I stopped listening to Khan 2 weeks ago so this post is intended to wrap everything up. It’s a very long post, and it gets weird. Interpret it however you like, I don’t mind.
Before covering my results with Khan, it’s worth going over my reasons for using Khan and what my goals were. I’ll also summarize my experiences from each stage, and finally cover my results.
I’m in my late forties, not looking for sex or money, and I couldn’t care less about building an empire. I’ve achieved most of what I wanted so I’m more interested in self development and rekindling a passion for life that seems to have waned during the last couple of years.
My first SC sub was Spartan, and I had very good, if unexpected, results where I lost about 20 lbs in 2 months. So I decided to give either Emperor or Khan a shot, mostly out of curiosity to see what the experience would be like. Both appear strange choices given what I said above, but SC promote their products as adapting to a person’s goals so I thought it would be an interesting experiment. I chose Khan because of Total Breakdown, which I believed could help lift me out of my jaded state. Aside from that I had no real goals and so had no idea how to take action to support any changes, which is such a key part of the process. In the end I decided to trust that my subconscious would know what I needed and would guide the experience. It turned out to be life changing.
ST1 (total ~450hrs): I started this during 2 weeks vacation I spent at an isolated property I have in upstate New York, hoping the inevitable introspection from being alone would help ST1 do its job. However apart from some instances where I felt unusually happy it was mostly pretty smooth, without much emotional upheaval at all. It didn’t change much after my vacation either. The most obvious effect I had was a steadily increasing libido, but I never had the total breakdown I was hoping for. I don’t know if that’s because I didn’t need it or something else. However it might be due to the fact I came to terms with my past a few years ago and wasn’t afraid of the those scars anymore, they were part of who I was, so didn’t need to break them down. I did feel somewhat more positive and less jaded though so maybe it did what it needed to.
ST2 (total ~425hrs): This is where things started getting rough. The first week and a half I just felt exhausted. A number of negative experiences from my past also came to the surface and I had to relive those experiences - I guess I hadn’t come to terms with everything in my past after all. However I also had some very positive experiences where I felt powerful and in total control. Notably ST2 seemed to have energetic effects on me as well, there were a number of times where I felt energy radiating from chakras, indicating these were opening up and clearing out blockages. My libido went through the roof. Overall it was a roller coaster ride, periods of rough reconciliation followed by periods of feeling fantastic.
During this period Alchemist was announced, and I immediately knew that was the sub I was waiting for. After considering different options I decided I would skip ST3 and go straight to ST4. My reasoning was simple - I still had no specific goals for taking action I so wasn’t sure how to make ST3 work for me. Also ST2 seemed to be having interesting effects so I was hoping ST4 would continue that.
ST4 (total … err, it’s complicated): Started like ST2, i.e. feeling exhausted. This lasted about a week and slowly faded, but what didn’t fade was the reconciliation. It was brutal and it was constant. Why? My theory:
Khan is basically about social and sexual dominance, although it contains a lot more. And ST4 contains both ST2 and ST3, i.e. Total Programming and Total Action. So what happens when you’ve got this sub beating at your subconscious for 20 hours a day demanding you take action, and you don’t know what action to take or what to aim for. Maybe my subconscious did have goals for me but my conscious mind didn’t have a clue and didn’t know how to take action to achieve it. The result? Massive reconciliation.
After 2 weeks making no progress, just feeling increasingly miserable and desperate, but refusing to give in, I performed a set of rituals designed to open paths and give me some answers. A couple of days later this thread appeared: Multiple instances
It was just a curiosity at first, the idea of running multiple instances or multiple speeds, but I tried it a few times. It made me nauseous and gave me a headache, but I felt like I needed to experiment with this to see where it led. So I went full in, running either 2x instances ultrasonic or 2x speed masked for ~12 hours a day, but still sleeping with 1x ultrasonic. While running this I felt a constant pressure in my 3rd eye area and would frequently feel like I was tranced out.
4 days into this all the resistance suddenly fell away…
It’s difficult to describe what happened then. I felt both intensely powerful and intensely grounded, like I was both an unstoppable force and an unmovable object. I kept seeing an image of myself in my head as a pillar of steel. I was so focused I felt like I could almost bend reality with my will alone. There was also a palpable sense of being guided by something, and when I closed my eyes I would sense a light shining above me. All my previous anxieties and fears fell away like some old, rotting skin being removed and discarded. There was also a sense of connection to everything around me.
The peak of this experience lasted about half a day, then slowly faded over several days, but left some permanent changes. I no longer feel any fear or anxiety over anything, I can still feel stressed by a situation but it never manifests as fear or anxiety, so I can continue to function fully. I can become intensely focused on a task easily when I want to. I no longer care at all about people’s opinion of me. I also still have this sense of being guided, but it’s more subtle now.
I don’t really know why I had that experience, but I outline a couple of theories later in this post.
Anyway I ran this 2x setup for 2 weeks, then decided to crank it up for the remaining 2 weeks that I planned to run Khan. Given that experience above I wanted to see what would happen. So I ran 2x instance of ultrasonic, but one instance was running at 3x speed and the other instance was running at 1x speed. With masked I just ran one instance at 3x speed.
The pressure in my 3rd eye increased, and I had deeper and longer periods of feeling tranced out. I had some strange extra-sensory experiences. More feelings of connectedness. I also had two additional remarkable experiences:
The first experience was a spontaneous stream of consciousness session that lasted about an hour. Through this I ran over decisions I had made in my life over a period of about 30 years, seemingly minor choices that had profound effects on my life, and how they related to each other, and more importantly how they related to my decisions now. Things started to make sense. A path through my life I hadn’t even been consciously aware of started coming into focus, which explained so much.
The second experience was much rougher, and involved running through all my beliefs, deconstructing them, analyzing them, and discarding them. Every belief, every idea, was discarded as ultimately being limiting and untrue. Even that first experience above was deconstructed and found to be limiting, that pillar of steel felt like a prison, so was discarded. In the end the only belief that survived was this - choice.
I only ran this setup for 1 week in the end, it was just too unrelenting. The main difficulty being I was working throughout this period, and it was bloody hard maintaining my composure at work with all this going on.
In total I ran ST4 for 5 weeks, but adding together all the multiple instances I estimate it was the equivalent of listening ~1100 hours at the regular rate. In the end I think I got what I wanted out of Khan, even though I didn’t know what that was when I started. It also caused a number of repercussions in my life that I’m still trying to understand, but I won’t go into that any further.
Now that I’ve stopped Khan I can identify what I think are the permanent changes. The loss of fear. The intense focus. A deeper understanding of what drives me. A deeper feeling of connectedness. Discarding my false beliefs. I feel highly present most of the time. Plus other things I’m still working out.
And I no longer feel jaded.
So why did these experiences happen? Some thoughts…
- I’ve been involved in esoteric practices for 30 years and had several profound spiritual experiences in the past, so I was somewhat predisposed to this sort of thing and definitely open to it.
- Listening to the subs at a higher rate was inherently stressful, e.g. the ultrasonic setup at the end was like having two people yelling at you at the same time, with one yelling at 3x speed. This probably resulted in raised cortisol levels and made my serotonin levels fluctuate wildy, which I think caused that tranced out feeling. There’s no telling what other chemical changes may have occurred that contributed to triggering those experiences.
Finally, do I recommend doing what I did? No. I definitely took it too far. It was brutal and put me in a highly stressed state for weeks. Better to take the time and run the subs as recommended, taking action toward your goals, and enjoying it. I started Alchemist 3 days ago and I’m running a vanilla 1x setup. Nice and boring.