Secret to Healing Virtually All Diseases and in many other books on healing with Hydrogen Peroxide. In this type of therapy one starts with a small amount of a substance and then gradually increases the intake for several weeks until the maximum desired quantity is achieved. Then some protocols stop there, whereas others repeat the same process in reverse, that is going from the maximum amount reached back down to a tiny amount. I call this approach – a ladder, as this is how a ladder is typically used, starting from the first step, one progresses one step higher until the top is reached. And then one may remain at the top, or traverse the same steps downwards.

The specific protocol described in Mihail Vishnevskij’s book suggests to start with just 1 drop of the tincture and then daily increment by one drop, culminating at 20 drops, and then decrement by one drop until 1 drop is reached again. Such therapy will take 39 days where you’d be taking the following amount of drops increasing/decreasing daily: 1-2-3-4…19-20-19…3-2-1, that is:

• day 1: 1 drop
• day 2: 2 drops
• …
• day 19: 19 drops
• day 20: 20 drops
• day 21: 19 drops
• …
• day 38: 2 drops
• day 39: 1 drop

Number 21 is considered magical, so I pushed the protocol a little bit up, culminating at 21 drops instead of 20, so mine was 1-2-3-4…19-20-21-20-19…3-2-1 and took 41 days in total.

I wrote all the 41 entries on a peace of paper, using ‘date quanitity’ format for each line, e.g.:

Dec 10 1
Dec 11 2
etc.

And as soon as I took the daily amount I’d cross out that line. So I have never mixed things up.

You’re to take the daily amount of drops first thing in the morning, 1 hour before first food intake (in another book 30min was given). Mix the tincture drops in a cup of water or milk and drink it. I used about half a cap of water. I could only taste alcohol a bit, there was no aftertaste.

When I finished the protocol I calculated that overall I took 441 drops, but since alcohol is so thin (low viscosity), the drops were tiny and I think I consumed about 20-30ml of the tincture in total. This corresponds to probably around 1/4 of a single fresh cap. That is, it was a tiny amount of A. Muscaria spread over 41 days! But, boy, what a journey it was.

As I mentioned earlier, the potency of A. Muscaria can vary wildly and depending on the strength of the alcohol used, and the duration of the brewing, it is very hard to tell whether what you will end up with will be stronger or weaker from the brew I made.

The author then suggests that you can repeat the same process some time later but going all the way up to 40 drops.

Another variation of this protocol suggested in the book is to do 1 drop 3 times a day for 20 days, mixing it with just a single table spoon of distilled water, 1 hour before eating. Breaking for 10 days and then starting again. Note that this is quite a different protocol – there is no incremental dosing.

Another Russian book “Muhomor-celitel’ i drugie jadovitye lekari” by A. V. Korodeckij (I translated the title as “The healer Amanita and other poisonous remedies”) on pages 34-35 of the 2005 edition suggests yet another variation of the “ladder” protocol, which is similar to the details I shared at the beginning of this section, except he suggests doing it 3 times a day (i.e. first day 1 drop 3 times a day, 2nd day 2 drops 3 times a day, …, 20th day 20 drops 3 times a day, and then all the way down to 1 drop 3 times a day). Then doing a one-week break. And repeating this course 3 times in total! As you can tell it calls for 3 times the intake! My feeling is that depending on your strength and the potency of your brew it may be too much. I had a very difficult time with just taking the drops once a day, I can’t imagine what I would have gone through doing it 3 times a day. I have a feeling that my mushrooms and my brew was extra potent.

Since most of this traditional knowledge has been passed orally over the centuries, the precise details must have been lost, as you have just seen 3 very different protocols. But on the other hand the variations also indicate that the details don’t matter that match. Most likely the healers of that time knew their brew, and thus knew how much to give to those they worked with. Unless you find a shaman in your neighborhood or you choose to travel to some remote place to be with one, my suggestion is to pick a protocol that resonates with you and that your body supports. Choose sustainability and repeat the process several times if needed, rather than going for a very strenuous approach and then choosing not to do it ever again.

Disclaimer

If you are crazy enough to do this experiment yourself, I trust that you’re sane enough to closely monitor your wellbeing, as you start with a tiny amount of the tincture. While it’s very unlikely that anything physiologically bad will happen to you from such a tiny amount of A. Muscaria, since a fatal dose has been calculated as 15 caps, and each drop in this recipe is about .0006 of a cap (24,000 times smaller), this is still a not well-enough researched mushroom to take anything for granted. For example, what if you misidentified the mushroom and used one of the deadly poisonous sub-species of Amanita?

I’m just sharing my experience, while trying to include as many details as possible, since there is very little information on internal use of A. Muscaria out there, but in no way I recommend that you do it unless you know what you’re doing and obviously do it at your own risk.

The Journey

Surprisingly, despite the low doze, the first 3 days were the most difficult for me. Perhaps it was so, because, it was the first time I ingested the brew and I wasn’t quite sure whether it was safe. My feeling is that worrying amplified everything. I’m not sure how to describe the experience, other than that I wasn’t feeling comfortable. I was expecting nausea, but I only experienced it for about 1 hour on the 2nd day before going to sleep and even then it was very mild. I ate some ginger and it went away. I have not experienced any nausea for the rest of the journey.

I completely stopped worrying after the first 3 days as overall I felt totally fine, so I knew I wasn’t poisoning myself. And it was a much easier going from that moment on.

The next two weeks were quite easy. For a big part of the day I felt a lot of physical and mental energy, which felt really nice. In the late afternoon I would start to get tired. I knew that my body was processing stuff and re-wiring itself, so I tried to do my best to support it and would stop working when I felt tired. (I watched a lot of TV-Series during those 41 days.)

Alas, some 15 days into the process my body got exhausted from all the processing and remained fatigued till about a week after the 41-day process was over. Next time I do it, I think I’d attempt a shorter process, with faster increase in the amount of drops, i.e., 1-3-5…19-21-19…3..1, which would require only 21 days. 41-days of intense every day processing proved to be too strenuous for me. It’s also possible that this is just how the first time was, and it’ll be much easier in the future.

I slept well, with perhaps an extra hour than normal.

During the 41 days I felt hungrier than normal, and ate more than usual. I did gain may be 1-2kgs over my average 80kg, but the need for more food has disappeared with the completion of the protocol, and I quickly lost that extra weight and then some. So, a month later, I am a few kgs below my typical weight.

One notable aspect was sexuality. A. Muscaria had a strong impact on my sexuality. With the progressive increase of the dosage my sexual energy was getting progressively stronger. It felt I could make love for hours without any tiredness (when I wasn’t already tired that is). I was able to see that my partner was experiencing an increasingly stronger sexual energy from me. Towards the 21 drops, my whole body was super-charged with sexual energy and it was enough to just touch me to get “zapped”.

I also stayed away from socializing, since my energy levels were unpredictable, and I didn’t want to create any unnecessary additional stress, hence I resumed my social contacts upon the completion of the process.

Supporting the Grind

Because I knew my body was doing a lot of rewiring and cleansing I decided to reuse parts of the support protocol from heavy metal chelation, that I have done some years earlier. In particular, focusing on liver support, as it was getting stressed, while processing the A. Muscaria compounds.

I’m not a big fan of supplements, so my approach was quite simple, using just a few basic, but nevertheless essential suplements to support my body:

• Supplements:
  • Vitamin C (2gr 3 times a day)
  • Magnesium citrate (250mg 2 times a day)
  • Milk Thistle Extract (300mg 2 times a day)
  • An occasional mega doze of Vitamin D with K2 (as it was winter time and there was little sun), I was also using the SAD lamp a lot.
• Coffee enemas twice a week – supporting elimination. I was also hoping A. Muscaria will help me to get rid of intestinal parasites I acquired while living in Asia, but, alas, that didn’t happen.
• Copious rest/sleep

Outcomes

I am writing this article 4 weeks after completing the 41-day journey, to allow my body and mind to settle and integrate, so that I can now observe the long lasting outcomes.

I didn’t have any big asks, other than trusting that this work with A. Muscaria would improve my physical and mental well-being.

The first week after the end of the journey was a recovery time, and then over the next few weeks I noticed a great variety of improvements in my physical and mental wellbeing:

• Depression: Almost none, it’s so wonderful to be much more cheerful and it’s now so much easier to see adversities for what they are and not getting affected negatively. It’s a strikingly new experience for me.
• Anxiety: I now experience almost no anxiety on a daily basis.
• Procrastination: Gone! It makes sense since procrastination is a symptom of anxiety.
• Motivation: I’ve been studying machine learning as of recent and I had very little interest in doing so before I did the journey. Now I feel in a totally different place and have been enjoying wrapping my head around this complicated domain.
• Energy levels: This is a completely unexpected outcome. I have so much more energy through the day, as compared to low lethargic energy levels I was experiencing almost daily before I started the journey. I have a much better mental clarity and a lot more energy to go through the day.
• Physical strength: I feel much improved physical strength. I feel much more robust.
• Patterns: this was an unexpected change – many negative habits aren’t there any more. I can now clearly see the ghosts of those mental patterns, but they no longer have compulsive power. I watch those patterns trying to rise, but they are very weak and I don’t have to fight with almost any of them. They now feel like a distant memory of what I used to do in the past.
• Sexuality: I now have a much improved sensual awareness during sex. It’s like I have acquired a new sense of feeling for my partner during sex, to which I had no access before. It feels very new and needs to be developed more, but it’s a delight to have. It fits really well with the energy work I have done (shared on experientialsexlab.com).
• Emotional sensitivity: Over the last few years I have been working on getting back in touch with emotions and becoming more alive, and I received many gifts in these domains. I feel I have become very sensitive in my interactions with others. It’s new to me and feels slightly overwhelming at times, but I’m welcoming and integrating it well, because I want to be alive and there is no aliveness without allowing the full range of feelings. Of course, I’m taking it in small steps, while growing the capacity to feel.
• Sleep: I tend to have super-fantastic dreams and usually wake up exhausted and it takes me some 3-4 hours to recover from sleeping before I can function normally. While it hasn’t fully changed, I can definitely feel an improvement in the mornings. While it still takes me time to recover, it’s has been a much quicker process.
• Physical pain: I used to be a professional sportsmen in my youth (Modern Pentathlon) and it ruined my body, so I have been struggling with a lot of body pain for many decades now. I do feel a lot less pain after this journey, but it’s not completely gone.

Recently, I have been reading on healing with Iboga and I found that the transformations that I received from my extended healing experience with A. Muscaria are quite similar to the shifts attributed to working with Iboga.

As I mentioned earlier I was hoping A. Muscaria would also eradicate my intestinal parasites, along with the other magic, but that didn’t happen.

There is this delightful practice of Holotropic Breathwork, which comes from yogic pranayma, and which very quickly puts you in altered states of consciousness. So during the journey I started to add some of that breathwork at the end of my daily yoga practice, with delightful results. Not only it feels fantastic during and right after doing it, while I am in those high states of consciousness, I start to visualize how I want to feel, think and be. Surely, I have experimented with affirmations and manifestation in the past. This feels completely different – it requires no words and it feels much more powerful, because this is done while strong subtle (kundalini) energy is circulating though my body. It only takes ~10min, but just 2 months into it, I’m already feeling great noticeable positive changes.

To conclude, it was a difficult experience, and there is no way I would have been able to do it if I wasn’t self-employed, but the outcomes have been worth many times the endured short term strain. I will definitely repeat this process to continue improving my mental and physical well-being, and experience more joy to be alive.

Recommended Reading

There is very little practical information to be found on A. Muscaria. Here are some interesting suggestions for you to read, but most of those books talk about things you can’t immediately apply.

Books:

• “The Sacred Mushroom and The Cross: A study of the nature and origins of Christianity within the fertility cults of the ancient Near East” (2009) by John M. Allegro
• “Amanita Muscaria. Herb of Immortality” 2ed (2007) by Donald E. Teeter (free download)
• “Soma: Divine Mushroom of Immortality” (1972) by R. Gordon Wasson
• “Drugged: The Science and Culture Behind Psychotropic Drugs” (2013) by Richard J. Miller
• “Mushrooms Demystified” 2ed (1986) by David Arora
• “The Sacred Mushroom: Key to the Door of Eternity” (1974) by Andrija Puharich
• “Magic Mushrooms in Religion and Alchemy” 2ed (2002) by Clark Heinrich

As I mentioned in this article, I did find a few practical books in Russian, but they haven’t been translated to English: 

• А. В. Кородецкий – Мухомор-целитель и другие ядовитые лекари (2005)
• Михаил Вишневский – Его величество мухомор (2013)
• Олард Диксон – Мистерии Мухомора – Применение Галлюциногенного Гриба В Шаманской Практике (2005)

Perhaps you could run the text through Google translate and still make sense out of the automatic translation.

Scientific papers:

It seems that slowly slowly some A. Muscaria research is starting to appear. Here are a few starting points:

• science.gov
• scholar.google.com
• ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

Insightful blogs and forums:

• Fly Agaric Tincture – a very detailed blog dedicated to using A. Muscaria for healing chronic diseases like Lyme, ME, MS, CFS, dementia.
• r/AmanitaMuscaria @ Reddit
• Amanita Research Forum

Sharing is Caring

If you have done similar work with A. Muscaria, please, kindly share your experience and outcomes in the comments below.

Please don’t ask me to add your website/video/blog – this is not a link directory. But you’re welcome to use the comments section to mention your resources which will be approved if they are A. Muscaria-related.

Please note that I always share everything I know in my articles, therefore if it’s not covered here it means I do not know it. So if you have a question that is not covered here, please try to find the answer elsewhere and then you’re very welcome to share your findings below in the comments section.

Please, stay safe, and be very careful when working with mushrooms.

The post Powerful Healing with Amanita Muscaria (Fly Agaric) appeared first on Experience Life.

While most people try to lose weight, I use the term ‘normalize weight’, since some people need to gain weight and for many the verb ‘to lose’ creates an unnecessary anxiety, which in turn makes them gain weight.

First here is the TL;DR (Too Long; Didn’t Read) version:

Reality Check

1. Don’t give a dime to what other people think about your weight. Especially since most of the time they don’t really think anything of you, as they are too preoccupied with their own life, and it’s you who thinks that they give a dime.
2. Each person has a unique normal weight. And this weight will vary with seasons, stages of life and person’s well-being at the moment.
3. Loving your body will naturally lead to a normal-for-you weight.

A Joyful Way to Your Normal Weight

1. Calorie intake: Eat almost anything but with an awareness (intuitive eating model)
2. Calorie burn: Engage in limbic exercise that you love (trance-type exercise, no thinking involved)

If you are intrigued let’s proceed to the detailed explanations and inspirations of the above ideas.

Reality Check

The best incentive to want to lose weight is when you feel it’s not serving you. For example, if you have a difficult time going up the stairs, your belly is getting in the way of tying your shoe laces, sex becomes difficult, your health is affected, etc.

Most people try to lose weight because they believe they should, after reading a fashion magazine or watching “Baywatch” on TV. If you don’t have your own inner incentive to make a change, your effort will probably not lead you anywhere.

Don’t Give A Dime To What Other People Think

Don’t give a dime to what other people think about your weight. Especially since most of the time they don’t really think anything of you, as they are too preoccupied with their own lives, and it’s only you who thinks that they give a dime.

Love Your Body

Love your body as it is! A person whose body weight is very divergent from what’s considered normal in our society, but who loves his body will appear to others as a very attractive person. A person with with a body that can be easily show on the front page of a fashion magazine, but who doesn’t love his body is likely to not be very attractive to others.

Love your body because it’s yours, not because it fits under a certain imaginary standard or not. Do not wait to normalize your weight before you allow yourself to love your body. The best way to normalize your weight is to love your body – when you love it, you will naturally do things that will lead to normal weight and not the other way around.

Your Unique Normal Weight

Each person has his unique normal weight. It will primarily depend on the body type. And this weight will fluctuate with seasons, stages of life and person’s well-being at the moment.

Skinny isn’t necessarily better. A bit of extra weight leads to better longevity in the long run. Persons, who are of a fire-type (very fast metabolism), may not have enough nurturing fat to support their longevity. Also if you ever get moved to learn how to extend your love making sessions from minutes to hours, a bit of body padding goes a long way to prevent the pain of bone-on-bone grind and it gives you additional physical vitality.

Trust your body to know the best weight it needs to have at any given time. You just need to learn how to hear your body communicating that to you.

A Joyful Way to Your Normal Weight

Unless you suffer from some kind of disease that affects your metabolism, your body weight is a simple function of how many calories you take in versus how many calories you burn on a daily basis.

Intuitive Calorie Intake

If you were to eat with even a little awareness of your body, it would always indicate to you when it’s getting close to satiation. Of course, this is not going to happen if you eat while watching TV, talking to someone or reading messages on your phone, since you are not present with your own body to be able to receive any messages from it. So usually whatever is on the plate goes in and you only stop when the fork scrapes the empty plate, or your hand scrapes the bottom of that savory bag of chips.

In fact, most of us are so used not to be present with the eating process, that even if we don’t have any distraction, we might still not notice the messages from the body because we don’t speak that language. It will take some practice of trial and error to revive that simple body feedback loop.

Emotional eating is another example of unaware eating. When we are distraught, there is no presence of the mind to hear the body screaming: “Stop! You had enough!” And the only reason we engage in emotional eating is that once we overload our digestive system, we become too tired to be anxious, and the anxiety somewhat recedes for a time being.

Special chemicals routinely added to the food is another problems. Normally your body is highly attuned to what nutritional elements it requires at the moment and it’ll make you crave certain things it needs and it’ll also indicate when it received what it needs. For example, if you face a fruit basket with various types of fruit in it and you notice that a banana “has your name written on it”, it usually means that your body needs some Potassium. If that’s the case you’re likely to gobble up that banana in no time. Notice, that if you were to be present with the process and were to go for a second or a third banana, you probably would not eat any more of it, because your body would signal to you that it had enough of Potassium-rich foods. When it comes to fabricated food all kinds of chemicals are added to precisely block this body feedback mechanism. That’s why we usually can’t stop eating those chips, until the bag is empty. Our body can only send signals of fullness, but it can’t send any signals of nutritional value since it doesn’t know what to do with those chemicals. So it just works extra hard eliminating those. And, of course, then there is the GMO…

The bottom line – if you were to eat as unadulterated foods as possible and were to be present with your body while eating, you will never need to worry about taking in more than what your body needs. Over time this will bring your body to a normalized weight, specific to you and your life’s circumstances.

I can recommend an excellent book that covers all the nuances of this approach. It’s “Intuitive Eating: A Revolutionary Program that Works” by Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch. It suggests that you can eat your favorite chocolate cake any time and as often as you’d like to, as long as you stay present with your body and listen for when it says: “No more at the moment, please”.

I can attest to validity of this method – when I eat with awareness I tend to drop to my normal weight within about a month or so. When I resist and try to run away from myself and start eating without awareness I start gaining weight. The awesome thing is that I no longer need to weigh myself, I need to watch my awareness level instead. When it’s high I know that even if I have just gained some weight it’s going to drop all by itself, I just need to give my body time. If my awareness is low, I know I’ll be gaining weight.

Limbic Calorie Burn

Regular exercise is important to keep one’s muscles in good shape, eliminating toxins via the lymphatic system (which relies on movement to operate), and many other reasons. Here I will discuss exercise specifically in the context of calorie burning to optimize one’s weight.

First of all make sure to engage in the type of an exercise that you enjoy doing on a consistent basis. If you believe that running is great for keeping your weight in check, but you hate doing it, this is not going to work well. For example, the dislike is likely to cause an unnecessary anxiety which can easily lead to emotional eating and you will end up gaining weight. And if you cover up the dislike with a mental distraction (TV, phone, etc.) during the exercise, you’re likely to cause a physical injury, since you are likely to miss distress signals from your muscles and ligaments.

Next, out of those types of exercise that you like, choose those that allow you to do in a limbic fashion, where your mind is not involved.

in Chapter 3 of the book “The Ghoraa & Limbic Exercise” Majid Ali, MD writes:

From extensive personal experience with limbic exercise, and from the experience of my patients to whom I’ve recommended this method of exercise, I know that exercise done with an uncluttered mind is far more restorative than goal-oriented, competitive exercise. […]

When in a limbic state, a person is free of all the usual thoughts that populate his mind. It is a native state of awareness of life, of energy and of a larger presence around us. It is a non­thinking but not a non-perceiving state. Limbic exercise means just that: exercising limbically. It does not mean that we plan our day while we exercise, nor that we review some past day during it.

The core point is that in limbic exercise an awareness of energy and life and a larger presence around us replaces the usual quota of angry or sad thoughts, […] The limbic condition, instead, cares, comforts, creates images of health and heals. In limbic exercise, it is not our purpose to achieve the health benefits of exercise by thinking more cleverly about its effects on our arteries, heart rhythm, brain waves or liver cell function. Rather, being limbic is to bring about physiologic changes by a no-thinking approach.

Limbic exercises are continuous, non-intense, non-goal oriented, noncompetitive exercises. There is no hyperventilation or perspiration. When done limbically, exercise ends with more energy than that with which it began. The essence of limbic exercises is the absence of focus. When we run limbically, we do just that – we simply run. There is no effort made to run well, to run at some predetermined speed, to run for some defined distance or to run to solve the problems of the day. When we walk, we simply walk. We make no attempt to solve our problems or sit in judgment on how we walk. Limbic exercises are done with abandonment, with total disregard of all the demands of the thinking head.

The chapter goes into many details of why limbic exercise is superior to cortical exercise, all the way to cellular tissue biology, and how it better burns sugars and fat.

In chapter 4 Majid Ali suggests that hiking, cycling and long distance running belong to the limbic-type of exercise if you perform them without thinking, whereas sports like tennis, baseball, sprinting and weight lifting do not.

I have been a swimmer since the age of 9 and my swimming practice has always been comprised of specific preset sets of laps, each set varying in speed, intensity and swimming style. After reading this book, and since I haven’t been doing competitive swimming in years, I have switched to swimming by lengths of time and to checking in with myself to know when to take a break or to stop. I really like this change. My swimming workout has already been a trance-like experience, and now it’s even better because I get to be in tune with my needs while I swim and my body can burn calories more efficiently.

Conclusion

The brilliancy of these methods is that they are very very simple, they work, you don’t need to spend your hard-earned money on magic formulas and training programs, and there is no rebounding with a binge eating when used correctly, since there is no diet involved.

It’ll take a small conscious effort on your part to make changes in how you eat and exercise and after a few months of practice to make it a habit you will be well on your way to an effortless normal weight.

The two books I mentioned in this article and that I highly recommend to you are:

1. “Intuitive Eating: A Revolutionary Program that Works” by Evelyn Tribole M.S. R.D., Elyse Resch M.S. R.D. F.A.D.A.
2. “The Ghoraa & Limbic Exercise” by Majid Ali, MD

If you have tried these methods and would like to share how these have been working for you, please share with the other readers in the comments section below. Thank you.

The post The Simplest Joyful Way To Normalize Your Weight appeared first on Experience Life.

I wrote this dedicated article for attacks performed via email, since email is the main source of online scam. It is so, because, it’s easy to spoof a sender identity and as a result an email in your Inbox is often considered more trustworthy, than a random website you may visit.

Having my email address listed on my websites since 1999, it has probably made into all possible spammer and scammer databases, and I receive hundreds and at times thousands of unwanted emails daily.  As a result of this I have a great collection of bad email I can study and share the insights from that study with you. The examples I use in this article all come from spam email I have received in the last few days. Luckily, my fine-tuned spam filters catch 99.5% of that undesired email, so only 1-2 of those make it to my Inbox daily.

Sender Information Can Be Easily Faked

Just like I can mail you a parcel and write that it’s from Santa Claus, I can send you an email from Santa and you won’t know the difference.

I can instruct my email client to have my identity set to “Santa Claus <santa@northpole.com>” and if I send you an email it will have:

From: "Santa Claus <santa@northpole.com>" 
Subject: No gifts for you this year
Try harder next year!
Santa

Most of the time all you need to do to tell that the email is not from who they claim to be is to look at that From: field of the email in question. Here I will use Paypal as an example, since there are so many phishing emails related to Paypal services.

Here are a few examples where you can instantly tell that these aren’t emails from Paypal:

From: "PayPal Security Update no-reply@paypal.com" <info2015@powtex.com>

Surely, they inserted “no-reply@paypal.com” into the free text identity part of the email, but powtext.com is not Paypal.

Or the following one:

From: Support <admin@server.chinanetrix.info>

Here you can clearly see that it’s not coming from Paypal.

So now you know how to tell most of the scam/phishing emails coming from money-related and other online services.

There is a much smaller percentage of phishing emails where you cannot tell from the From: header that it’s not an email form Paypal. It may look like:

From: "service@intl.paypal.com" <service@intl.paypal.com>

but it will not be a legit email from Paypal. If that’s the case, unfortunately, there isn’t an easy to way to tell. Below between the two lines I will provide information on how to do that for more advanced users. But do not despair, later in this article I will give you a second,  even easier to use technique for identifying illegitimate emails. The second technique is to look at which website the perpetrator is trying to send you.

Non-advanced users please now skip over the next section between the two horizontal lines.

<– Advanced explanation starts here –>

If you are an advanced user and you know how to tell your email software to show you all email headers, then you can usually quickly tell whether the sender is indeed who he is. (scroll down a few lines if you don’t know how to do that, where I will show another way)

Consider this email:

From: "service@intl.paypal.com" <service@intl.paypal.com>
Received: from mx0.slc.paypal.com (mx1.slc.paypal.com [173.0.84.226])
Subject: You've got money

Here the From and Received headers match at their domain name level, so this was indeed sent from Paypal.

Note that there are several Received: headers in each email and you need to look at all of them.

And now consider this one:

From: "PayPal" <service@intl.paypal.com>
Received: from FIRM-TS006.FIRM.local (ip-78-137-145-191.dub-3rk.metro.digiweb.ie)
Subject: Your account has been temporarily suspended

Clearly that’s a fake paypal email, since From and Received domain information headers don’t match.

Luckily probably about 95% of phishing email senders don’t bother to obfuscate their origin, so most of the time you don’t need to look at uncommon email headers as explained in this section.

<– Advanced explanation ends here –>

Never Reply To Or Act On Emails You Are Not Sure About

The first rule is that unless you’re certain who you received an email from and you really really need to get in touch with that person, do not reply to any such emails. If you do, they will first know you exist for real (there are many dead email addresses) and they will re-sell your email address to many other scammers, and you will get hundred times more scam emails.

Second, anything you will tell in your reply will be used to further perpetrate their con activity against you. Before you reply to them they usually know nothing about you. If you reply even once they now know a lot more about you.

If unsure, the best action is to instantly delete such email. Most banks who have any security sense will never conduct any business with you by email. Always call your bank instead, if you believe your bank really contacted you via email. You can also open your Internet browser and log in into your online service/bank, but that’s not 100%-full proof, since if your computer is owned you could be tricked into logging into a site that looks like your bank, but it’s not. So phone will be your best bet. That is of course if you know your bank’s real phone number. There are scammers who do scam over phone too.

I trained my dad to always forward me any emails he is not sure about and 99% of the time my reply is a single word: Delete.

If you are a polite person and have no heart to just delete an email without doing anything about it, it’s important for you to know that email is an unreliable media. A huge number of emails (including legit ones) never reach their destination, due to various filters and blocks that Internet Service Provider companies use in order to keep the amount of bad email manageable. Therefore, usually senders cannot know whether you received the email they sent to you or not (albeit there are ways to circumvent that) and therefore if it’s a real person with legit purpose they will find another way of contacting you. Thus, I repeat, if unsure, it’s safe to delete any email that comes to your Inbox.

Scam Emails From Your Family, Friends and Acquaintances

Every so often I get an email like the following one:

===================================
good evening Stas

http://bit.ly/2hblkjasd8fGWy1

Joe
===================================

No story, no context, just enough information to establish familiarity (it’s from Joe, whom I probably know since I’ve communicated with Joe before and thus my email is in his address book) and a link (I scrambled the original scam link). Of course the scammer can be more elaborate and write a real story enticing me to click on the link, but it’d be tricky since he will have to know a lot more about the sender or a the recipient (me) to create a believable story. But this too is possible if the potential payoff to the con artist is worth it.

Now, this kind of scam happens if a scammer either broke into your email account (yahoo, gmail, etc.) by keylogging^[1] the login/password you used to access your email account in an Internet cafe, while you were traveling or he hacked your computer and he has a keylogger installed on your computer, or perhaps you use Outlook or some other desktop application and then the address book information is right there on the computer without needing to break into your online email account.

footnote 1: keylogger is a virus/malware program that logs everything that’s being typed on the keyboard and then this information (including passwords) gets sent to the person who broke into your computer.

The bottom line is that the hacker (most of the time it’s a malware) has now established a link between the hacked email account owner and all people in that person’s address book. It can then quickly analyze who this person emails the most (friends, family, etc.) and then send them an email with a link to a scam site like I have shown above. It may use a fake sender information, but most of the time they use the hacked person’s email account and send the email from there, in which case all the information in the email will be completely legit (i.e. appearing as a real person you know).

What can you do if this happens to you? If you were not the one who has been hacked, but instead your email address was in the address book of the hacked person. First, don’t click on any links in emails sent from that person. Second, tell the hacked person that his email account or computer has been compromised. Ideally not through the same email address since the perpetrator could be smart enough to scan incoming email and automatically delete any such alerts. Best is to use his phone or some other channel where you can establish a real person to person contact.

If you were the one, who has been hacked, truly there is little you can do. The hacker already has your address book and you can’t take it away from him. You definitely need to change your email account’s access password, but you must do it from another computer. Ideally a computer that is safe, which can be very tricky to find these days. Most likely a computer running Linux will be the best bet. Or walk into a computer service company, ask to use their computer, which is likely to be safe (but not guaranteed). The problem is that if you changed your password safely and your computer still has the key logger malware on it, the hacker will get your updated password as soon as you login into you email account next time. Really you need to completely reinstall your computer to get rid of any hidden viruses that your antivirus software couldn’t catch. But if you run Microsoft Windows it’s a matter of hours and often minutes after going online before you get re-infected again, and this after you spent hours and perhaps days reinstalling everything. Switching to Linux operating system is the safest solution, not only because it’s much more secure than Windows, but primarily since it has the smallest user base and thus isn’t very attractive to hackers, who can make much more damage/money attacking very wise-spread systems like Microsoft Windows. Recent Mac systems run underneath a Unix-based variant, so in theory they are as secure as Linux. But since Mac is much more popular than Linux, hackers are more likely to attack a Mac before they will go for Linux. But no system is truly secure, it is all risk management.

I empathize with you, as this is a very difficult problem and there are no really easy solutions here. But at the very least having the awareness of this issue may be helpful to you and those digitally connected to you. I wish I knew of a magical solution to share with you, but I don’t other than unplugging your computer from the Internet.

Never Click On Anything In Emails You Are Not Sure About

If you received an email that seems to be coming from your bank or an online service and it’s asking you to do something, e.g. update your password, fill out some form, or alerts you that your account got locked or robbed. Ignore the rest of the email and call your bank or online service. They will tell you what’s happening for real. Do not be afraid to be a nuisance, on the contrary, the clerk on the other side is most likely going to thank you for being vigilant and security conscious. Banks lose a lot of money to online fraud.

Most of the time it’s easy to identify a scam/fraud/phishing email by simply hovering the pointer over the link the email is trying to incite you into clicking. When you do so, most email clients will show you where the link is really taking you and not what the text suggests it to be. Here is an example from a recent Paypal email (personal data removed):

As you can see that if I hover with my mouse over the blue link “preference centre” (where the first red arrow is pointing), the status bar at the bottom of the image (where the second red arrow is pointing) shows:

https://www.paypal.com/myaccount/settings/notifications?ppid=[...].

So this link is indeed pointing back to paypal.com and it’s relatively safe to assume is valid.

Do be careful though as a scammer could arrange all the links pointing to the correct service and swap only that one crucial link to take your to their fraudulent website. Here is an example of this exact case:

Hovering over the “Recover them here” shows us a real Paypal address. So far so good.

However, if I hover over “Login Now” button:

Ouch, this is no longer Paypal. If you look at the status bar at the bottom of the image (second red arrow), this is the scam/phishing/malware website^[2] the sender wants you go to. You can be sure that the destination website will look like paypal.com (it is so easy to copy any website’s looks) and will gladly take your ‘login’ and ‘password’ so that you can see what’s wrong with your account. Once you type those in, it’ll give you some kind of an error, suggesting to come back later, or even redirect you to the real Paypal website. Except now the perpetrator has your login and password information and can login into your real Paypal account and do whatever he wants with your money.

footnote 2: I hope you will not type up the hacker’s website link and be curious to check it out unless you know you are doing that on a secure system.

Another type of such misleading linking is inserting the word Paypal into the website address. Here is an example:

As you can tell at the very bottom of the image, the link indeed contains the word paypal, but instead of using paypal.com domain name it uses some IP address, which will never be paypal.com’s address. Surprisingly most scammers don’t bother to be really sneaky, most of the time they won’t even have the word paypal in the phishing website address.

Some very sneaky ones can create a destination address like: http://somefakewebsite.com/paypal.com/i-own-you – so it even contains paypal.com in it, except in the wrong place. You want to see https://www.paypal.com/ or https://www.paypal.ca or a few other valid variations to know that the website is really a Paypal website.

Here are a few other examples of enticing emails:

If you were able to follow and understand the above you will now be able to instantly tell 99% of scam attempts in your Inbox by checking the From: address and where the “Action” link is pointing you to. But perhaps you found it a way over your head. Do not dispair! If you didn’t understand it — never click any links in the emails you receive, instead call the company on the phone you know to be valid for that company. I.e. you didn’t find it in that same email, but instead you went to a real website typing paypal.com into your Internet browser and finding their phone number there. And even that can be not 100% safe, if your computer is compromised and the hacker tricks your Internet browser to go to another similar looking website instead. So even better use the good old printed Yellow Pages book. Google can be useful too, except even Google makes spectacular misinformation mistakes at times (see at the end of this article).

Don’t Open Questionable Email Attachments

Attackers often put malware in an email attachment and try to get you to open it.

Here is an example:

Hello stas, 
You are going to be billed USD 2,230.50 on your 
Mastercard card soon. View attachment to avoid it. 
Password is 5558

Here they use an attachment that’s a virus program, and use the scare tactic to make me open the attachment. They also give me a password to make it look more legit (i.e. nobody else but you will be able to open that attachment, so they confide in you).

Most of the time they guess wrong, (i.e. I don’t have a Mastercard), then it’s easy to delete. But if they happen to guess right be careful to contact your bank by phone if you’re concerned and don’t open any such attachments. Your bank will never send you any such information by email.

Nigerian Scam (Advance-fee scam)

There is a whole category of scam emails that were invented by a few brilliant social engineers in Nigeria, and even though now it’s used by many scammers, this type of scam is often referred to as a Nigerian Scam. Properly this is called Advance-fee scam, and apparently it has been used as early as 1922. The Internet has just made it much much easier to perform.

The scam’s ploy is very simple. The senders is asking your help to transfer a huge amount of money (usually around $1 million) out of their country, offering you an insanely large commission (e.g. $100,000). The only trouble is that they need, say, $10,000 to pay the lawyer to do the transfer and they ask you to pay that, since they have no access to that $1 million before they pay the lawyer fee. Usually it involves a widow or some other type of situation which will help to create trust.

Just today I received:

Hello,
  
 Compliment of the day to you.
 I am Mrs Natacha William; I am sending this brief letter to solicit
 your partnership to transfer $19.5 million US Dollars. I shall send
 you more information and procedures when I receive positive response
 from you.  please send me a message in my Email box and here is my
 (natachal_w@foxmail.com)
 Thanks
 Best Regards,
 Mrs Natacha William

Clearly you want to trash any such emails and never reply to them. Even if you’re a super polite person and you just have to say, Thank you, but no Thank you. Or if you want to tell them that you can see through them. Do Not! Any reply will validate your existence and they will get you elsewhere.

Often they try to speak to your heart and goodwill, consider:

You can see other elements of establishing trust. For example see the disclaimer at the end that is usually used by real businesses.

Here are a few variations on this type of scam.

Good day.
Urgent - help me distribute my $12 million to humanitarian.
this mail might come to you as a surprise and the temptation 
to ignore it as unserious could come into your mind but please
consider it a divine wish and accept it with a deep sense of 
humility. I am mrs Helen George and I am a 61 years old woman.
i am a South African married to a Sierra Leonia.
... much more trimmed ...

another one:

Compliment of the day,
How is your day. I am Mrs.Siti Zakaiah  from Malaysia, 
I am writing to let know you that I am a widow with the 
amount of $5.3M buisness proposal  for you. the fund was 
left by my late husband and the bank inform me to present 
his business partner before the fund will be released.

Note that they smartly use typos and grammatical errors, to appear as if it were a real person, whose native language is not English.

Yet at times the most genius approach the scammers use to get you into talking is by sending an email with just:

Can we talk ?

Since you don’t have any context, you might be curious to reply to ask for more information and that’s where they can get you, all because you replied once and they will then use your human nature against you.

And of course see a dedicated article on how I  almost got scammed just recently, on a much smaller scale and the scammer used the service I offer as a bait. The article includes the complete exchange of emails so that you can hopefully learn from it and not fall for the creative variations of the Advanced-fee scam.

I Love You Already Scam

If they can’t get to you via your greed, they will try your heart. If you’re a man and are lonely they are likely to get you via emails like this:

Hi, honey!
The main thing for us is to trust and to hope. 
When I close my eyes, I see you. I send you a lot of kisses. 
Write me please! My email fake_girl_name_here@rambler.ru

Trust me, there is no girl behind this email. It’s an automatic software sending you this email and if you reply, while it’s quite possible that there will be a female fraudster behind the scheme, I have to disappoint you and tell you that most likely it’ll be a guy you will be talking to, thinking it’s a woman.

If you reply, the other side will start romancing you with sexy photos and cries of despair asking for your help. Except all they want is the contents of your wallet and then some.

If you want to participate in online dating, initiate this yourself by going to a credible dating website. Of course that doesn’t guarantee you will be romancing a real woman either, but the probability of that will be much higher. And even if’s a fake profile, those who run it, will not know that you’re gullible and desperate for love, as they instantly do know if you were to reply to such email.

Here are a few other examples:

My dear! How are you? I send you my tender love, 
my warm embrace and my most passionate kiss-across the miles.
I am waiting for your answer! My email vendula7wzkin@rambler.ru

Hello my dear - I've had a web camera with good quality.
I'll do what you want for you, long time not seen you in a web camera.
My email anetaulrikeuir@rambler.ru

Unsolicited Service Offers

And then there is a huge percentage of spam emails that contain unsolicited service offers.

If you have a website, you’re likely to receive dozens of emails from companies telling you that you website doesn’t rank well on Google and that for a fee they will tell you how to fix that (SEO service), or that the design is broken and they will re-design it for you. Most come from real companies (many come from India) looking for customers. They send the same unsolicited email to millions of people and if 10 take the bait they are happy. So the math works well. Except there are thousands of such companies, each sending millions of such emails daily. That’s not fun. Thank God for email spam filters!

Here is one I received yesterday:

Subject: Loved your site ChestofBooks.com: Read Books Online 
for Free, would love to guest post for you
Hi there, 

My name is Chris and I run the Nature Sport Central website. 
I’m writing to you because I’d love to contribute a guest post to your site.

I’ve been brainstorming some topics that I think your readers 
would get a ton of value from:

• 7 Tips for Camping With Kids
• How to make camping with kids fun and relaxing
• How get organized to get the most of out of camping

I’ll make sure the piece overflows with information that can’t 
be found anywhere else. In exchange I'll be sure to share your 
site to my social media following (2k+ Facebook, 7k+ Twitter, 
3k+ Pinterest & 2k+ Instagram followers). I'm sure you'd get 
some nice publicity.

Let me know what you think and keep up the awesome job with your site! 

Cheers,
Chris Cole

If you look at the subject line (first line), you will see that this is an automated email and not a real person. The spammer software visited my website: ChestofBooks.com, scraped the title of the front page, which contains:

ChestofBooks.com: Read Books Online for Free, would love to guest post for you

and used that to create an email. Perhaps there exists a person by name Chris, who will take over if I were to reply to this automatic probe, perhaps not. But clearly I’m not replying to any such emails and immediately delete them.

Moreover in about two days or so I will receive a follow up email giving me another chance to reply, reminding me of the first email, and sometimes there is a third “final notice”-type of email. Delete them all without thinking twice!

Yet other spammers go even further to make you feel guilty, and they tell you that they already did the work for you even though you haven’t asked them to do so.  And so of course you will be curious to see what have they done for you. (curiosity tactic)

and then 2 days later there is the follow up:

This is no longer a curiosity tactic, my silence lead them to escalate this fraud to fear tactic.

note: I’m so happy that my spam filters keep me clear of this scam, just reading through my spam email folder to give you examples for this articles make me feel yucky.

Granted these unsolicited emails are mostly harmless and just waste our time and our cool at times, but trust me some of those aren’t real service offers but yet another way of a fraudster to get to you.

Faking Trust Tactics

As mentioned in a few places already the spammer will try to get as much information about you as possible and use that in their initial email to gain your trust.

But they are other methods.

1. Using prefix Re: in the subject line.

Usually when you send your friend an email with a subject:

Subject: Let's go for a hike

when she replies to you it comes as:

Subject: Re: Let's go for a hike

The email client software does it automatically to indicate that this is a reply (Re:-ply).

Since you’re are unlikely to open an email with a subject:

Subject: Get Your Website First in Google Ranks

as it’s a clear giveaway of what’s waiting for you in the email, they change the subject to:

Subject: Re: Get Your Website First in Google Ranks

Now, it appears as if you have already been having a discussion and now you will feel obliged to open this email.

Similarly FWD: is another type of common prefix that is used by email client software to indicate that the current email has been forwarded to you and not written from scratch. Of course anybody can write anything in their Subject line, so a spammer can use a similar tactic and write:

Subject: FWD: How To Get Your Website First in Google Ranks

Now that makes you think that someone cared enough about you to think to forward this very useful piece of information to you and thus you’re likely to open such email.

2. In the previous section I mentioned another strategy where the spammer will reply to his own email that you hopefully didn’t reply to and try to get to your kindness by making you feel guilty that you didn’t reply to their first email and hope that you will do it this time. And they will do it a few more times, continuing this conversation with themselves and all along encouraging you to feel guilty and act on it out of guilt. Only if you unconditionally delete them all and hopefully not even bother to read the details will they leave you alone (this time).

In a few days they will try a different approach. It will come from a different person/company with different pretext and reasoning, except most of the time it’s the same spammer. But even if it’s a different spammer, what do we care. We delete them all.

If you haven’t yet read it, please proceed to my article “How To Reduce the Risk Of Getting Scammed and Owned Online” to learn about other security risks you will certainly encounter when conducting your online activities, with an exception to email, that’s covered in this current article.

If you think of other common types of email attacks not listed in this article, please kindly use the comments section below to share those with the readers. Thank you.

The post How To Reduce the Risk Of Getting Scammed and Owned Via Email appeared first on Experience Life.

While the con artists simply want to get some of what you have using their ingenuity and relying on your gullibility, there is a whole new type of exploits that lead to perpetrators owning your computer or mobile device, and then profiting from using it without taking anything directly from you. They use your device to mine bitcoins, facilitate denial of service attacks on vital online services, rent out access to your computer to anybody willing to pay, and much more. They also perform identity theft, where they use the gathered personal information to scam others, using your personality to trick your friends into further scams, suggesting to them to purchase things as if it were your recommendation, infecting their devices with viruses, influencing political votes, etc.

And while new scams and ingenious social engineering schemes get created every second, and nobody is really fully immune (I almost got scammed just recently), there are a few “low hanging fruit”-type of scams that you really should know about and which you can easily detect and avoid.

Main Types of Attacks

How do bad guys can attack you? Usually it’s one of the following things:

1. Phishing. They want to trick you into giving them your login/password to your bank, online service or platform. They could try getting that information from you by calling you on the phone and pretending to be your bank’s customer service or send you an email doing the same. Once they have your credentials they can take your money, your data and pretend to be you to people who have a pre-established trust with you (friends/family/co-workers), which will make it easy for them to attack them.
2. Scamming. They want to trick you into giving them some of your money. e.g. Nigerian scams. Usually this is done by offering you some insane payoff if you do something for them — that something involves sending them some of your money.
3. Malware installing. They want to trick you into downloading and installing malware, which could be a virus or another bad software that will either use your computer’s CPU to work for the perpetrator (e.g. mine bitcoins), encrypt your data and ask for ransom, or attack other computers and anybody it’ll find you’re connect to via your addressbook.
4. Spamming. They will try to persuade you to buy something (products, stocks, services), influence you (e.g. political votes) or sign up for some mailing lists, etc.

Terminology

In this article I use a variety of terms for the bad guy: con artist, scammer, hacker, perpetrator, etc. Most of the time they refer to the same kind of “occupation”.

The only word that I don’t like using in this context is ‘hacker’, since in the IT world the definition of a hacker is of a person, who has the know-how, diligence and perseverance to solve difficult problems. Some of those hackers engage in black hat (dishonest/bad/criminal) activities, but most hackers engage in white hat (honest/good/creative) activities. There is also the grey zone, where depending on the person’s view of the society’s norms and rules, the same person could be considered doing good things by some people and bad by others. For example, if someone breaks into your bank account or performs a credit card fraud and takes your money, your bank will most likely reimburse you, so that you will lose nothing, but the bank will. And the perpetrator may have done a good thing according to his morals, since he made the bank lose money, and that’s goodness if he believes that banks are evil (Robin Hood effect).  Regardless of your belief system, it’s the best to stay safe and not get sucked into any such things explained in this essay in the first place.

Don’t Believe Your Antivirus Program

Chances are you have a free or paid-for antivirus program installed on your digital devices that are connected to the Internet. Which most of the time will tell you that your device is safe.

This is so far from being true, it’s scary. Mostly because it’s telling you a lie.

Your antivirus program can only detect viruses that it knows off. It cannot know of all viruses and hundreds of their mutations roaming the networks out there. Over time the antivirus company will identify new viruses and add them to their database and when that happens it’ll be able to detect those viruses too. But there can be a gap of a few days to a few months before a newly released virus program gets identified and therefore your antivirus program cannot detect any such viruses in real time.

If antivirus companies were truly honest, the message their software would have said is something like:

Now Your Computer Is Immune Only To Viruses We Know Of As Of Yesterday.
It Is Not Protected From Viruses We Don't Know Of Yet.

And this leads us to:

Don’t Download Anything From Sites You Don’t Know

It’s OK to go to websites that you know are real companies who create software and that are trusted in the world, and download their software. While it doesn’t guarantee that what you download is 100% safe, chances are that it is^[3]. While occasionally you may get a dud on a certified and known to be good website, this is not really a problem. The problem is that there are many websites that you’re almost guaranteed to get a virus onto your computer when you download something from there.

footnote 3: the best validation is to make sure that (1) the website link starts with https:// and not http:// (note the extra ‘s’ – which stands for secure protocol) (2) there is a little lock picture next to it, showing the lock closed and not opened, like so:

I have already discussed the email scams that entice you to click on a link that takes you somewhere you shouldn’t really go to. And then there is the Internet at large, where very similar and even more elaborate traps are abound. Yet, a random website has less credibility in the eyes of a random visitor, because it usually doesn’t have a pre-established trust with that visitor.

If you download warez-type or nulled software, instead of purchasing it from the company’s website who created it or an open source equivalent, 95% of the time you voluntarily allow a hacker to install a virus onto your system. And of course the fact that you paid for some software doesn’t mean that it’s safe. It’s easy to setup a website that sells viruses as if they were legit things. If you can’t afford to pay for the software, try to find an open source equivalent, but even then you need to establish a credibility of the site you download the open source software from. If you must run software of unknown origin at the very least run it in a “sandbox”, isolated from the rest of your computer. Vmware, virtualbox and other virtualization software is used to run such sandbox environments, but chances are that it will be too complicated for you to figure out, unless you’re a technically-apt person.

Same goes for movies, music, images, books and anything else you may like to download from the Internet. Hackers are very smart at camouflaging malware as legit files. Some of these will be caught by your antivirus program, but many won’t be detected.

Finally, I’d like to alert you to a type of websites that use fake user comments to entice you to download things. Such websites will have a download link for say some popular software for free, and under it, it will have a 100 comments from various people with their profile pictures and really smartly written comments. Pay attention to the content of their comments. Most will say things like:

1. This is a great software. Thank you, thank you, thank you. You're God!
2. Great! I checked on 5 antivirus programs and it is legit!
3. No problem running at all. Go for it.
4. You must download it, it's amazing!
5. My niece works at microsoft, she said it's safe to download.

Often if you look closely you can tell that the all comments are designed to get you into a herd mentality and act. Some websites are sneakier at it than others. Often it helps to go and look at other pages on the website. Most of the time you will see very similar and at times identical comments.

Don’t Believe Fake Antivirus Program

Sometimes when you browse the Internet, you get a pop-up that looks very similar to a common Anti-virus program and of course it’s telling you to either download and install an antivirus program that they give you the link for or to call a number where an auto-reply will tell you to do the same.

Here is an example:

This one tries to get you to download the malware telling you it’s an antivirus program, and also to call a number. Others are more creative and tell you what you’re about to lose if you don’t do that. Lots of scare tactics used here. Of course if you were to follow through you will indeed have all the problems that the scam is supposedly trying to protect you from.

So never act on such pop-ups, even if they look like your antivirus program. Instead, close the pop-up window, and even the Internet browser altogether. The go to your antivirus program that you already have installed and run a system and data check.

It’s the same thing in all the different situations. If something on the Internet is prompting you to act or else… cull that prompt immediately and instead initiate the activity yourself, either by calling your ISP’s support or if you’re advanced enough doing it on your own (such as starting your own antivirus program). Don’t trust anything else, whether it pretends to do you a favor out of love or through scare tactics.

Nothing is Ever Free

Marketing people have been using ‘Free’ for years to entice us to give away our free time in exchange for a permission for them to sell to us. Free samples, free seminars, free training, free money.

Of course this is used not just by marketers, but pretty much by most people. It’s very rare to encounter someone truly giving something away without wanting something in return, whether declaring the intention of exchange directly or the way it’s done most of the time — indirectly and covertly. Think of all the favors others have done for you, only to ask back for a return favor when they needed something from you.

Since this unspoken “barter” mechanism is so ingrained in our society, scammers use it with a great success online. Just as I was writing this article, one of the websites sent me this pop-ups:

Yeah, right, how lucky I am. I’m getting $120 for free. Not only I’ll not get any $$ from acting on this pop-up, if I do click on the link and follow through with what does appear like a benign survey – I will now give away my email address to get a lot more email scams in the future, very likely they are going to trick me into downloading a virus, and they could make me do many other things that won’t be beneficial neither for me nor for anybody connected to me, because a $120 offer is not cheap. Of course it can be just as well $5, but then you’re less likely to get tempted.

There are legit companies that pay users to fill out surveys, and usually the payoff is a few dollars. But if you ever want to get into business of making a few dollars per filled out survey you should go and seek out those companies. Almost any offer that comes in a pop-up screen is a scam.

Also do notice how the scammer will try to earn your trust by showing you as many personal details as possible. Here for example I accessed the Internet via Shaw ISP, and they tried to use that to earn my trust, since they don’t know anything else about me. If you ever did give them your name and email for example and then access the Internet from the same computer (i.e. same IP address) they will use your name too to gain trust.

Have you noticed that since about 2012, when you looked at some product on some website that same product has been following you in ads popping up on other websites? This sneaky method is called re-marketing and even though you have left the store, the store owner now can still try to convince you to buy. It is fine with legit vendors since the authorities don’t consider re-marketing not kosher. But since scammers use the same approach, we’re in deep trouble.

So the next time you see an offer to make an easy $120, think twice before you say ‘yes’.

When To Use A Fake Email Address When Registering Online

Often it’s hard to tell whether a website is legit or not. And sometimes we do know that the website is shady, but we still want what they have to offer.  Most websites want you to register to get in, and what do they want the most? Your email address. And once they have it, they will sell it to anybody who is willing to buy it, and who will then use it to scam or spam you. There are even large legit companies, who at times sell their email list to another legit but less honest company, who then sells it further and off it goes.

So the best approach in any situations where you aren’t sure is to use a fake email address.

If the website doesn’t require validating your email address, then you can always type something that looks like a valid email:

john.doe@somewhereonline.com

Try not to use gmail and other real email services when you write a non-existing email address, since you’re very likely to pick an actual email address of someone else and now they are going to get a headache due to your action.

The problem is that most websites want to validate that you provided a real email address. So they will email to the address that you provided a special link that you need to click, once that email is received so that now they will know the email address is for real.

If that’s the case (and it is the case 99% of the time), create a secondary email address at one of the free email services like yahoo, hotmail or gmail and start to always use that email address in such cases.

Continue using your real email address for your bank, any online services that are essential for your wellbeing and with your friends. Use the secondary email address for anything else.

You will see that very quickly that secondary email address will get inundated with spam- and scam-type of emails. But what do you care? You don’t need to check that email account at all. Only go to that account when you need to “validate” an email for a new site you used it for. But otherwise let those emails pile up.

Of course if you’re going to use that secondary email account like you do with your primary one, you will defeat the purpose of this whole separation. If you do so, don’t bother with creating a secondary account or you will waste even more time.

There are also throw away email services, which keep the email address valid for say one hour so that you could validate it and then they delete it as if it has never existed. But why bother with creating a throw-away email every time, when you can just have one or a few secondary email addresses you can use for the rest of your digital life.

If you weren’t sure whether the website is a good one and you used the secondary email, you can always change your profile and switch it to your primary email address. Therefore you don’t need to be afraid to use the safer choice first and decide to make chances later.

I personally use such secondary email addresses not only for potentially shady websites, but also for almost any newsletters and email subscriptions. I don’t like being bombarded with weekly and daily emails even though I do want to occasionally see what some of those websites share in their newsletters. When I choose to do so, I go to that account and read those newsletters. I like having a choice.

As you can see it’d be very helpful for you to create even more than two email addresses. One that you use exclusively for any purposes that you want to be kept in the loop 24/7. Second, for data feeds that you care to look at sometimes. Third, for anything you’re not sure about.

Blocking Ads

While commercial ads can be useful at times (though very infrequently these days), you can install special software that will block most of the online advertisements from ever showing in your Internet browser, and will definitely stop the crazy pop-ups. The main advantage of using this software is that besides blocking ads, it’ll also block most of the malware that often gets distributed through those ads.

While I do make a little bit of money from ads appearing on my websites and I only use Google Adsense for this purpose, and trust that they are diligent at not allowing any malware in their ads (most of the time), I do recommend to you to install Ad blocking software as it’ll make your online experience not only less annoying, but also much safer.

To find the right software search for your Internet browser name, your platform name and ad blocking on Google. For example if you’re on Windows OS and your use chrome, search for:

windows chrome ad blocking

note: if you use firefox, the extension ublock is much more efficient than Adblock at the time of this writing.

Online Identity Theft

Here are a few notes on Online identity thefts and how they impact everybody connected to those stolen identities:

Hacked Friends

If someone hacked your friend’s computer, same as with email, the hacker can now write to you via any messaging system, like Facebook, pretending to be your friend and suggest to you to click on some link, because he thinks it’s awesome. As I explained earlier talking about email from friend scams, the weakness of the hacker is that most of the time they have little to no knowledge of the person they have hacked. And as a result of that they can’t provide a good reason for you to click the link, other than some silly:

wow, this is amazing, http://some.link.here/

If you get such a message from a friend, always ask for a context and more background before you click it. Most of the time they will tell you they have no idea what you’re talking about. Of course they don’t know they have been hacked.

Fake Personas

Some years back when I worked in email security company I attended several Internet security conferences. I didn’t go back since the information shared there was truly scary and I didn’t really want to live in fear. But this one is worth sharing with you.

Not all hackers out there just break into accounts and computers. There are some who develop fake personas, e.g. on Facebook, they nurture those with rich, interesting and frequent posts and comments to other people’s posts, establishing themselves as experts and trend makers, creating huge following, and so on. These fake personas are then sold or rented to people who want to manipulate your opinion and then if you happen to be a follower of such a fake persona, they can, for example, relatively easily sway you politically to impact the current or future elections. Of course they can do many other things, which have nothing to do with causing direct damage to your computer or stealing your data or money. Manipulating minds is much more powerful than stealing material goods.

So unless you met someone in person and can be reasonably sure of their true identity, when you talk to someone online you really have no idea who you’re talking to. I hope that’s a sufficient revelation.

If It’s On Google It Must Be True

I will conclude this essay with another common fallacy.

Somehow because people have been using Google search so much and got such an excellent value from doing so, they now blindly believe anything that appears on Google’s search pages. Beware, Google is just a search engine and has no way of validating anything it displays. It’s just shows you what’s available and you need to do your homework to tell what’s legit and what’s not.

Moreover as of recent Google has started to have the hutzpa to post authoritative information in the search results without any validation of such postings. Currently they post it on the right column of the Internet browser on desktop computers or the top of the page on mobile devices. While it works for converting grams to ounces and some other things that just can’t go wrong, they are so wrong at times. For example. I have just happened to search for Somananda, who is a contemporary Tantra yoga teacher.

https://www.google.com/search?q=Somananda

gives us at the time of this writing this:

Not only this is the wrong person in the photo, the person in the photo is alive and well as I happen to know him. But Google tells me that he lived in the 8th century and has been long dead.

The person in the photo is Dharmananda, 21 century’s Somananda’s brother. And no relation whatsoever to the 8th century Somananda, other than Dharmananda has been studying/practicing some teachings of Somananda from the 8th century. So you can see how Google’s algorithms connected things up, except they packaged it all wrong.

note: Of course it’s possible that when you read this article and you click the link Google could have fixed this very invalid authoritative information. Which would be wonderful. And it’d be the best if they have removed this not so clean feature altogether (other than converting grams to ounces or current time). We have enough of disinformation going on already in the world at large.

As of recent I have seen at least a few other examples where Google presented something which was either absolutely wrong, or was only presenting one side of a story, and not necessarily the most correct one. For example try to research chakras and it’ll give you an authoritative information on chakras which was invented in the New Age and which is often very far from what authentic thousand-year old Yoga tells us.

To clarify I’m not talking about Google showing links to various websites, which may or may not be wrong. It has no magic powers to know that. I’m talking about Google displaying information in a box on the search result pages.

So kids repeat after me altogether, “if it’s on Google it must be true!”

Now that you have studied these notes on common online attacks on yourself, please make sure to read “How To Reduce the Risk Of Getting Scammed and Owned Via Email“, dedicated to teaching you to identify and avoid attacks delivered over email and which most people are very vulnerable to.

If you have other online security tips that are not too complex for a lay person to benefit from please share in the comments below. Thank you.

The post How To Reduce the Risk Of Getting Scammed and Owned Online appeared first on Experience Life.

How does it make money? Through selling advertisement.

How does it sell advertisement? By making you spend as much time as possible on the Facebook land. Even if you don’t click on any advertisement – they still make money from the brand exposure kind of ads, where advertisers pay for their brand to flash in front of your mind again and again, until it gets programmed into your subconscious, and that when you next go to buy something you unconsciously will choose the brand you were programmed to choose. And you’re also more likely to buy something you don’t need in first place.

Facebook making a killing in profits is not a problem – we live in a capitalistic world so it’s the norm.

The brainwashing is not the problem – they have been doing it long before Facebook.

The real problem is the side effect of Facebook’s design to make money — most Facebook users waste a lot of their life and invite too much unnecessary stress into an already very stressful life.

And even bigger problem is that all that distraction prevents you from having those few precious moments of being with yourself, when you can grow the most and be in your heart. When there is an inner disquiet it’s so easy to seek out something that will take your mind and heart away into some dream land. And online with non-stop stimulation and notifications of promised stimulation you’re being unplugged from your inner being and by making sure you’re constantly plugged into that dream world.

The easiest solution is not to use Facebook at all. The good old email is still going strong. The problem is that most of the world is on Facebook so if you want to communicate with people they prefer Facebook chat over email. Secondary, most events are now announced and arranged through Facebook so if you want to participate in group gatherings of any kind, unfortunately it’s almost impossible to accomplish without using Facebook. For quite some time I contemplated of dumping Facebook altogether, but then I realized that I can be smart about it and use it to my advantage and not let it take advantage of me.

Some people left Facebook in favor of another platform, but it too is there in the business of making money and who do you think they are going to copy as far as their features go? Don’t think twice — the leading platform Facebook. And they will do it more poorly since they don’t have as deep pockets as Facebook.

So what to do?

In this article I’m going to share tips on how you can continue using Facebook (and other similar platforms) without it sucking all of free time out of your life and replacing it with more stress than you already have from other sources.

Keep Only Real Friends

It’s very tempting to accept all friends invitations. Don’t. Delete anybody you don’t really know. And don’t feel bad about rejecting the invitation, the other side most of the time doesn’t really care if you accept it or not and many do it so that they can market their stuff to you anyway.

A few years ago I deleted 3500 friends, who weren’t friends at all. In fact I initiated most of those connections when I was experimenting with Facebook marketing myself. I now have about 550 on my friends list, all of which I have either spent time with in person (I used to be somewhat a celebrity in a computer tech world some 10+ years ago and I traveled and lived in many countries) or at least we had a meaningful conversation online and we moved to keep in touch. I don’t think twice about deleting friend invites from people I don’t know – even if I see that they “liked” what I posted. I still don’t know them. Remember that there is the ‘follow’ feature. They can always choose to follow me if they like what I share. And so can I. If in the future we get to connect and to get to know each other, and it feels good to both of us then I’m happy to add them to the friends list.

The problem that the more friends you have (1) the more “stuff” you get on your Facebook feed and (2) more irrelevant event recommendations and invitations, (3)  “xyz is live now” alerts, (4)  like-my-page requests and much much more. And as a result of all these side-effects you haven’t considered when accepting a new “friend” invitation — Facebook will suck out even more life out of you.

And if you share something, you’re likely receive comments from people you don’t really know. While more likes is always nice, knowing that the whole like-feature is often manipulated and anybody can buy thousands of likes for cheap, it really turns it into a meaningless false indicator of worthiness. Really, I don’t care whether you like my posts or not. What I care about is whether what I share is meaningful to you and it makes your life more interesting, efficient, loving and there is less suffering in it.

Don’t Read the Feed

The awesome side effect of the time that I had 4000 friends is that I had to stop reading the feed. How could I possibly keep in touch with a flurry of non-stop posts from 4000 friends. And when I dumped most of them, I discovered that I acquired a great habit of not going to the feed and I kept at it considering it a gift.

Recall your life pre-Facebook. Were you calling all your friends, relatives and acquaintances every day, several times a day asking on what they are up to, what did they buy today, what music tracks they have been listening to and how their pet or toddler charmed them today. Why then all of a sudden you started caring so much about the lives of others. Especially people that aren’t that close to you. The fact is that you don’t. It’s been pushed down your throat and you have been swallowing it in big gulps without getting a breather to even realize it’s not what you need.

At any point you can go to the wall of any of the persons that you’re friends with and read what they are up to. If you start having a choice, chances are that you will be doing it in the same way you did it before Facebook existed. You will do so once in a while, i.e. once a week, once a month, once a year, and not once a minute. And then it’ll be your choice to be interested in someone’s life at a specific moment because you felt moved to do so. What a difference.

Turn All Notifications Off

This is the most destructive part of the modern communications – we are being bombarded with notifications from every app and platform, often there is a new notification every few seconds – this is madness!

The problem is that you don’t realize how destructive and stressful it is because you’re now so used to it. Try to take a week off without your mobile and computer – when you go on vacation next time don’t check your email, or Facebook and don’t use any apps – keep your phone off and with you just for emergencies. When you return back to your normal usage you will be horrified how jarring and stressful it is to re-open that madness tap you have little control over.

And if you’re emotionally upset about something, the notifications are so “precious” because they help you to run away from yourself. Who wants to do the uncomfortable work of self-growth, when there is so much “play” out there, and you don’t even need to seek it out as it’s calling you through all of your digital devices and their apps.

Facebook makes it very difficult to turn all notifications off, because the less notifications you get, the less you will come back to the site, the less money they will make. I have been battling with this for a long time and Facebook keeps on inventing new ways of notifications. For example when it starts pushing on me events on a different continent because I happen to have a friend there, you can’t just say ‘No More’ – you can only choose ‘Less of This’.

To gain control over your usage of platforms like Facebook you need to be in control of when you use it. Say you check your email several times a day (unless you have notifications On as well!), check your Facebook messages at the same time – nobody will die if you reply to them in a few hours or days later. They will just learn over time that you aren’t a robot and you reply to messages when you’re ready to do so and more importantly so, when you can make yourself fully available for a meaningful conversation, and not answering their deeply inquiring questions, while you’re walking to your car, running to catch a train, or sitting on a toilet, and you’re not really fully present.

This also means you need to turn the Chat off as well. Do you really care who comes online or goes offline every few minutes?

Once you turned all the notifications off, then you may choose to turn some of them back on. But now you have a control over what your real needs for notifications are. And it’s very likely that you are now addicted to those notification pop-ups and really can’t live without them.

Don’t Write Significant to Others Stories On Your Wall

Let’s admit this – Facebook is a black hole of information. If blogosphere created a wealth of information for everybody to benefit from at the moment of writing of any of the blog posts and still so many years later, Facebook is the black hole which eats up anything you write to be never seen again. Try a simple experiment of finding something you wrote on your wall a year earlier. Or even better the same on someone else’s wall. You won’t find it because the data is gone. Sure you can get to it if you have the patience to hit Next at the bottom of the feed scrolling the feed for a few hours and then you’re likely to miss it, because after 50 scrolls you will tune out and no longer pay attention to the data coming at you.

I find this phenomena demonstrated so well in large Facebook groups, where the same question is being asked again and again, and some 100 people answer it again and again. Instead of having an Internet forum-like hierarchy of information where things are sorted in a sensible folder structure and can be easily searched and found by new users of these forums, it’s just a flat unorganized stream that disappears into nowhere.

So if you write anything that you believe can be of any use to anyone down the road please do the world a favor, start a free blog and post any significant insights there – and then share the link to a blog post on your wall, so your shared link will disappear into the black hole of Facebook, but the information you shared will still be accessible and searchable at large via Google and other search engines. Blogs used to be difficult to use in the early days. These days they are as easy as posting on Facebook. And it doesn’t cost you anything.

Of course if you write something that is of no use to anybody, but a few people (e.g. family photos), or the information you share will expire in 3 days anyway (e.g. you have some tickets for sale), then by all means share it on your Facebook wall. This is the best use of this resource.

My Facebook Usage

My usage is very simple.

1. I have all notifications that are possible to have off as off. I don’t get email notifications. Chat is off.
2. When I choose to go to Facebook I go directly to the messages page – so I really use it as email.
3. I never visit the feed page.
4. When I think of someone and I want to know what they are up to – I go directly to their wall.
5. I use the events feature for joining and organizing events – this is one feature that Facebook has done well.
6. I use groups only when I have a need to research some information.
7. I manage one group at the moment. As a responsible manager I have notifications turned On just for this group to take good care of its members.
8. I write anything of long term significance to others on my blogs and share the links to the posts on my wall. If some silly post of mine turns into a a meaningful conversation, I compile its comments into a digest and put it on my blog if I believe it’ll be useful to others.
9. I prefer skype to Facebook chat as it’s non-invasive, doesn’t tempt to check out irrelevant things and as a engineer I find skype to be a much better chat tool, IMHO. (Except now it’s starting to copy Facebook and is starting to go downhill). So with a tiny handful of people that I communicate with a lot, I ask them to use skype to talk to me.
10. Email is my preferred way of communication, so at times I ask people to switch to email, especially when discussing personal matters.

Useful Aids

Here are some browser extensions that I use in the context of Facebook to save my time and diminish stress:

• Expand All Facebook Comments – it’s a maddening experience needing to click ‘See More’ in any busy discussion on Facebook. They couldn’t think of adding a button to expand them all. So the linked bookmarklet does that for you. It’s a great time saver. I use it on firefox on my desktop computer. I’m sure someone wrote something similar for other browsers/platforms. Just google it for your setup.
• Seen Blocker – this is a psychological manipulation one – as humans if we know that someone knows we read their message we are likely to create a pressure on ourselves to reply. It’s a healthy built-in social normal in a real person to person conversation. But when it’s done over chat this is not so, because our correspondent has no clue what we are doing at the moment of them sending the message and us happening to read it. So yes I read your message, but do I really have to say: “I read your message, but I’m sorry I can’t reply to it right now as I’m on a toilet right now”? So these tools cancel Facebook’s mechanism of showing your correspondent that you read the message. And now you can attend to it when you’re ready to do so without feeling self-imposed shame that you haven’t done it as soon as you saw the message. And if it’s important you will surely tend to it as soon as you will find it practical. Basically it brings communications back to the simplicity and convenience of the good old email.

I hope this sharing was useful to you. If you have useful tips you have discovered to productive use of Facebook and similar platforms  and you would like to share – those are very welcome via the comments section below. Thank you.

The post How To Use Facebook Productively Without Letting It Consume Your Life appeared first on Experience Life.

A lot of the modern physics discoveries are about non-linearity of time, and the possibility of existence of parallel universes (multiverse). Finally the science is starting to catch up with the science fiction.

Parallel Universes

The concept of parallel universes is rather simple. Take yourself exactly as you are at this moment. Now imagine that there is another universe where you’re slightly taller, and another, where you’re even taller, and so on. Another universe where you are slightly shorter, and in another, even more so. Now take each of your body parts, the health of your organs, your smarts, etc., and create a new universe where everything else is the same except that one is slightly different. You have just visualized a pretty big number of universes in your mind.

Next, imagine yourself standing at the cross-road – take a random decision and let’s say you turned left. Imagine another universe, where you turned right, another, where you went straight, another, where you went backwards and yet another, where you just can’t decide how to proceed and so you just stand still. Apply this to every time in your life you have to make a choice. Here we end up with a finite number of choices since your life span is limited and so is the number of choices. But it’s a helluva lot of choices.

Now, consider how many sentient and insentient beings there are in this world at any given moment and multiply that number by the number of variations created in the previous two paragraphs. Now you can tell the numbers start to become infinitely large.

Finally, modern science tells us that there is an infinite number of galaxies out there, with their own suns and planets like ours – and this is just in our universe.

Science fiction works often like to play with the concept of pulling different versions of the main characters from different parallel universes and making things delightfully complicated.

I remember one of my Tantra teachers, while teaching the concept of parallel universes, introduced a very interesting proposition, explaining how Jesus could have possibly made the lame walk and the dead alive. After all, if someone has been lame all their life, even if Jesus could cure their physical illness, their muscles would need years of rehabilitation (physio!) before they could walk. So his explanation was very simple — Jesus simply swapped the present lame or dead person, with their parallel universe copy where they are not lame or dead. What a chutzpa!

I find it interesting that the writers don’t encounter any spacial paradoxes related to multiverses, unlike those who tinker with the concept of time travel, where the paradoxes are plentiful. I suppose this is because it’s much easier for us to imagine how time travel can impact our life.

So here are some masterpieces , exploring the concept of parallel universes, that I have enjoyed and would recommend to you.

Books

• The G.O.D. Inc Trilogy (1987-1989) by Jack L. Chalker. Someone discovers that there are parallel universes of this Earth, each a bit different from the other, including speed of the time, events, etc. They build a machinery to move between different universes and build a G.O.D. Inc. company to exclusively control it. The books don’t go much into exploring the idea of the differences between various versions of this earth, but concentrates on a detective work of how people try to manipulate and take advantage of the situation. The trilogy explores the issue with the same but slightly different individuals meeting each other.
  A lot of other of Jack L. Chalker’s works involve parallel universes/alternate realities. I enjoyed reading almost all of his works.

• The Disappearance (1951) by Philip Wylie.  This novel is about what happens when everyone wakes up one day and finds that all members of the opposite sex are missing (all the men have to get along without women, and vice versa). The book delves into the double standards between men and women that existed prior the woman’s movement of the 1970s, exploring the nature of the relationship between men and women and the issues of women’s rights and homosexuality.

• Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said (1974) by Philip K. Dick. A parallel universe where all is the same but where the main character doesn’t exist.

Movies

I haven’t found any yet that really explore parallel universes, where one shifts in and out of several universes, not just finding himself in an alternate universe. Perhaps you can help.

TV Series

• The Farnsworth Paradox (Season 4 Episode 15 of Futurama) (Animated). The Planet Express crew goes to a parallel universe made accessible by Professor Farnsworth’s latest experiment.
• Sliders (1995–2000). A boy genius and his comrades travel to different parallel universes, trying to find their way back home.
• Rick and Morty (2013-) (Animated). The exploits of a super scientist and his not-so-bright grandson, traveling back and forth in time and parallel universes.

Nested Universes

These are like parallel universes, but happening within the current universe, often in a nested fashion. Akin to when you dream that you dream that you dream…, or you wake up from a dream, but this is actually a dream of you waking up… and you no longer know which one is the reality and which one is the dream.

Movies

• OtherLife (2017) [IMDB] A virtual reality where time moves a a very different speed.
• Existenz (1999) [IMDB] A virtual reality that invokes another virtual reality from within itself.
• Inception (2010) [IMDB] A stacked dream within a dream consciousness manipulation.
• Infinity Chamber (2016) [IMDB] A man trapped in an automated prison must outsmart a computer in order to escape.

Alternate Universes

Many use the terms “parallel universes” and “alternate universes” interchangeably, but to me an “alternate universe” is an exploration of a very different reality, whereas  “parallel universes” are those with slight or almost imperceptible variation of the normal universe as described at the beginning of this article. I think it’s much easier to come up with an idea of a very different world. It requires a much more refined imagination to come up with a subtle or peculiar variation to our normal world. It’s much easier to relate to a slightly different, yet familiar world. It perhaps helps us to transform and make the familiar world a better place to be in. An alternate universe, which usually represents a far removed reality, is fun to imagine, but it’s very difficult for it to have an impact on our daily reality, IMHO.

Books

• Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871) by Lewis Carroll (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson). These masterpieces require no description.
• Mither Mages Trilogy (2011-2015) by Orson Scott Card. Three universes, only one of which is populated by humans.
• The Man In The High Castle (1962) by Philip K. Dick. Alternate history and alternate parallel universe.

Movies

Here are good movies exploring alternate universes:

• Alice in Wonderland (1951). Probably the most famous alternate universe of all. Of course make sure to read the original.
• Being John Malkovich (1999) . A portal to John Malkovich’s head.
• The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985). A movie can have its own alive universe.
• Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988). A cartoon universe.
• Jumanji (1995). Don’t let the scary universe come into yours!
• The Thirteenth Floor (1999). Parallel universe replicating the 30s.
• MirrorMask (2005). Escape world with fantastic creatures.
• Logan’s Run (1976). Life is terminated at 30 whether you want it or not.
• In Time (2011). In this universe the time is a commodity that one could trade and thus making one life’s duration very short or infinitely long.
• Run Lola Run (1998). One of my favorite movies with 3 alternative endings.
• Mr. Nobody (2009). Anything is possible, and one’s destiny is unset.
• Possible Worlds (2000).  A man lives in parallel worlds, falling in love with the same woman, while the police hunt down a serial killer who steals brains.
• Repeat Performance (1947) [IMDB]. A woman kills her husband and then wishes to fix things by reliving the last year.

TV Series

• The Man In The High Castle (2015– ). Alternate history and alternate parallel universe.

Also see wikipedia’s extensive list of fiction employing parallel universes.

Time Travel

While I’m yet to encounter any astonishing fiction works on omnitemporality, i.e. where one can perceive all of time at once, there are lots of magnificent works that explore the concept of time travel and its paradoxes. Here is modest list of suggestions that that I have enjoyed and would recommend to you:

Books

• The Overlords of War (1970) by Gerard Klein. Time-travel, aliens, war & why we fight it. George Corson, earthman, is sent on secret mission to end a long smoldering war with the birdlike inhabitants of the planet, Uria, 6000 years in the future, only to be used as a pawn by powerful god-like beings. Is there such a thing as the ultimate weapon? Can war be ended once & for all? Is the destruction of the universe necessary to achieve peace? The original French title is “Les Seigneurs de la Guerre”.

• The End of Eternity (1971) by Isaac Asimov. Andrew Harlan is an Eternal, a man whose job it is to range through past and present Centuries, monitoring and, where necessary, altering Time’s myriad cause-and-effect relationships. But when Harlan meets and falls for a non-Eternal woman, he seeks to use the awesome powers and techniques of the Eternals to twist time for his own purposes, so that he and his love can survive together.

• Time Cursor (2010) by John David Krygelski. Dealing with time travel paradoxes, while trying to prevent deaths and crimes, and a bit of parallel universes talk.

• Replay (1998) by Ken Grimwood. A “Groundhog day”-like story, spanning over decades, with a twist.

Movies

• Somewhere in Time (1980) [IMDB]. Time travel with the power of self-suggestion alone!
• Back to the Future Trilogy (1985-1990) [IMDB]. Probably one of the best time travel movies.
• The Time Traveler’s Wife (2009) [IMDB]. Try to have a relationship when you’re affected by involuntarily time travel.
• Predestination (2014) [IMDB]. A timecop tale.
• The Butterfly Effect (2004) [IMDB]. Exploring one of the main most likely effects of time travel.
• The Girl Who Leapt Through Time (2006) [IMDB]. A Japanese anime on how time travel aids a teenager in her daily life.
• Peut-être / Maybe (1999) [IMDB]. A heart touching French-made movie, dealing with a time portal into the future.
• Looper (2012) [IMDB]. Assassinations in time.
• The Time Machine (1960) [IMDB]. H. G. Wells’ classic.
• Twelve Monkeys (1995) [IMDB]. Traveling back in time to prevent a future disaster.
• About Time (2013) [IMDB]. Have the time machine, will travel.
• Synchronicity (2015) [IMDB]. A physicist who invents a time machine must travel back to the past…
• Timecrimes (2007) [IMDB]. A series of disasters of unforeseeable consequences due to time travel.
• Click (2006) [IMDB]. Not so much time travel, but time fast-forward with some interesting consequences.
• Time Lapse (2014) [IMDB]. A mysterious machine that takes pictures twenty-four hours into the future is found and is used for personal gain, until disturbing and dangerous images begin to develop.
• Timeline (2003) [IMDB]. 21 century archaeologists are trapped in 14th century France.
• Timecop (1994) [IMDB]. Must prevent a politician from changing the past to control the future.

TV Series

• 12 Monkeys (2015– ) [IMDB]. Traveling back in time to prevent a future disaster.
• Steins;Gate (2011– )  [IMDB]. Anime. A group of students travels in time to stop evil.
• Sapphire & Steel  (1979–1982) [IMDB]. Evil forces try to disrupt the universe’s timeline.
• 11.22.63 (2016)  [IMDB]. A high school teacher travels back in time to prevent John F. Kennedy’s assassination.
• Timeless (2016– ) [IMDB]. An unlikely trio travel through time in order to battle unknown criminals and protect history as we know it.
• The Department of Time (El ministerio del tiempo) (2015– ) [IMDB]. 3 persons from different centuries cooperate to keep the history unchanged.

Time Loop Movies

In these movies the characters get to re-live the same period of their life again and again, sometimes a day, sometimes just a few minutes of it.

• Groundhog Day (1993) [IMDB]. The classic – a model for all time loop movies since. Another chance to love.
• Edge of Tomorrow (2014) [IMDB]. Another time loop in war with aliens.
• Source Code (2011) [IMDB]. A time loop used to find and disarm a bomb on a train.
• ARQ (2016) [IMDB]. Using a time loop to overcome armored raiders.
• Before I Fall (2017) [IMDB]. Reliving the last day of her life a teenager untangles the mystery around her death and discovers everything she’s losing.
• Cruel & Unusual (2014) [IMDB]. Wrongly condemned for killing his wife, a man finds himself in a mysterious institution where he is sentenced to relive her death for eternity. I can’t help but think of “Wristcutters: A Love Story (2006) [IMDB]” in this context.
• 12:01 PM (1990) [IMDB]. A man is stuck living his life in the same 59 minute time frame.

Time Loop TV Series

• Day Break (2006) [IMDB]. A detective on the run, same day all over again.
• Re: Zero – Starting Life in Another World (2016) [IMDB]. Anime. A very interesting storyline with multiple timeloops. Modeled after computer game players, who intermittently save the state of the game, and roll back to it, when their character dies in the game, so that they won’t need to start the game from the very beginning.

Also see wikipedia’s extensive list of time travel works of fiction.

Lives of Immortals

These are stories of those few who have been living much longer than us normal humans. It seems that the main character of this genre is vampires, but occasionally we find other unusual characters. For vampires it’s relatively easy, since they usually don’t live amongst people, but for non-vampires it’s very difficult to conceal their lack of aging and thus usually forces them to move all the time and moving is the least of their troubles. So in the lists below I skipped vampire movies since they don’t really help us experience how to be an immortal amongst people, with exception to scenarios where vampires blend into the human society.

Books

• The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde. A masterpiece of storytelling.

Movies

• Only Lovers Left Alive (2013) [IMDB]. Love amongs vampires. Tilda Swinton at her best!
• Orlando (1992) [IMDB].  A man moves through several centuries of British history, experiencing a variety of lives and relationships along the way, and even changing sex. Tilda Swinton once more!
• The Man from Earth (2007) [IMDB]. You must not know what the movie is about before you watch it – a strikingly powerful movie.
• The Age of Adaline (2015) [IMDB]. A woman becomes ageless after an accident.
• The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945) [IMDB] and a remake: Dorian Gray (2009) [IMDB]. A man who doesn’t age, but a painting of him does.
• Tuck Everlasting (2002) [IMDB]. A young woman meets and falls in love with a young man who is part of a family of immortals.
• Zardoz (1974) [IMDB]. A savage enters into a secret abode of bored immortal humans, many of which want to die but cannot.

TV Series

• Highlander (1992–1998) [IMDB]. Immortals and their struggles in the modern society.
• New Amsterdam (2008)  [IMDB]. A New York homicide detective is cursed with immortality.

I will be updating this article as I find good additions to the above lists. Thank you all who helped me with suggestions when I first posted this article on FB.

If you have recommendations on good fiction books and movies on time travel and parallel universes please share. Thank you.

The post Mind Expanding Books and Movies on Time Travel and Parallel Universes appeared first on Experience Life.

I first encountered the phenomenon of Near-Death Experiences (NDE) some years back. Having read several books on the topic, I found it striking that most people, who went through the experience and lived to tell the story, came back completely transformed. Upon return they usually found themselves significantly more loving, cheerful and being able to instantly let go of whatever in the past bothered them for long periods of time. Many were cured from whatever physical ailments they had. I’d dare say that most came back enlightened to a degree.

The given explanation was that they experienced the afterworld, learned that their soul is immortal, thus got freed from the fears of their body’s mortality and in the process got liberated. Having studied high states of consciousness, enlightenment and related topics, I knew that for most people it takes years, decades and lifetimes to achieve a steady high state of consciousness. Many people have experienced very high states of consciousness through entheogens, Holotropic Breathwork, spiritual emergency and advanced yogic practices. While it’s clear that some impact was made on their daily life, it again normally takes many years to bring to a deep transformation, since person’s ego is not very easily modified and it takes time. In my yoga studies I was taught that it takes 6 hours to 3 days (!) of being in samadhi (state of enlightenment) for it to become integrated. Yet with NDEs the transformation seems to happen almost instantaneously.

I remember one of my lovers, who studied this subject with me, had a longing to experience an NDE and in the process to get liberated from the load she has been carrying with her. We will get back to her later in this article.

About 5 years ago I met Guruji Ravkumar Baswar, who is a right hand Tantra teacher in India. He claims that he wasn’t born into this plane, like most of us did. Instead, he made an agreement with a sickly man, who was about to die, to take over his body, heal it, spend some years using it to accomplish his spiritual work and then return it to the original soul. He said he had to do that in order not to loose connection with his teachers on other planes and to not forget the spiritual knowledge he has. It sounded dubious, but through the years of working with Guruji, I came to experience first hand his authenticity and real power.

footnote: if you’re curious about my teacher please see his FB page. His specialty is working with Cosmic Powers (Saktis) through Mantra, Yagna (fire pujas) and Herbology.

Then, a few years later someone suggested I watch Dolores Cannon’s lecture called “Moving into the New Earth (2012):

(you can safely skip the first 5-10 minutes of this talk, as they are irrelevant).

Dolores Cannon, who recently passed away, had been working as a hypnotherapist most of her life. A lot of her work had to do with putting her clients into the deep hypnagogic state and having them report to her what they saw/experienced. Based on some 40,000+ cases, she compiled an incredibly insightful corpse of information and published several books on the topic.

What she discovered is that the current Earth no longer can support the energetic pattern the materialism has been driving humanity into. And therefore help was needed to make the correction. Therefore the universe organized several waves of volunteers to be born here to raise the human consciousness. Those souls didn’t need to born again, as they learned their lessons, so they volunteered to do so anyway (Boddhisattvas?). The first wave happened to some of those born in 50s, who incidentally became the Hippie generation. And they had to do the most difficult heavy lifting. And we all know that their work did have a huge impact on the state of Earth. The second wave was of those born in 70s (my generation) and finally the third wave was of the Indigo Children, who were born in the 90s. Note that these volunteer souls came into existence in the normal way.

footnote: Finding myself fitting into the second generation of volunteers helped me explain why I have so little interest in material things. Of course it might be my wishful thinking, since clearly I still have lessons to learn and I can’t say I feel enlightened. The lack of materialism was the part that resonated with me. If you have been struggling to understand the purpose of your being on this plane, Dolores Cannon’s hypothesis may give you an insight, as it did for me.

The part of her lecture that’s most relevant to this discussion is this: She talked about those of her clients who experienced NDEs before working with her. They reported that when a person dies, they sometimes are given a chance to go back to Earth. If they choose not to return, a different soul comes back in their place. This is another volunteer coming in to raise the consciousness of humanity.

Do you see where I’m going with this? If an average soul gets swapped with a spiritually liberated soul, that would explain why those who have experienced an NDE, had an instant transformation and appeared to be much more enlightened than they used to be.

If this is true, then perhaps my ex-lover’s desire to experience an NDE wasn’t so smart – as her soul would be likely to leave her body – but of course how could she have known that (if that’s true in first place).

If you were ever to study laws of karma, this instant transformation doesn’t fit either, as the soul needs to learn the lessons it set to learn and can’t skip them.

Recently I have read Dr. David R. Hawkins’s “Letting Go – The Pathway to Surrender“. I consider him to be a pretty enlightened soul (he also has passed away just recently). And in the introduction to the book a short autobiography is given and guess what – he had had an NDE before he experienced his liberation.

A few years back I was at a talk by Anita Moorjani, who was diagnosed with terminal cancer, had an NDE and returned not only healthy, but wise beyond any one’s expectations. She wrote several books about her experience. Remember at the beginning of this article my mentioning of my teacher in India, who healed a terminal case before taking over that man’s body? It happens here as well. Is Anita still the original Anita or instead some other much more advanced soul, who can instantly heal the body at such an advanced disease stage?

Having been exposed to all these tidbits of information, what originally appeared like a tall tale by my Indian Tantra teacher, now seems to be much more believable to me.

I haven’t done enough of an in-depth research to see how consistent this phenomenon is in most people who have gone through their NDEs . But clearly there is a pattern here. I hope you can see it as well.

And if a person had an NDE and came back without much noticeable change in their ways of being, does that mean their soul said ‘yes’ to the invitation to return and that’s why we can see no significant change?

Do you know first hand of anyone, who has experienced a clinical death and came back to life and you saw their amazing transformation? Please share if you do.

Of course, if you can see serious flaws in my reasoning please share as well.

Thank you for reading.

The post Do Souls Get Swapped During a Near-Death Experience? appeared first on Experience Life.

The Hindu Story of Creation

In Hinduism there is a very powerful creation story. It’s been said, that there was a being, named Shiva, that was omniscient, omnipresent and omnipotent. And who, despite the infinite power, had a very unsatisfactory existence, because he couldn’t appreciate all that power, since there were no problems to apply this power to or a way to reflect on his own capacity. Being omniscient, he found a solution. Just like a child playing in a sandbox and pretending to be a firefighter, an astronaut or a knight, and once bored with the current pretense, moving to a new game of pretending to be someone else, Shiva decided to pretend that he is limited in its powers and thus have an interesting game of experiencing things. So he contracted into a very limited being that could only do a few simple things. But that quickly became boring just the same and therefore being almighty, he created an infinite number of universes, populated with an infinite number of completely unique beings, all having a different level of his power, interacting with each other in an infinite number of ways. And that infinite number of beings in infinite number of universes were all part of Shiva. Now that was something and Shiva set himself up for an infinite future of infinite number of experiences, as creatures large and small, all being a contracted  Shiva, went about their lives, with all the drama, comedy, horror, joy, excitement, and many other characteristics of the qualities of life. Basically this world is an entertainment sandbox of Shiva, who experiences it all and who chose to not make any rules or ever interfere, because any rules would turn an unlimited experience into a limited one and it’ll bring his wise plot to an end.

In mainstream Hinduism, Shiva engages in 3 activities: creation, sustenance and destruction. Whereas in Kashmir Saivism 2 very essential stages are added: concealment and remembrance. So Shiva (1) forgets that he’s almighty, then (2) creates the universes and the beings, then (3) supports his creation, then (4) destroys it, and then (5) remembers that he’s a child playing in the sandbox and that perhaps it’s time to go have a dinner. The Hindus call this process leela – a divine game.

According to this model it is very important to stress that each and every being of this world is not separate from Shiva, but it is Shiva “dreaming” to be each one of those beings. Unlike other creation stories, where God creates something outside of himself and as such is separate from his creation, Shiva is his creation.

The enlightened masters of the Indian continent were able to construct a very refined chain of contractions that Shiva undergoes in order to contract his almighty being to become suns, human beings, rocks and all other sentient and insentient denizens of this world. The Samkhya philosophy defines 25 such contraction stages, which are called tattvas in Sanskrit. The sages of Kashmir Shaivism refined it further to add 11 more stages on top of those 25, resulting in 36 tattvas. Now that we know the contraction stages, we can perform various practices to overcome the limitations imposed by those contractions and stage by stage ascend back to our almighty Shiva-nature. For example transcending the linearity of time is one such limitation, ego is another one.

This Life Is a Dream

But the point of this article is not to teach you the science of the 36 tattvas and how you can transcend the dream, Shiva is dreaming through you. The idea I’d like to discuss here is how can we use this creation model to find meaning in our life.

In a recently published book “Dreamstate: A Conspiracy Theory” Jed McKenna ^* explores this exact story of creation, and he says:

“Boredom is the problem the universe exists to solve[…]”

and explores how we and the creator get easily bored and need drama to be entertained. If we were to transcend the story and arrive at the total awareness of what is, we would get ejected from the dream state, since there will be no more drama to be engaged in. That is, the drama will still be there, but it won’t have as engaging and as personal of an impact on all of us, as it has while we are in the (Shiva-)dream state.

footnote *: I highly recommend Jed McKenna’s The Enlightenment Trilogy, which makes you ask important questions about your belief system and spirituality in general. A lot of readers, myself included, experienced some sort of depression, as a result of contemplating those questions. We must test the validity and strength of what we believe in by asking ourselves those difficult and honest questions, and if your belief system survives the process — that’s wonderful, if not — that’s wonderful too, and perhaps you ought to look elsewhere for what makes your life meaningful.

The depressing part of contemplating the idea, that life is just a dream, is to why bother to do anything, especially if life is hard and full of suffering for some of us. If you have a lighter personality perhaps your first reaction would be different, mine is quite heavy and thus my first reaction is feeling down. Then after awhile I get bored with being down, I get over it and I want to play, so I go and play.

Sometimes I forget that I’m an almighty Shiva, that contracted himself, to have this limited experience of being me, and I fully immerse myself into the game with no awareness of it, with all the ups and downs it brings with it. At other times my awareness is sharp and I’m acutely aware of the game as it unravels. When that happens sometimes I act like Alice at the end of “Alice in Wonderland” and I exclaim “you’re but a deck of cards” (spiritual bypass) and spoil the game. At other times I’m masterfully able to continue playing the game, while having a full awareness of it being a game, and fully taking in the experience as it unfolds.

You are NOT the One Dreaming your Dream

Now let’s bring the big guns in. Suzanne Segal in “Collisions With The Infinite” tells her life story, where something happens to her as she’s about to step onto the bus platform and her witness consciousness pops out of its normal place, and as a result of that she no longer has a normal control over her life. From that moment on she observes her “character” live her life, sleep, eat, interact with other people, try to understand what happened to her, and so on, while her witness consciousness is 24/7 fully on. For example she watches herself sleep as it happens from the beginning to the end. This is not something we can even imagine possible. And it goes on for 12 years, until she integrates that shift in her being and she understands the following: Life lives through her and she doesn’t live her life. Her ego masterfully takes credit for making things happen, but actually life just happens without her having any influence whatsoever on it. And of course she suggests that this is what happens to all of us, she was just (un-)lucky to pop the illusion and see behind the matrix.

So, not only we are in a dream, we aren’t even the ones dreaming it, it just happens to us. Can it get more depressing than that?

Suzanne Segal starts the epilogue of her book with a quote by Padmasambhava:

Since there is nothing to meditate on,
there is no meditation.
Since there is nowhere to go astray,
there is no going astray.
Although there is an innumerable variety
of profound practices,
they do not exist for your mind in its true state.
Since there are no two such things as
practice and practitioner,
if, by those who practice or do not practice,
the practitioner of practice is seen to not exist,
thereupon the goal of practice is reached
and also the end of practice itself.

i.e. it’s all an illusion from the beginning to the end. Nirvana Shatakam by Adi Shankara is another powerful poem that says the same in a very beautiful way.

Getting Enlightened is not Meaningful

If you have been exploring the spiritual playground, you certainly have been exposed to different paths to enlightenment or liberation. Let me ask you a question then:

Have you ever considered what will happen to you when you get liberated?

During the intermediary stages that move you towards the liberation you’re still bound to the dream, and you’re still “working” at it. Well, not you, but it appears that it’s you working at it.

And when you are finally liberated, pooph, your unique individual ‘youness’, that you cherish so much, is gone, merged into the big ocean of Shiva consciousness.

So what will you have been liberated from? At least now you can have pizza, sex and some drama at times. Or if you’re a hardcore meditator you have your meditation high and the struggle of not thinking of pizza, sex and some drama. And once liberated you will remember that you’re Shiva, who is pretending to be you, who wants to have have pizza, sex and some drama at times. A conundrum indeed.

This is Madness, Where is the Meaning?

So how the heck can we find any meaning in this dream world?

One obvious way is through oblivion and self-lie. But can you really unsee what you saw, other than through heavy medication? Can you not think of a pink elephant?

According to many spiritual teachings even suicide is not an option, since you end up being reborn in the same conditions, so that you can learn to surrender and grow through the challenge and adversity. So that choice is out of question too.

I can see only one solution here. It is to accept that this is just how it is, and after all I’m Shiva, and if I look honestly — my life is full of entertainment, good and bad, there is no lack of constant change, that ensures that there will be no boredom. Isn’t that what Shiva wanted in first place. I’m an actor, playing a game of life, and there is no other meaning, but in deep understanding, that it’s just a game, letting go, surrendering to the flow and enjoying the unfolding show, without me needing to make any effort to support it. And did I say that it means that I can never fail? Not bad, eh?

Mainstream Buddhist and Vedanta paths don’t resonate with me. I like the teachings of Tantra, which say, that there are people for whom those ascetic paths are the right ones and they are perfectly valid as a path of liberation. And which also say that there some of us who like to play, illusion or not. Hence I choose to study and implement Tantric ways in my life. The egoic part of me would like to feel more of Shiva’s unlimited mightiness, but the all-knowing part of me is not in a rush to get there. Especially now that I understand that the more powers I get, the less juicy entertainment I will experience. For example as of this moment I’m quite enjoying contemplating and putting these words together.

After hearing Suzanne Segal’s story, our ego finds itself on a very shaky ground, and therefore many asked her how could they make choices in their life, given that they aren’t really making any choices. Her answer was:

Choicelessness is the experience of the obvious in a moment-to-moment way.

and then she elaborated that one simply does what’s obvious to them to do in any given moment:

If it is obvious to meditate, chant, journey, circumambulate, travel, set up an altar, eat certain foods, perform certain acts, or visit certain teachers, these will be done, as things have always been done, by the mysterious, non-locatable doer that is behind everything.

So after my ego is shaken up, goes through its mandatory reaction of inducing depression on me, as a protest to my dangerous thinking, which threatens its power over me, I get up and want to play. I’m now liberated, before I’m liberated. I can be anything and everything. I can’t fail at anything. All I can do is to watch the life unfold through me and enjoy the ride. Awareness in, oblivion out.

One thing is clear to me. The only time I suffer and indirectly inflict suffering onto others is when I’m not aware. So really, the only real practice I can do is to remember to have the awareness. And if you see me getting stuck in my head, please support me by asking me, whether I’m aware or not. That’s the best gift you can give to me. And if you like this game, I can do the same for you. That’s if I’m aware and see that you aren’t.

Now it’s your turn. What thoughts and emotions did you experience after reading this contemplation of mine? Did you find it meaningful? How did it impact your need for a meaning in life?

And do yourself a favor – don’t read the books I have mentioned earlier in this article, unless you’re ready for a deep introspection of your belief system. But wait, you can’t really have a say in whether you will be moved to read those books or not. OK, then do what’s obvious. I didn’t really write this article, you didn’t really read it, so whatever happens next is not up to you and I. “Honey, please pass the remote, what’s on the other channels?”

p.s. luckily there are a few amazing books out there, that can help you with wanting to develop your awareness and teach you how to become aware in very simple ways. Here are two of such books that I found having a huge impact on my life:

• Awareness: The Perils and Opportunities of Reality by Anthony De Mello
• The Lazy Man’s Guide to Enlightenment by Thaddeus Golas

I can’t recommend those books enough. Did I say that each one of them is just a few dozen pages long? The truth is always simple.

The post Finding Meaning in Life through the Game of Life appeared first on Experience Life.

Some 10 years ago I stumbled upon an audio recording of a seminar by Caroline Myss, where she discussed her book called “Sacred Contracts“. A big section of the book deals with spiritual archetypes, which I don’t really care too much for, but the gem was in her discussing the following theory, which requires that for the next few paragraphs you suppose that reincarnations are possible and that you live more than one life.  If you already believe in reincarnations — then all is good, if you don’t — please indulge me by suspending your disbelief for a few minutes and just suppose that it’s possible while you read the next few paragraphs.

Before you are born your soul makes contracts with other souls, so that when those souls incarnate they will show up in your life in a way that you requested of them. And you will do the same for them. Since we learn the most when we are under stress and have problems to solve, we task a big part of those souls to be the stress-inflicting ones. And since we need breaks to heal and recover from stress, we give the remaining group of souls a task to be nice and supportive to us.

This is it!

So according to this theoretical model your alcoholic father, who beat the bunkers out of you, and your loving, but suffering mother, who couldn’t protect you, your amazing inspiring school teacher and your evil neighbor next door, were all there doing the amazing and horrible things to you, because you asked them to, because you knew what stress you needed to have in your life in order for your soul to grow.

What I did next is very simple. I decided to try to live my life for one month as if it were true. There is no way I can validate whether this theory is correct or not, but I’m happy to adopt anything into my way of life if it provides a consistent, sustainable and independent way of being.

When I encountered this theory put forth by Caroline Myss, I suffered a lot, mostly because, well, I made myself suffer. Every time time anybody pushed any of my, many at that time, buttons I’d spend days spinning wheels in my head, feeling a victim and contemplating how I could get back at the perpetrator of my peace. I could easily do it for days, at times burning myself out from incessant wheel spinning, which wasn’t really leading me anywhere anyway. And usually either I’d get bored with the specific drama, or some new drama would overpower the old one… and I didn’t know how to put an end to it. So this theory came to me at a perfect timing.

Being an engineer I put it to test right away. The next time I got triggered by someone I first internally thanked them for triggering me, because if they were working for me, how can I not thank them. This small change had a huge impact, as it immediately and completely killed the victim mentality, I so cherished and rejoiced from for so long. I couldn’t blame them for how I felt anymore, if I were the one who asked them to do this for me.

Now I had an insane amount of energy and time freed up to actually go and look at the feeling and attempt to resolve it. This quickly led me to a new understanding that usually people can’t trigger us, unless we already carry a pile of unresolved conflict in the same aspect of life. The fact that someone can trigger us simply shines light to the dark corners of our psyche, that we never really want to look at.

At the same time I happened to listen to a talk on forgiveness by Wayne Dyer, where he spoke of how he was a renowned spiritual teacher for decades, when he realized that he never forgave his father for dumping his family when he was just a toddler. And how he did that by going to his burial site, forgiving him there and how amazing of an impact this event had on his life. Well, I was inspired – so I decided that I can do that too. My first attempts at forgiveness were very difficult, as there were some very evil people, who did very evil things to me when I was a child and, boy, was I carrying a memory of them in my mind. But little by little bygones became bygones and I was able to forgive them. Forgiving myself for allowing those things to happen to me was another huge discovery.

So now I had two tools to my toolkit – when someone triggered me I thanked them and forgave them and myself, while looking deep into the things that have been hiding under the proverbial carpet for so long.

That one-month experiment had such a tremendous impact on the quality of my life, that I decided to adopt^* the theory of sacred contracts as Truth. I don’t care whether it’s true or not, what I care is how it impacts my life.

footnote *: For another example of choosing something that you can’t verify using just logic read on Pascal’s Wager.

10+ year since I have dealt with a huge numbers of unresolved issues, and I now have very few buttons that can still be pushed, and I’m now happy when someone triggers me, since I get a chance to lighten up even more.

Of course. I don’t always remember that way and fall back into the old ways at times, but usually I recover pretty quickly, since my internal self-BS detector goes off pretty quickly.

Another interesting impact this mindset had on my life is that I stopped worrying about how I show up in other people’s lives. I realized that the only disservice I can do is that if I try to decide on behalf of another person whether I should or should not do or say something to them, rather than be in the flow and just be me. That doesn’t mean that I go and carelessly inflict pain on other people. It means that I don’t worry about being me, and letting others do what they will with it. I can only be responsible for myself and if everybody were to do the same for themselves what a world we would be living in. It is mind boggling how simple and powerful this mindset is.

This major change in my life also lead me to start practicing radical honesty and integrity, which is a natural extension of the sacred contracts theory, since who are we lying to if we planned all this, but that’s a subject for a different article.

What do you think? Are you ready to try an experiment that may dramatically transform your life?

Chances are that you will have a fear of success that we all carry, in which case read this quote several times a day:

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.

It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us.

We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?

Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God.

Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do.

We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone.

And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same.

As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”

— Marianne Williamson from A Return To Love.

I am very grateful to Wayne Dyer and Caroline Myss for making their wisdom available to me at the right place at the right time.

The post Engineer Your Way Out of Suffering with Sacred Contract Method appeared first on Experience Life.