Reddit reviews Shaving the Inside of Your Skull
We found 3 Reddit comments about Shaving the Inside of Your Skull. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
Reddit reviews Shaving the Inside of Your SkullWe found 3 Reddit comments about Shaving the Inside of Your Skull. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
You might like this book. I’m about to go through it again.
yes.
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I had my life in a complete shit, at about age 25. I was divorced, working jobs I hated with a degree I didn't want to get but was pressured by my parents to get because it was lucrative. I got laid off on my birthday, my wife cheated on me, we had moved to Seattle where I knew next to no-one and it was very difficult to make friends easily. I left with hardly anything except the dog and was very happy. Do you know why? Because I had had some damned stupid epiphanies when I was 16 where I had seen myself on my death bed and glimpsed all these things I saw to do before I died. (Try imagining yourself there and what you'd want to see, its sobering.) And you know what? I knew two things. I refused to give that old man any regret. and all the wounds I had now were a part of who that old fuck was.
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Shit now it got tough. I set out to do what I loved doing, but had no idea what the fuck that was. So I read a lot of philosophers, psychologists and people I respected's biographies. R. Buckminster Fuller helped. So did Joseph Campbell. I learned about my Unconscious mind. I began to un-learn bad habits by forcing myself to do things I didn't want to do to unlearn fear. I read books on Unlearning such as "The Essential Crazy Wisdom" and "Shaving the Inside of your Skull." I unlearned attachment to money by living on hardly anything and reading "Your Money or your Life". I unlearned attachment to social norms / groupthink by doing strange things in public. Seriously. It didn't help when girls started liking me for this, that was only encouraging. But it was good too because I got good at calling myself on my own bullshit, like when I was being ungrounded, or attached to things that are insignificant.
Finding out what you Love is tougher. Campbell says "follow your bliss" and then he saw what people made of that and said "I should have said 'follow your blisters'." For me, I tried to remember what it felt like to play as a child and I tried to do one thing a day that felt like play.
Of course by now you're wondering if I got another job. Naw, I consulted here and there, but shit for the life of me I'd have the weirdest people ask me to do the weirdest things. Since I was nutty, I started finding there were lots of nutty people with nutty money. I began working for lawyers, writers, pharmacists, flag makers, silk soy milk, the world health organization, universities, I even worked in hollywood. shrug.
Life is weird if you let it be.
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Soon I began to find various mentors, I contacted authors by hunting down their emails. I took them to lunch. It didn't take too long for me to become homeless at this point (hell everyone was being then and I figured I might as well choose it because I was being lame and wasn't traveling.) And so I began traveling around meeting authors and taking them to Thai restaurants. I learned so much about my own potential, my own proclivities. Fuck I learned what my learning style was, after 20 some years in an education system no one had bothered to even test that shit. I used couchsurfing.com a lot and read books like Blue Highways and then learned more and more about not trusting what my limbic system's predictions of what I thought life was, and rather would put myself in situations and truly experience these things, and was time and again wowed by the wonder of this.
Of course around this time that movie about that wanker who died in Alaska came out and everyone kept telling me how I reminded me of him. Sure I went camping a lot too but that kid was a numbnuts. Damn dude.
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Pretty soon I was traveling around like Kane in Kung fu, getting in adventures and helping people and shit. I'd move from place to place, went all the way down the Pacific Ocean side of the US, then across America, mostly on foot. I met amazing people, met celebrities, couchsurfed in mansions and only slept out when I wanted to. It was as if because I was so curious as to who I really was inside, everyone was really curious in me. I think an ounce of that curiosity is enough for the average person to get by. If you have any curiosity of who you are, or what your potential is, then you'll do pretty well. But the problem is you get superstitious because life is so fucking crazy. seriously.
The other problem with this lifestyle is that you begin to see how fucking feeble and fragile our society is. Drop oil and 99% of this country is fucked. I mean close the 7/11 and you've killed 80% of the state of california cause they can't get doritos. I wish I were joking here. Anyhoo, I decided to go a little rural and walked and walked until I found ways to help people and learn gardening, survival skills, etc. I did work with Iraq Veterans in Sweat Lodges helping them find themselves. I couchsurfed. I wrote Universities and made up titles and gave lectures on subjects I loved but had no credentials on. People hesitated to let me on stage, but I was well received because I loved what I was talking about. I learned hypnosis (mentor) and put friends in trance to help them learn to speak with their Unconscious minds. I lived.
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Now mind you I did all this with my dog too. He had a good time. People loved him but then I got summoned home by a death in the family. While there, I did what I needed to do and gave the abridged version of what I was doing with life to people (Rilke: 'never horrify your parents by telling them what you truly are.')
Next I decided to find people who were like me. I had been homeless a year and figured I'd need to find some people who basically lived as if in the 1800s. I kept wandering until I found a farm where they had an extra cabin. They liked me, I fit in great and was invited to live there. I lived here still and am having a great time. I built earth batteries to power it. I carried water from a spring that comes out of some rocks at the base of a mountain. I have a beautiful girlfriend who wants to paint and kiss me and pet my dog and plant our garden. I write stories and make japanese swords out of scrap pieces of wood that smell.
Now at this point, I can't tell you how to do it, thats your own way. Thats what you see when you think of yourself on your death bed. Sure its morbid, sure it takes a lot of time, sure it is fucking insane and horrifying, but thats what gives it meaning. Things like that strike you to your core and there you are, who you really are. Just keep breathing and calm yourself. Its just your imagination.
TLDR: my life sucked. I stopped doing what others told me to do. I stopped making decisions out of fear. I played every day. Then did crazy shit. Now am happy.
I'm home for holidays, so I don't have my bookshelf to glance at. I wouldn't have given you practical recommendations if I knew you only wanted literature either so sorry for wasting your time.
Other books I have found useful:
http://www.amazon.com/Transcending-Levels-Consciousness-David-Hawkins/dp/0971500746/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1324589773&sr=1-3
(This one, along with the others in the series by this author, are difficult to recommend, I feel it is entirely based on a lie, the guy is a complete nutjob if you ask me, but yet these books give you some amazing insight into the nature of reality and where you are at in life. If you are willing to deal with some bullshit to uncover remarkably poignant truths about yourself and the world, pick this book up.)
Otherwise, a decent alternative is:
http://www.amazon.com/Love-What-Life-All-About/dp/0449911624
or
http://www.amazon.com/Course-Miracles-Dr-Helen-Schucman/dp/1883360250/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1324590110&sr=1-1
Those are more focused on getting the brain out of the logical hemisphere, back into a loving, emotional, right-brained sort of living.
But, there are some people who would advise you to just take the shortcut, live life on the edge, go skydiving and smoke pot and immerse your body and mind in an orgasm of sense and you'll get there even quicker...
http://www.amazon.com/Info-Psychology-Instructions-Manufacturers-Navigational-Individual/dp/1561841056/ref=sr_1_8?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1324590218&sr=1-8
http://www.amazon.com/Remember-Here-Now-Ram-Dass/dp/0517543052/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1324590288&sr=1-1
After that I would recommend getting a basic grasp on all the religions, their stories, their beliefs and practices. You can do this in about a week if you are diligent.
After that I would start delving into learning more about the occult, magick, chaos magick. Get a basic understanding. This book is great for that:
http://www.amazon.com/Book-Lies-Disinformation-Magick-Occult/dp/097139427X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1324590545&sr=1-1
Re-read the last couple hundred pages of Prometheus Rising, and read the first couple hundred pages of this book. Understand that we it is still important to be loving, kind, humble, gentle, and silly, but that there are two paths you can take, you can try your entire life to be enlightened, or you can try and make your life the best it possibly can be. I chose the latter and it took me to magick...
http://www.amazon.com/Initiation-into-Hermetics-Franz-Bardon/dp/1885928068/ref=sr_1_sc_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1324590364&sr=1-1-spell
Finish Crowley's Book 4. Download a bunch of magick ebooks and read,read,read.My spirituality most closely resembles chaos magick, respect everything, try everything with an open mind, keep what works, discard what doesn't.
If you can get ahold of this book before you undertake any of this, I would encourage it, completing it is like a defrag for your brain...but I'm not sure how an atheist might approach it, but as someone interested in Buddhism it was pretty powerful....
http://www.amazon.com/Shaving-Inside-Your-Skull-Mel/dp/0874778417/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1324590673&sr=1-1
http://www.amazon.com/Rebels-Devils-Psychology-Liberation-ebook/dp/B004FGLROS/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1324590889&sr=1-1
This is quite an interesting book as well...
And last, but not least, I would get familiar with Gurdjieff and the Fourth Way.
There is no easy book on this subject that I have found, so good luck. I don't think that this is the end of the road, but it is certainly where I hit a dead-end and had to turn around.
Always begin with awareness and appreciation and respect. If there is something that angers you, that you don't "get", that makes you feel uncomfortable, or whatever, run towards it. Go into an evangelical mega-church once a week till you come to terms with something about it, and can be loving and understanding and conversant (no arguing) with the people there, even if you still think they may be misguided. I know of no greater way to become a better, more whole person, than to practice this over and over until you are understanding and loving of everyone and everything.