Get live statistics and analysis of Vacha's profile on X / Twitter

Yesterday, girlfriend asked me to come into a GPs appointment with her to witness the level of gaslighting she gets from doctors. She reported standard symptoms of sleep apnea, and asked if there were tests for this. He said it’s *impossible* to get sleep apnea if you are under 40 and not clinically obese. Proceeded to say it she almost certainly just has an anxiety disorder (despite no anxiety symptoms during the day). Then proceeded to prescribe her a relatively high dose of SSRIs and insisted she see a psychiatrist. His whole tone throughout was of mild irritation at having to deal with her. It honestly felt like being in some Victorian clinic and witnessing a woman with epilepsy being diagnosed with hysteria or something.

All addiction, at its heart, is addiction to unconsciousness. It doesn’t matter if it’s social media addiction or heroin addiction. The addict is always trying to block out consciousness by covering it in stimulation or numbness. This means the cure to addiction is always more consciousness. But consciousness can’t just be willed into existence. Instead, developing consciousness is closely linked to developing insight. This is because usually the reason we want to hide in unconsciousness is that there’s something we don’t want to be conscious of. Something in our world that contradicts the story we want to tell ourselves about the world. Perhaps we want to believe that we can always avoid pain and only experience pleasure. So we try to push pain into unconsciousness. Or we want to believe that the things we love will last forever. So we try to push any sign of decay or change into unconsciousness. Or there is some story we want to believe about ourselves and who we are. So we try to push anything that contradicts that story into unconsciousness. So the way to overcome our addiction to unconsciousness is to build accurate world models. When we learn to view the world as a place that includes suffering, is impermanent and is free of stable selves, reality starts to match our worldview. With this insight in place, we no longer need to push suffering, impermanence, and things that threaten our sense of self out of consciousness. Consciousness then naturally expands of its own accord.

One of the easiest genuine superpowers to learn: Learn to notice the tensions other people are holding in their bodies. Then temporarily mirror those tensions as you talk to them. Then slowly relax those tensions as the conversation progresses. Watch how relaxed they become.

I see a strong link between procrastination and what I call "tensing style." When doing a task, we can either tense into it or relax into it. Many people force themselves to do productive things with a kind of mental & bodily tensing motion. When we build a habit of tensing into a task, our bodies start to associate acting with tensing. This makes tasks feel uncomfortable and leads to procrastination. We can instead learn to relax, release and surrender into productive tasks. When we build a habit of relaxing into a task, our bodies start to associate acting with relaxation. Tasks now feel pleasant and approachable. Learning how to melt into a task is a great doorway to overcoming procrastination.

A wise man once told me that suicidal impulses are rarely wrong. They just shouldn’t be taken literally. They draw attention to a part of us that needs to die, not the entire organism. Learning how to let parts of ourself die is actually a way to embrace life, not reject it.

A good way tell if we’re in love with a person or a fantasy of that person is the degree to which we feel compassion for them. That is, the degree to which we care about the things *they* care about. If we’re mostly in love with a fantasy, we’ll usually care less about the concerns of our partner that don’t relate to our fantasy of them. We might care about how much they enjoy having sex with us, or how in love with us, or how strong our connection is. Because those things feed into the fantasy. But we’ll probably spend less time thinking about their personal concerns that don’t relate to or center us. Fantasies, after all, are there to gratify us, not for us to serve. Whereas if we’re in love with the actual person, we’ll likely spend a lot more internal and external energy on celebrating their joys, commiserating their sufferings and supporting them in their flourishing. Even the little mundane and unglamorous trials and successes that make up their day to day. Developing these compassionate qualities towards them not only indicates true love but also helps cultivate deeper love. Practicing compassion and sympathetic joy for those closest to us helps us see them more clearly and care more about what they care about. It also makes it easier to communicate with and meet the needs of our partner. Because we’re paying attention to what they actually care about. Perhaps counter-intuitively, it also allows us to develop stronger boundaries. By more clearly seeing our lover, we can more cleanly separate them from our fantasy of them, which demerges them from projections that actually belong to us. Romantic love and compassionate love may feel like different kinds of love. But actually the latter is deeply supportive of the former, and the deepest forms of the former start to look increasingly like the latter.

There is a Tibetan form of spiritual hyperstition that is more powerful than any of the modern day forms. It works by living and believing as if you have already awakened to the ultimate truth of reality. Tibetan Buddhists mastered this technique hundreds of years ago. In…

Women have a very sensitive radar for being treated as a fantasy. It’s partly why “simping” is so unattractive. It’s clear that it’s coming from a place of fantasy. This makes some men think that the way to make women like them is to be unkind to them. But it’s not the kindness part of inauthentic kindness that is unattractive. It’s the inauthenticity. Authentic kindness based on genuine mutual connection is usually very well received The opposite of simping is not unkindness. It’s authenticity.

An Optimization Mindset says: “If I optimize every aspect of my life, then I’ll be happy.” A Happiness Mindset says: “If I learn how to be happy, then I’ll naturally function in an optimal way.” A Happiness Mindset ime outputs more happiness and, actually, more success in life

In Tibetan psychology, every “negative emotion” is said to contain its own wisdom when awakened. The awakened form of anger is mirror-like clarity. The awakened form of jealousy is the wisdom that drives purposeful action. The awakened form of arrogance is equanimity. The awakened form of craving is discernment. The awakened form of confusion is non-conceptual knowing. So, if we want to feel clarity, we should become awake to our anger. If we want to be peaceful, we should give our arrogance space to soften into equanimity. To be more discerning, we can look into the wisdom nested in our cravings. And so on. When we truly befriend our emotions, we discover our heart is full of unfathomably wise guides dressed in the robes of stormy passion.

If you want to get higher than any other drug - higher that 5-MeO-DMT or LSD, higher than shrooms or Ayahuasca, higher than crack or heroin or meth - then do this: Find the deepest terror in your heart, then sit patiently & relax into it. This is the true stairway to heaven.

We are a singing species. Pretty much every other culture from history had a regular container for community to come together and sing. Singing appears second only to eating, sleeping and sex in the history of what humans give importance to. Yet now it is at best a niche hobby for those not part of an organized religion. This is a huge loss imo, and robs people of one of the most multi-faceted skills of being human. Singing has so many diverse functions. We can sing to celebrate, to grieve, to heal and to express our joy. Sing to connect with other people. Sing to our emotions to soothe them. Sing to plants to connect across the divide of our biological kingdoms. Sing to give voice to unconscious parts of our bringing. Sing to express our our creativity and our deepest insights into the universe. Sing to weave ourselves into ancient traditions and have their truths resonate within our hearts. A plant I spoke to once gave me the proverb: “Never speak anything that could have been sung.” I think we should be encouraging children to sing with the same urgency that we teach them to talk. And we’d have a lot more happy adults if we all sang as regularly as we eat, sleep or have sex.

Hate to break your heart, but there is no real meaning to waking life. Waking life is random neural firings. Your brain makes up a story to make sense of it - using memories, experiences, fears, concerns, etc. Waking life has functions (memory, threat simulation, etc.) but no real meaning. TRUST THE SCIENCE! 🥼🧪🧬

Most love stories in movies and media focus on the infatuation stage. So, people aren’t so good at recognizing all the other amazing stages that romantic love develops into. Some of these include: - The stage where your lover starts feeling like family. This has a specific feeling tone just like infatuation has the heart fluttering feeling tone. For me, it has a childlike quality; hidden parts feeling safe to show themselves. - The stage where sex starts to feel less like two bodies consuming each other and more like two consciousnesses trying to touch. Sex becomes a vessel for love to flow between one another instead of just a stage for lust to dance on. - The stage where you’ve had so many shared life experiences, that parts of your character form to one another. It is like your shared experiences form a negative space between you that clicks your personalities together like a missing puzzle piece. You inhabit a shared world, with a shared history that amplifies that sense of family. There are so many other stages like this. I’d be interested for people in the comments to describe some of the stages they’ve experienced in romantic love that felt most meaningful to them.

I used to be kind of a skeptic about doing affirmations but I’ve come to find them very valuable. They do actually sort of make sense in the light of modern psychology. The brain tries to minimize predictive error and cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance is the discomfort of holding two conflicting beliefs or attitudes simultaneously. So if we affirm a set of conscious values via affirmations in the morning, our brain is motivated to process the world in a way that stays consistent with those established attitudes. It also then preferentially notices and interprets evidence that confirms its hypotheses. In this way, we recruit our brain’s natural gradient to start interpreting the world in ways consistent with our affirmations. So, if we affirm, say “I am happy” in the morning, the brain has at least a partially increased motivational weight to interpret the world through a lens that confirms that happiness. For those wanting to dip their toes in the water of affirmation practice, I recommend the IFS 8 C’s as a good all purpose boilerplate for morning affirmations. Each morning, shortly after waking we can say: I am Calm I am Curious I am Compassionate I have Clarity I am Confident I am Courageous I am Creative I am Connected Then let your brain collaborate with the world to confirm these qualities to you throughout the day …

Your body is like a mini-universe and you can decide whether it is a universe of love or a universe of fear. When we radiate love to the cells in our body, to them it must feel like being touched by the love of a god. When we listen to what our body parts ask of us, it must feel to them like having their prayers answered. When we bring our unconscious parts into consciousness, it must feel to them like they are experiencing a spiritual awakening. I think all of this also gives us a clue as to what’s going on when we as a full organism awaken spiritually. Each of us is like a cell in the universal body, gradually waking up into it its wholeness. As above, they say, so below. We are the vehicle through which our parts awaken. And we participate in the awakening of the living universe of which we are a part.

Yesterday, girlfriend asked me to come into a GPs appointment with her to witness the level of gaslighting she gets from doctors. She reported standard symptoms of sleep apnea, and asked if there were tests for this. He said it’s *impossible* to get sleep apnea if you are under 40 and not clinically obese. Proceeded to say it she almost certainly just has an anxiety disorder (despite no anxiety symptoms during the day). Then proceeded to prescribe her a relatively high dose of SSRIs and insisted she see a psychiatrist. His whole tone throughout was of mild irritation at having to deal with her. It honestly felt like being in some Victorian clinic and witnessing a woman with epilepsy being diagnosed with hysteria or something.

Hate to break your heart, but there is no real meaning to waking life. Waking life is random neural firings. Your brain makes up a story to make sense of it - using memories, experiences, fears, concerns, etc. Waking life has functions (memory, threat simulation, etc.) but no real meaning. TRUST THE SCIENCE! 🥼🧪🧬

All addiction, at its heart, is addiction to unconsciousness. It doesn’t matter if it’s social media addiction or heroin addiction. The addict is always trying to block out consciousness by covering it in stimulation or numbness. This means the cure to addiction is always more consciousness. But consciousness can’t just be willed into existence. Instead, developing consciousness is closely linked to developing insight. This is because usually the reason we want to hide in unconsciousness is that there’s something we don’t want to be conscious of. Something in our world that contradicts the story we want to tell ourselves about the world. Perhaps we want to believe that we can always avoid pain and only experience pleasure. So we try to push pain into unconsciousness. Or we want to believe that the things we love will last forever. So we try to push any sign of decay or change into unconsciousness. Or there is some story we want to believe about ourselves and who we are. So we try to push anything that contradicts that story into unconsciousness. So the way to overcome our addiction to unconsciousness is to build accurate world models. When we learn to view the world as a place that includes suffering, is impermanent and is free of stable selves, reality starts to match our worldview. With this insight in place, we no longer need to push suffering, impermanence, and things that threaten our sense of self out of consciousness. Consciousness then naturally expands of its own accord.

Most AI developers seem to have no idea what the human mind largely does. Probably around 40% - 70% of human brain capacity is dedicated to operating and regulating bodily processes. AGI = an intelligence able to do anything a human mind can do as well as a human mind So, AGI would mean artificial minds able to operate and master a human nervous system including all motor skills. I don’t think anyone is expecting that “later this year”. So all this “AGI by the end of the year” stuff is nonsense. There is more to human intelligence than the production of language and abstract concepts. The ability to navigate and master physical reality from the vantage point of a skilled body is central to the general intelligence that humans possess.

If you want to get higher than any other drug - higher that 5-MeO-DMT or LSD, higher than shrooms or Ayahuasca, higher than crack or heroin or meth - then do this: Find the deepest terror in your heart, then sit patiently & relax into it. This is the true stairway to heaven.

There is a Tibetan form of spiritual hyperstition that is more powerful than any of the modern day forms. It works by living and believing as if you have already awakened to the ultimate truth of reality. Tibetan Buddhists mastered this technique hundreds of years ago. In…

Nick has some insightful takes, but this is total nonsense. The Pali Canon is a very precise and prosaic set of texts, where the path is laid out in exhaustive detail in very plain language. There's a few poetic texts in it like the Dhammapada and the Jātaka Tales but the vast majority is technical to a fault. None of its teachings are hidden behind deities either. To the extent that deities appear, its mostly so the Buddha can teach them regular dhamma in usually quite plain language. But the vast majority doesn't involve deities at all. Mindfulness, the jhanas, all the key insight themes, metta, and the rest of the eightfold path are laid out in perfectly legible ways in both succinct and in-depth forms. Modern Theravada teachers also speak very clearly and relate things in modern terms. I'd challenge someone to read the collected talks of, say Ajahn Chah, and come away describing them as "hiding behind weird poems and deities." Sure, Zen takes a more poetic approach and Vajrayana includes deity work. But both involve close teacher-student relationships where necessary clarity is provided on a tailored individual basis. A Vajrayana path would usually involve a thorough sutric training before engaging in deity work, and you'd better believe that someone on that path receives a deep training in how to meditate properly. The actual reason most modern internet meditation "innovators" don't like or don't read the Pali Canon is not that its obscure or imprecise. Rather it's because its too precise and they don't like what it precisely says. It lays out the *entire* path of reaching full human potential. This includes the parts that modern western meditation teachers don't like. Parts that include deep renunciation, huge sacrifice and a complete re-orientation of one's life away from sensual pursuits towards a single-minded focus on a spiritual life. This undermines the type of teacher who wants you to believe the path terminates in basically living a regular worldly life but being very calm and happy whilst you do so. The teachings *do* teach you how to do this. And that's wonderful. But that's not what they teach as the end. It's barely the beginning. If internet meditation teachers were to reckon with that, they'd have to face up to the fact that people spending 8+ hours a day in front of a laptop screen, spending much of the rest of their time pursuing sensuality and then practicing some meditation as a side hobby are nowhere near the end of the path. This disrupts the image that the teacher usually wants to present of themselves to the world as being at least quite close to the end of the path. And it disrupts what the kind of student they attract wants to hear. An appeal I'd like to make to anyone who's made it to the end of this wall of text: - It is not the traditions who are hiding things from you. - It is the modern internet meditation "innovators" who are hiding things from you. They are hiding the full depth of what traditional Buddhism offers and limiting the spiritual potential of every single person they hide it from. Of course, they'll say the bits they are hiding are the extraneous and inessential trappings of some less enlightened culture. But really, they are often the most important bits. The bits that make meditation a truly spiritual rather than materialistic hedonistic activity. The bits that push us beyond the boundaries of what we can even imagine from our current vantage point and value system. And I'm not talking about deities or poems. I'm talking about sober, precise, prosaic teachings from people who dedicated every waking moment of their lives for years on end exploring regions of human consciousness that go far beyond what purveyors of the watered-down versions have any contact with. And set up institutions that guarded teachings for thousands of years that we in the west are only beginning to scratch the surface of. We are not a more enlightened culture. We are not revealing what is hidden. We are not being pragmatic. We are revelling in our own limitations, blindspots, and ignorance. And calling it "innovation". Please, please, please, from the bottom of my heart, don't let anyone persuade you that the traditional teachings have nothing to offer you. They have everything to offer anyone who is willing to break the habit of our deeply arrogant culture and actually listen.

One of the most persistent myths about Buddhism is that the Buddha taught that there is no self. Thanissaro Bikkhu calls "there is no self" the "granddaddy of fake Buddhist quotes" In fact the Buddha taught that holding the view that you have no self is unskillful. Throughout his teachings, he meticulously uses the word "anattā" which means not-self (rather than "no self") and it would always be in reference to something in particular (eg “the body is not self”, “mental formations are not self” etc) The only time a phrase similar to "I have no self" appears in the Buddha's teachings is in suttas like the Sabbasava Sutta where he designates it as an unskillful view (of course he also designates "I have a self" as an unskillful view too). He’s trying to push us out of the whole conceptual binary of “there is a self” / “there is no-self”, not push us towards affirming the “no-self” side of the divide. If a spiritual type says to you “there is no self” in a way that feels smarmy and pedantic, a fun smarmy and pedantic way to respond is: “Ah, so you’re not a Buddhist then?”

I see a strong link between procrastination and what I call "tensing style." When doing a task, we can either tense into it or relax into it. Many people force themselves to do productive things with a kind of mental & bodily tensing motion. When we build a habit of tensing into a task, our bodies start to associate acting with tensing. This makes tasks feel uncomfortable and leads to procrastination. We can instead learn to relax, release and surrender into productive tasks. When we build a habit of relaxing into a task, our bodies start to associate acting with relaxation. Tasks now feel pleasant and approachable. Learning how to melt into a task is a great doorway to overcoming procrastination.

Someone desperately needs to de-woo-ify chakras so more people can benefit from the model. Learning how to relate to the sub-minds distributed in our body has so many benefits. The idea that the mind is largely located in the brain blocks a lot of effective action. It means we always look to our brain for solutions and ignore the intelligences and energies available to us in other parts of the body. I find that if my brain doesn’t have a solution to a problem, my gut often will. Or if my brain tells me I have no energy, Ill actually still be able to access energy by tapping into my sexual energies. Or if I’m failing to empathise with someone, I’ll get more value in bringing awareness down to my heart than by doing more thinking. But the real breakthrough comes in learning to relate to these different centres of intelligences not just as abstract energies but as something more like personalities that we can build a relationship with. We can build a personal relationship with our heart intelligence, our gut intelligence, our sexual intelligence and various other intelligences in our body. We can gain insight into the fact that they continue living a fairly well-defined life of their own, with their own subjectivity even when we aren’t in conscious communication with them. We can actually befriend them and win their trust, which allows us to access more of their wisdom. We can come to experience ourselves more like a community of distributed bodily intelligences rather than just one blob of intelligence in the head connected to a mindless body. Apparently, there are promising lines of enquiry in finding potential physical correlates for these bodily intelligence centres. Different combinations of endocrine glands, nerve plexuses and other regions with dense intoreceptive representations in the brain. The latter aspect may explain how the illusion of intelligence being entirely located in the brain occurs. All these other intelligences are *represented* in the brain. So it’s easy to miss that much of the pre-cognitive information processing can still be happening distributed around the body. I personally think that some aspects beyond the scope of currently known physiology may be part of the ultimate explanation for our distributed bodily intelligence. And some of those things may even be legitimately “woo.” But for now, it would be great to find more spiritually neutral ways of helping people connect to the embodied sub-agents or their somatic mind. I believe it would help people live more whole, intelligent and empowered lives.

Do you Have a Question for the Enlightened Tree? Soon, I'll again be visiting the Amazonian tree which the locals say has attained enlightenment. If you have a question for the tree, drop it in the comments & I'll try to get it asked via the shaman who channels her messages. Try and think of questions that would be particularly interesting to get answered by a tree in particular if you can.

One of the easiest genuine superpowers to learn: Learn to notice the tensions other people are holding in their bodies. Then temporarily mirror those tensions as you talk to them. Then slowly relax those tensions as the conversation progresses. Watch how relaxed they become.

Increasingly, people seem to equate Buddhist awakening with gaining reliable access to “non-dual” states of consciousness. But the “non-dual” states in question often seem grounded more in delusion than in awakening. The idea appears to be that awakening means having a default conscious perceptual field that feels “centreless,” and lacks a conscious sense of self. On this model, one can be very - even maximally - “awakened” while still: - lacking maturity and wisdom - being largely driven by craving and aversion - habitually acting in harmful or inconsiderate ways - experiencing little change in what motivates them or the goals they pursue The idea is that as long as all this happens whilst having a “centreless awareness” and no conscious sense of a self, then you are still very awakened. This of course is a total delusion. If one’s behaviour, intentions, motivations, and habits remain rooted in craving, aversion, and ignorance, then the supposedly “non-dual” conscious field is clearly being sustained by simply blocking everything that contradicts it out of awareness. That is, consciousness is telling you a delusory story about the extent to which you as a holistic system are actually in a non-dual state. There is nothing awakened about hiding one’s cravings, aversions, ignorance, and identifications from oneself. Actually, there nothing inherently awakened in and of itself about a conscious field that feels centreless or selfless. What makes this trend especially jarring is that many of its advocates use Buddhist language, despite Buddhism having been founded largely to counter this very error. Earlier on his journey, the Buddha experimented with abiding in refined, non-dual states of consciousness that were not sufficiently transformative to his behavioural-motivational system, and he found them wanting. He saw that such states did not uproot the causes of suffering or optimize us for minimizing harm to ourselves and others (others being equally important to someone who has truly developed non-dual insight) Instead, he taught that awakening is the output of freeing ourselves from the cravings, aversions, and ignorance that drives our intentions, motivations, and actions, and that sustain the illusory self. The measure of awakening on this model, then, is not what shape our consciousness takes. But rather how much craving, aversion, and ignorance have been released, both consciously and unconsciously. On this model, having these forces sit outside your conscious field is actually worse than having them visible and workable. Therefore, cultivating a non-dual conscious field can even become a step toward further delusion if it’s not accompanied by a proportional impact on overall motivations and behaviour patterns. I think the Buddha’s original model is a much more functional model of awakening. It points the practitioner towards a holistic transformation of their intentions, motivations and behaviour, not just a transformation of their conscious sense of themselves. As long as people keep being told that awakening = non-dual conscious experience, that’s what they’re going to keep optimizing for in their spiritual practice. And they will keep pushing anything that disturbs that experience out of awareness. Buddhist awakening has never been about engineering “non-dual” states in and of themselves. It’s always been about aligning your mind, body, intentions, motivations and actions with the already non-dual nature of reality. Characterizing awakening instead as “reliable access to non-dual states of consciousness” in and of themselves points people on the path to awakening in completely the wrong direction in their practice.

Having only joined Twitter a few months ago, I've been shocked at what gets pushed on young men as "masculinity" on here. I've always felt very at home in my masculinity and, to me, mature adult masculinity consists of the kind of attributes you would expect a father to have: - A strong sense of personal responsibility and how your words and actions impact other people - A natural protectiveness towards the weak and vulnerable - A love of women, which extends beyond sexuality to the distinctively masculine varieties of protective, nurturing love one might offer to a daughter or spouse. - A prioritization of honour and virtue over pettiness and flippance - A "pick on someone your own size" mentality whereby critiques and jokes are largely aimed at people who have at least as much power as you do These values seem to have been almost completely inverted on Twitter, so that masculinity becomes: - A hatred of women and an inability to see them through any lens other than what might make them want to have sex with you - A general tendancy towards mocking, shaming and exerting power over people who are weaker or more vulnerable than you - Petty, flippant, edgelord, teenager-level humour, largely targeted at the weak and marginalized - A prioritization of what you are "allowed to say" over any sense of responsibility around how your words and actions might impact other people. (The antidote this this btw, is not to fear speaking what is true, but to have a sense of appropriateness about how, when, and why) People are seemingly being trained that mature masculinity basically looks like perpetual teenage boyhood. How do we fix this?

A wise man once told me that suicidal impulses are rarely wrong. They just shouldn’t be taken literally. They draw attention to a part of us that needs to die, not the entire organism. Learning how to let parts of ourself die is actually a way to embrace life, not reject it.

Women have a very sensitive radar for being treated as a fantasy. It’s partly why “simping” is so unattractive. It’s clear that it’s coming from a place of fantasy. This makes some men think that the way to make women like them is to be unkind to them. But it’s not the kindness part of inauthentic kindness that is unattractive. It’s the inauthenticity. Authentic kindness based on genuine mutual connection is usually very well received The opposite of simping is not unkindness. It’s authenticity.