re: Have you ever done a religious fast?

Well obviously, and the feeling is different for different pleasures, and usually it sucks and is not intended by me, and I just feel shitty and depleted. The growth from the experience often takes a while to process. People are really bad at gauging how much they are progressing at any particular time. Sometimes people think they are getting more and more awesome and they are just deluding themselves. Sometimes people think they are spinning their wheels and going nowhere, when they are really getting much stronger on the inside. In any case, it seems pretty clear that nobody has any incentive to learn jack shite about themselves until they are deprived of having something.