Leo Gura

@LRyan The best techniques that I know of for PTSD are neuro feedback training and psychedelics (specifically MDMA). I think doing Vipassana retreats or the like would also work wonders for PTSD. Don't expect it to be easy though. All of these methods lead to healing, but healing requires emotional labor.

@Loreena By doing the work. Self-inquiry done long enough leads to surrender. You cannot shortcut the process. You cannot will the surrender (because there is no free will). You cannot fake the surrender. As all worthwhile things, it takes work.

The whole challenge here is: How can you grasp hold of something which is nothing? The mind cannot do it because the mind is a set of experiences. Every thought is an experience, and is something by definition. The mind needs to exhaust itself searching the haystack of experience before it finally realizes that it keeps looking in the wrong way. Mind is not up to this task. It must surrender itself.

@bobbyward As I said above, make a distinction between perception/experience and Absolute Awareness. Awareness is not perceived because it's what's doing perception. But you can BE it. You are it right now! You're just not aware that you're it. Because it's SUBTLE. It's not a material object like you're used to experiencing. The nature of awareness is such that it is aware of itself. It's the only thing that's fundamental to reality. Everything else is modulation of awareness. Instead of thinking of reality as made up of atoms or space/time or The Universe, think of reality as a cloud of empty awareness within which "stuff" is awared. That stuff is what we normally call "the universe". Even space and time are "stuff". Even existence is stuff. Everything is stuff except awareness.

@Echoes Of course you struggle with this. If you were aware of the infinite field, you would be enlightened, and you wouldn't have any questions. Infinite empty awareness is not anything. No words can describe emptiness. Space-like is a metaphor. It's not exactly right, but similar. There is no way to understand it without actually becoming it. What's key here is that you make a distinction between all experiences on the one hand, and the field of infinite empty awareness on the other. The practice of self-inquiry is to DISCRIMINATE between the two. You have to constantly push back experience until you run up against the infinite empty field within which all experience take place. You have to understand that emptiness is extremely subtle. Yet you are overwhelmed with gross experiences. You are MESMERIZED by experiences. It's all you basically know. You don't know how to look for anything else but more experience. So you have to slowly train your mind to focus on not-experience (whatever that is, you can't yet know).

@Maorice Excellent work!

@Big_D As Martin Ball talks about, pyschedelics can definitely create psycho-physical energy releases. My 5-meo breakthough had such a powerful energy release that it pealed the skin on all 10 fingertips for about 2 weeks. Like a lifetime of repressed physical baggage was shot out of me.

What evidence is there that you are that human body? None! Take a close look at your direct experience. Your coffee table is as much you as your body. How else could you access the coffee table unless it was you? The body doesn't "perceive" anything. The body is perceived, it doesn't do any perceiving. The body and the coffee table are both just perceptions which arise within the infinite empty field of awareness << which is the real you. Ask yourself, how can one perception perceive another? Because that's what you're currently stuck on. You actually think the perception called "body" perceives all the other perceptions. But this is patently silly. Take an honest look at how your experience ACTUALLY works. This is not the thread for that discussion.

Hehe, depends on which school of psychology you and your therapist subscribe to. Some schools are great, but of course most Western psychology is terrible because it fails to understand or address the root existential issues. It fails to talk about all the spiritual truths without which true healing is virtually impossible. And don't get me started on the therapists who issue pills for things like depression, ADD, and anxiety. But "self-actualization" is a Western psychology term. If you're gonna use a therapist, find one who's into Humanistic Psychology, Transpersonal Psychology, Positive Psychology, CBT, Gestalt Psychology, Reichian Therapy, etc. If your therapist is "new-agey", that's a great sign. If he's like a doctor, that's a terrible sign. Psycho-analyzing your past can have some value, but it's generally not a good technique for growth. You're much better off spending that 1 hour meditating, journaling, contemplating, or self-inquiring.

Fantastic! Some great holistic understanding right there.

@Barna I can confirm the sleeping part. Rarely I will get an experience of God in my sleep. It's quite awakening even in this dim form.

Again, be very careful here. You can still FEEL something, but not "it". There is no "it". "It", meaning "body", is a conceptual construct which doesn't exist. Also notice, that there is no direct connection between a body feeling and a body visual. Also notice, that you say, "I can still feel it", which means you are not it. Because you are the feeler, not the feeling. So what is that "I"? Also notice, when you're taking a nap, you don't feel your body.

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.