Leo Gura

@kieranperez 23? You are still a baby. You've got plenty of time to iron all that out. Have hope. But get to work.

@Socrates 300ug can be difficult to handle regardless of where you are. Even 150ug can kick your ass. So watch out. Sounds to me like you're asking for a bad trip because your attitude towards this substance is way too light. 300ug outdoors can go really wrong. This doesn't mean it will go wrong every time, but it certainly CAN go very wrong unless you are extremely careful and know what you are doing. If you do it a dozen times, I can almost guarantee something will go wrong. So watch out. You are playing with a loaded gun.

@How to be wise There is no limit. You can become conscious of pretty much anything permanently. But it will take a lot of focused work in most cases. Of course your neurology will be a limit a lot of times, but you can change your neurology both through external and internal means (like psychedelics and diet or yoga and long meditation sits). The point is that spiritual practice of any kind rewires your brain. Psychedelics and meditation ultimately do the same thing, one is just more short-acting while the other is more long-acting. Psychedelics are also more powerful because they can change your neurology is crazy ways, but the effects are rarely permanent (which is actually a good thing) otherwise you could really damage yourself with a bad trip.

Should be fixed now.

@cle103 Just keep at it. Eventually you will break through. There's not much of a trick to it other than brute force. Psychedelics help enormously with this issue. Once you've died a few times, death stops being a big deal. The ego just goes quietly. But not at first. At first it makes a big drama out of it. Eventually you will discover that all fear is illusion. Especially the fear of death.

@1x0 That's right, there is a trade-off between being a technician versus being a big picture thinker. Project leads do very little actual coding. So you have to decide what you want out of life: Do you love coding so much that you want to be a master hands-on coder, or do you love other things more, like management, big picture thinking, business strategy, etc? In that case, you must surrender your desire for hands-on coding. It's sort of the difference between being a bricklayer and an architect. If you love to lay bricks you shouldn't become an architect. There is no right or wrong answer. It is perfectly acceptable to just enjoy the art and science of coding or bricklaying. It's not always better to be a project lead. You can just be a master coder. Then again, coding can be quite dehumanizing and a waste of life. Do you really want to be sitting behind a computer screen for 12 hours per day? Is there something more fun and valuable that you could be doing? Does the world really need another code monkey? Or could your creative talents be put to better use? But it's not just about getting more money for your time. You must enjoy the thing you're doing. So if coding is what you genuinely most enjoy, then do that. The trick is, there are probably other things you enjoy more but haven't discovered yet. So then your task would be to discover that. Personally I don't enjoy management so I avoid positions where I have to manage lots of people. I would rather be working independently, doing my art. But that's me. Some people love to work in groups and manage others. It all depends on your personality type.

Psychedelics + Nootropics + Kriya yoga Kriya yoga is very effective at shutting down the monkey mind through brute physical force. Also, if you have the money, EEG neurofeedback training. You can find a center near you that offers hourly sessions. It's great for ADD. Just 5 to 15 sessions can make a lasting impact.

@cle103 In other words: https://www.actualized.org/insights/enlightenment-retreat-fail

@Bernard In a few months you will forget all about it. The cure for bad trips is 1) Learn the lesson it was trying to teach you, 2) Let a few months pass, 3) Then try a different substance to clean your palette. Only then return to the original substance. By this point your trip will go very differently. You will be much more mature.

Regardless, Kavanaugh is definitely a liar and an ideologue. Which should be enough to disqualify him from a Supreme Court position. It would be good if no partisan or ideologue was ever allowed to even apply for that job. The most important requirement for a judge is to be non-biased. That judges are liberal or conservative is silly. Judges must be neutral and openminded. But of course, that would de facto make them rather liberal, which conservatives would never abide. The thing is that openmindedness is not acceptable to conservatives. Their entire philosophy is based on closedmindedness. Which is why self-actualization and conservativism are like oil and water and not just my personal political bias. Conservatives are neurologically wired to be more closedminded, as studies seem to show. Which doesn't mean they are always wrong but let's just say they fall more on the losing side of history, like dodo birds.

You're welcome to wake up at any time

As Socrates famously said, "I know that I know nothing." That's enlightenment in a nutshell. But it's still not what you imagine it to be. By knowing nothing you know everything. Things go full-circle in an unexpected way. You should also distinguish carefully between absolute vs relative knowing. We are talking about knowledge of the Absolute Truth in this context. Relative knowledge abounds, but it is relative. Absolute knowledge isn't really knowledge, it's Being. But we colloquially call it "knowledge" because most people do not understand a word like "being".

Ego is terrified of losing control. But all sense of control is illusion. You are INFINITE! Just think about what that means. Why do you seek control to avoid your very self? Notice how the ego wants to escape its full nature. The ego wants to stay confined and limited. But TRUTH is unlimited. Your work is to stop trying to limit the unlimited. Do you think the people tortured in the Spanish Inquisition got a say so? And said YES? Do you think the gazelle on the savannah gets a say so if it should be eaten by a lion? And it said YES? If you're not gonna be Hitler, who will? Is there someone here other than you who can do the job? Like maybe some homeless person you think?

Hehehe... That's why I keep saying you must hone an genuine desire for TRUTH! Not pleasure or joy, but TRUTH at all costs! There will be terror. The joy comes afterwards. If TRUTH was so easily enjoyable, every fool would have found it by now. The trick is precisely that the greatest joy lies behind a veil of your greatest fears: death & insanity. You must have enough wisdom and vision to confront your greatest fears, intuiting that they are merely paper tigers. It is not possible to realize God without dying. A bigger dose of psychedelics helps here. A dose so big that you have no choice but to surrender. But not so big that you physically harm yourself.

Except you were. Since there is no one else here but YOU Time is relative. Everything exists simultaneously from a high enough elevation. In fact, every experience exists eternally, forever. Including this one right now. Here it is! Eternal! But you're stuck in relativity so you aren't aware of the eternity. See, that's what happens when your mind gets attached to particular forms.

Of course Spinoza knew what's up. He was a Western mystic. Apparently a hero of Einstein's. Check out Bishop George Berkeley too.

@Bernard Inquiry is a good idea. Just keep in mind that the end result of solid inquiry is a solid mindfucking. Maybe that's because reality is groundless Just what exactly do you think inquiry will reveal? That you are a cosmic kangaroo? That Void is your Absolute nature The ego (you) is not going to survive this process. You still haven't grasped how serious this is. You are like the dog that caught the bus.

@Jcent Def sounds like kundalini energy being awakened. The navel chakra stores the largest reserve of kundalini energy. Which is why the navel chakra is often stimulated only after lots of prep work -- because when it opens it could unleash a torrent. Sounds like you would get a lot of out of Kriya yoga. It should be very effective for you. Much more so than conventional meditation. Give it a try for 6 months. You could awaken just like that. It could change your whole life. Don't depend on other people to awaken you. Take the job into your own hands. Which is not to say never do Reiki, I just mean, seize this lucky break to awaken yourself. I have some books about kundalini on my book list. Make sure you educate yourself about some of the dangers of kundalini and how to awaken it gradually and properly. Otherwise you might run into problems.

It told you to respect the substance. Because every trip builds on the prior. Those first few trips were merely laying the groundwork for the mindfuckery that is to come in the future. In the future you will experience recontextualizations so radical that you will not be able to tell if were ever born. You ain't seen nothing yet. So watch your step. See, the arrogant ego just stumbles into this stuff thinking that it's a joke. Then it catches one tiny glimpse of Truth and it runs crying for Mommy. You just can't appreciate yet how radical this work is and how deep the rabbit hole goes. The only way you can know is by getting mindfucked.

That is the core lesson of mysticism: reality is irreducibly mystical. You cannot know the Absolute because knowledge is a 2nd order process. Being is prior to knowing. You can BE the Absolute rather than knowing it. Or you can know that it is unknowable. Which is what Osho is describing. Nonduality means that knowing must collapse into being. Which is why the ultimate Truth cannot be spoke, thought, or symbolized. All symbols are too indirect. You must directly become the being of which all symbols are made. Language and thought must be entirely transcended. The Truth is beyond thought, imagination, or even your mind. Ayn Rand was of course an arrogant, egoistical, dualistic, stage Orange fool. The hallmark of the ego-mind is that it thinks it can know everything through linear reason. And in this it is deluded beyond hope.

@Bernard Sounds like you disrespected the psychedelic by taking it willy-nilly without a proper, serious spiritual intention and it kicked your ass to teach you a lesson. From now on, when you trip you will do it with seriousness, good intent, focus, and no more willy-nilly stuff. Psychedelics are not a toy. When you take a psychedelic properly, you set aside the whole day, mentally prepare yourself, and you do it almost like a religious ceremony (minus the dogma). Why are you drinking during a psychedelic trip? Why are you tripping while tired? Why are you trying to avoid the trip through sleep? This shows sloppy protocol and disrespect for the substance. When you take a psychedelic you must in peak form: alert, awake, focused, sober, solemn, at peace, in a positive mood, well-rested, empty stomach, reverent, slightly apprehensive, and ready to be mindfucked.

@mochafrap There are still subtle dualities in your way of thinking about reality. You are assuming there is a material difference between something and nothing, when there isn't from the absolute perspective. What you're calling "differentiation" is otherwise called a distinction. Distinction is NOT a concept! But concept is a distinction! All of reality consists of distinctions, but at the same time all distinctions are ultimately one. This was explained in my longest episode: Understanding Sameness vs Difference Pure beingness is literally nothing whether you drop your concepts or not. Nothing has ever happened. That's reality. Nothing. And everything. Because there is no difference between the two. The difference is only there in your mind. The implications of this are not only important, it is the source of all Creation! This is how God created the entire universe! If you understood what a distinction was, you'd be deeply enlightened and you'd understand how the entire universe came into being. So it's worth contemplating a bit P.S. You would also become immortal as the distinction between life and death would collapse. P.P.S. An object which lacks all distinction is Infinity. And yet at the same time this object contains within it all possible distinctions, thus comprising the sum total of reality. Nothing and Everything in one tiny/huge point. A white hole if you will.

Tripping in nature is great, but in practice presents problems with sun, cold, snakes, bears, people interrupting your trip, etc. Don't go hugging a rattlesnake while you're high

Even under Trump, the US is still becoming more liberal and progress is happening. Evolution & progress cannot ever be stopped. The attempt to stop it is itself part of the progress. So in the end there is no losing, only winning if you are a progressive. It just doesn't happen as fast and directly as your ego might like. Michigan legalized weed today. So there you go

By definition God is all. So asking the question: Is thing X God? is pointless because the answer will always be YES regardless of what X is. God is your entire field of consciousness.