Leo Gura

So close your eyes. And now it's not visible. So can you be the (visual part of the) body then? Don't overlook the obvious. If an experience ever disappears, even for a second, it cannot be you, can it?

James is generally a great teacher, but keep in mind that he's not out to seek a cosmopolitan understanding of all the paths. He's committed to teaching a very strict traditional Advaita Vedanta path. Which means he will throw many other teachings under the bus. Whenever some criticizes a nondual teaching, be very cautious about how they define their terms. Often, the differences are merely terminological and superficial. For example, when someone says "ego death" you have to understand that they're actually referring to by that phrase. Likewise with "being in the NOW". I've noticed some of James' criticisms are silly. It's very easy to make a strawman out of other teachings if one isn't careful. That said, some of his criticisms are valid and helpful to keep in mind.

@Alex90 Some do, and some don't.

@Big_D Good. Careful though, 300ug is a very strong dose. I find that doubling a dose more than doubles it's power. Given that you're still so young, you wanna be extra cautious if you're gonna use these substances.

@Costa7 I would keep them separate practices.

Once you see God, I think your cannot ever be the same again. At least that's how it was for me. It's not enlightenment, but it's quite something. No idea. Probably half the snorting dose. But you have to know how to vaporize the full dose properly.

Contemplate this: All pleasure ends. Then you're fucked. Unless...

You gotta be very careful in your reasoning here. When you say, "How can one that is not the body/mind" you are referring to the Absolute Self. And it's true, the Absolute Self does NOT change even if you take a pill or a bullet to the brain. But that is not your experience of yourself. This is only hearsay for you. Because you ARE very deeply identified with that body/mind, when a pill radically changes how body/mind is experienced, that will make a HUGE difference to your current identification, which is occurring at the body/mind level. Your entire body/mind/experience is chemical. If we magically transformed you into a kangaroo, you would have a kanagroo experience, and it would make a HUGE difference to you. Because you think you're a human body/mind. But the Absolute Self would remain untouched even if you became a kangaroo. The whole problem here is that you're deeply identified with experience and you don't know it yet. You don't hold it an identification with experience, you hold it as "reality". A radical change to your experience will rob you of this illusion. For example, if you took a pill that literally changed you into a kangaroo, you would no longer be able to think of yourself as a body/mind. The mistake people who haven't taken psychedelics make is that they assume a psychedelic will make you hallucinate you're a kangaroo. When in fact, it's more like, a psychedelic will LITERALLY turn your body into a kangaroo body. So when you come back down from your trip, it's not like you hallucinated being a kangaroo. You ACTUALLY were a kangaroo! All experience is hallucination. There is no special set of experiences which are "real" and others which are hallucinatory. ALL OF REALITY IS A HALLUCINATION! Your current body is a hallucination. The reason this is still not making much sense to you, is because you're locked in the naive realist paradigm and spirituality/psychedelics are a totally opposite paradigm, yet you are trying to understand them without making a discontinuous jump. So your old paradigm's assumptions are infecting the spiritual/psychedelic paradigm, which makes it sound impossible or crazy. You must make a discontinuous jump. But you don't know how. So you're stuck. You're not really motivated to work for years without results. Which is where psychedelics are helpful. One way or another, you must make a discontinuous jump in this work. And only then will you realize how stuck you were. Like a fish in water, you can't see the water until some fisherman hooks you and drags you ashore. Try to imagine how big of paradigm shock that is for the fish. His entire universe changes once he sees some real land. Notice very carefully: when you are inside a dream, you do not know it's a dream. You hold it as REAL! Only by contrast, after awakening, can you look back on it and say, "Oh, yeah... of course that was a silly dream."

@Principium Nexus I like to think of it like this: how could you have Absolute Infinity without egos? If you're gonna have a hard drive, you're gonna make some virtual partitions on it. That is the practical side of a hard drive. Otherwise it's just there being empty. And if it's empty, it's not being Absolutely Infinite. It's limited. To be truly unlimited, one has to include all limits. Which is why infinity must be paradoxical. It goes full-circle.

@jjer94 Now try to imagine that experience x1000, and you've got 5-meo. Good work.

Martin Ball is talking about smoking it, which is very different from snorting. The smoked trips are very powerful, but very short. I imagine they blindslide most people. You'll be like, "WTF was that?????????" And really have little understanding of what happened. So in this case, it totally makes sense to immediately trip again so that you might grab hold of some actual insight. With snorting/plugging this is less of an issue because you have a good 30 minutes to gather your insights, and the intensity is lower, so your mind still functions a bit. Of course you could experiment with doing double or triple back-to-back snorting trips. But for me, one trip more than plenty. Regarding meditation, no, because it's a totally different thing. Meditation is very clear, slow, and mellow. You are conscious of what's going on there, unlike smoked 5-meo. The point of meditation is to stay long to go deeper into it. 5 mins of meditation isn't going to do much for you. 5-meo doesn't work well for microdosing. The whole point is to experience ego-death, and you can't get ego-death with a microdose. Ego-death is a heavy experience by it's very nature. That's why it's such a powerful tool. If you want to microdose, you can do that with LSD or liquid shrooms. Yes, there is benefit to sub-breakthrough doses of 5-meo -- you still get a huge expansion of awareness -- but the breakthrough is really what you want. It breaks all reality.

@Venus Even if you became enlightened tomorrow, you'd still not be out of the woods. Your growth journey would only begin. Enlightenment will not clear out all your crap, or install healthy habits in you, or remove toxic habits in you, or any other things which you probably want. Spirituality basically consists of two things: finding the Truth (enlightenment) and working your ass off to embody the Truth. You're not even remotely capable of finding the Truth unless you start working your ass off to embody it already. Which is why most spiritual traditions and schools involve rigorous training and development before you are even told what enlightenment is. It's a bad idea to hold enlightenment as a cure-all solution to all of your issues and desires. You need to be a lot more nuanced than that, and do all kinds of additional personal development work. The only exception to this is maybe if by "surrender" you mean you'll go live in a cave for the rest of your life. Then you just surrender to that, and go do it. Eventually you'll realize that path will circle back around into personal development anyhow. You cannot live successfully in this physical reality without personal development. So you might as well start mastering it now. Which means if you have negative thoughts, solve that shit now.

@username Don't worry, it's only a matter of time until you feel hopeless again. All states come and go. Which is why the wise seek liberation.

Don't confuse Nothingess/Absolute/God/Consciousness with scientific ideas of nothingness. Two totally different domains.

@The Monk No, it means less low-consciousness friends. Nothing says you can't go out and make high-consciousness friends. Of course you'll have to stop taking the process of acquiring friends for granted. Up until now, you had an unconscious process for finding friends. Now you need to create a conscious process for finding friends.

Of course your work has to be exceptional. But even exceptional work can not be enough. And exceptional work still has to fit some kind of market need. Music is easy to market because it's free, short, low cost to produce, and everyone loves music. It's a massive pop-culture market. Even niche music is still massively popular because it demands so little of the listener. It's like comedy in that regard. Everyone loves good comedy. Because it's naturally easy to like. Not so with many other types of art. Good luck making a living off a sculpture the same way you might with a good song. To accomplish that will take some real innovative strategy. But yes, mastering your craft and finding your unique voice is critical for any artist. The trick is that it's hard to master something unless one experiences some degree of early success to make it a sustainable practice. You can't afford to spend 10 years mastering your craft without selling anything. So you need to design a bootstrap process, which will allow you to develop mastery plus publish some value to the marketplace.

Those people are fools. Don't worry, life will slap them for their foolishness Classic spiritual mistake: finding spirituality and thinking that it obviates practical thinking. You must be both spiritual and practical, idealistic and realistic. As always, people suck at balance, so they take sides and bicker. You must be BOTH! Do your art, but don't get so artsy-fartsy you lose touch with ordinary people or ordinary reality. I've had to sell my soul to the devil a lot to succeed. If I never did that, you would never have heard of me or found Actualized.org. Success is a pragmatic issue. If you care about it, you must make certain sacrifices. You can't just create whatever kind of bullshit you fancy. That's way too easy. You must take others into account as well. But without selling out. Your art ain't doing much good if no one can access it. Of course, if you wanna be a starving, misunderstood artist, go right ahead. Nothing wrong with that per se. Personally, not my cup of tea though. For me, it's important that my work has a sizable impact on people and that I am reasonably compensated.

Another good question to ponder is: What are the components of a successful intimate relationship? Yeah, there are a lot of different angles you could come at this question from. Some angles are more metaphysical, others are more practical. Both are good. They feed into each other. So there's plenty to contemplate. I like this idea of collective contemplation. It's a good use of this forum. If you guys are interested, what we could do is create a set of contemplation threads for the specific purpose of collective contemplation. For example: What is creativity? What is love? What is science? etc. These threads would have some ground rules so that people actually contribute contemplative answers, and not just speculation or talking-shit. And then we could have one master sticky thread which links to all the different contemplation sub-threads. Is that something ya'll would be interested in?

@Vanish I can imagine storing LSD in India was a sketchy affair.

@Loreena Of course! Your butt is not gonna wipe itself Every detail must be accounted for no matter how enlightened you are.

Yup, been there before Welcome to evolved-living. Where you unmoor yourself and take charge of your own destiny.

@ShadowWalker No, actually the difference is much more pragmatic. Starving artists starve because they don't invest energy in learning marketing or bothering to market themselves. Just doing great art is NOT good enough. You must learn your audience and learn to appeal to them and lure them in. Artist-types usually suck at this, which is why most of them are starving. You must be wiser than that. You must reconcile the problem of how to market yourself without selling your soul in the process. Success requires ruthless pragmatism. Not wishful thinking. But you can still be a visionary. A highly pragmatic visionary.

@ajs That is fine, but your challenge in this work will then be to find a way to harness the emotion contained in those sports experiences and put it to productive, creative use. I'm sure it can be done. But you'll have to think a bit outside the box. Meaning... it won't be as simple as saying, "Okay, I get a thrill out of playing golf. So that means I should be a professional golfer or golf coach." No! You need to think deeper and connect more dots. What does the thrill of golf say about the kind of impact you want your creative work to have on people? "Creative work" and also be interpreted broadly. For example, someone like Bear Grylls does creative work. But it's not your typical idea of creative work. It's more kinesthetic. You sound like a kinesthetic person, so you'll need a life purpose which feeds into and off of that. Find a way to make it creative rather than competitive. Competitive sports are shallow and short-lived. You gotta find a way to build something with your activity.

@5thPablo You'll never understand until you're there. Once you're there, you'll laugh at how you could think anything else could have been even remotely true. The problem is, you've never yet experienced the possibility of an ABSOLUTE reality. Absolute means, God himself could not make it otherwise. It's true under all conditions, for eternity! Such a thing is completely outside the realm of any human experience. No human you've ever personally known has experienced truth at such a profound level. So to you it is unimaginable. Which is why I keep insisting on radical openmindedness.

Here's some food for thought for ya guys: Are there any things which are unrelated to anything else? What is selecting out the objects which are said to be related? Why those two objects and not others? Are relationships only between sentient beings, or other things too? What does it mean to be in relationship with another thing?