Leo Gura

@kieranperez Sweet! Happy for ya

Not really. It's best to just treat them arbitrary.

Strong Determination Sitting is a good way to work on consciousness of pain. This isn't easy to do, but try to sit for so long that you get to the point where the excruciating pain of your sit turns into pleasure. It's a very distinct inflection point that happens during long, serious sits. As you sit there in pain for an hour or more, you have ample time to contemplate: What is pain? What is suffering? With pain and suffering it's very important to try to contemplate it WHILE IT IS HAPPENING, not after the fact. This cuts through speculation and theorizing. My guess is, you'd have to be pretty deeply enlightened to be able to deconstruct pain in the way Ralston talks about. Because so long as the ego is intact it will bitch and whine and moan and resist too much. A deep surrender is required. Ralston is talking about super-human levels of consciousness. So don't be discouraged if you can't get it fast.

It might be easier to do this using a much simpler image, like a red triangle or white circle or the yin-yang. Yes, these might bore you, but if you get bored easily then that's precisely what you must work through. Boredom is the ego-mind's resistance to truth and higher consciousness. Boredom is not easy to work through, but therein lies the spiritual purification.

@Andrea Maffioletti That's the mindfuck of it: perception does not really exist. What you presently think of as perception will eventually -- at high levels of consciousness -- get recontextualized into Absolute being. Perception only appears to exist because the ego is co-opting Absolute being as its own "perceptions". In truth, you are not perceiving anything. Absolute Infinity is being itself but because you believe you were born, you are misinterpreting Absolute being as "my perceptions of reality". Without a belief in a separate self, there is no perception. The notion of perception carries with it a hidden implicit metaphysics: subject/object (duality). When you become really conscious, this duality collapses and you realize that perception was never taking place. Absolute being was taking place. This may sound like a semantic word game, but I assure you its not. It's a very radical and palpable shift in consciousness. You will feel it like getting struck with a lightning bolt. Your whole sense of reality will flip inside out as your consciousness up-shifts from relative perception to Absolute being. Visually, nothing may change, but your understanding of what you thought your visual field was will radically change. It's like if what you thought was a shrub swaying in the wind, upon closer inspection, turned out to be a creeping grizzly bear

@NoSelfSelf Only buy from places that get great reviews. Never buy from an unknown source. And on top of that, use drug testing kits to verify your substance is a genuine indole. Be especially suspicious of substances which don't look pure (brown, grey, yellow, pink, dirty-looking, chunky, etc.).

As far as interpreting imagery goes, the human mind can only understand reality via images and symbols. That's what understanding is regardless of whether it is scientific or spiritual understanding, literal or poetic. There really isn't a difference between literal and poetic understanding. So the mind, especially during a trip, will use whatever images it can to understand the vast complexity of reality. All sorts of strange symbols and images can arise, and they are all relative to that mind's intellectual framework. Truth and wisdom will be communicated in whatever way works FOR THAT MIND. To a Christian mind it might be the face of Jesus, to a Hindu mind it might be the face of Vishnu, to an atheist mind it might be a mathematical formula or a logical axiom, etc. All of it is just arbitrary symbols which only have meaning relatively, WITHIN the framework of that person's mind. It's like a language, which only makes sense and has meaning to those people who speak the language. To an outsider, it is just noise.

Of course dissociatives can be used for accessing profound mystical states. The only problem is, they tend to be physically harmful to the body, and also addictive. Ketamine can become very addictive and prolonged usages destroys the kidneys I believe. Which is why I do not recommend them. Why take those risks when you can have mindblowing mystical experiences on totally safe and non-addictive substances like LSD, mushrooms, or DMT? After a 5-MeO breakthrough, even small doses of LSD or mushrooms will be fully nondual, infinite experiences. I don't need more than 125ug of LSD to take to me to full God-mode. With so many safe psychedelics to explore, I would leave dissociatives for last on the list, after you've explored 2C-B, DMT, 5-MeO, MDMA, mushrooms, etc. BTW, once you try 5-MeO, you will not want anything else. It is a psychedelic in a league of its own. It makes LSD seem like a toy (and LSD is no toy).

There are healthy and unhealthy ways to be socially withdrawn. In the healthy version, you desire isolation so that you can focus on working on your consciousness. Many sages have socially withdrawn themselves to high degrees that would seem unhealthy to most people. But they were just hardcore in their practices. This isn't strictly necessary, but it may be for some people for some period of time until they finish their work. In the end, there is only the one Self, so all those other people are none other than you. So whether you are with people or not, you are still always alone. There is no problem being alone as long as you enjoy it and you are not becoming more and more depressed or mentally unstable.

Hehehe... That will have to fly out the window. Did you really think that the ultimate nature of existence can be understood without taking a toll on you? The cost of admission is your life.

@MadisonAlyssa Well... sit down and contemplate why you are so attached to vanity and appearance. When contemplating this stuff, you must probe beneath the stories and excuses like, "My Dad caused this", or "It was because of my childhood" and get to the root of why you are still attached to it. Attachments like this are always rooted in your survival needs. So what do you fear will happen to you if you let go of vanity and appearance? What would happen if you became ugly and everyone thought you were a cheap nasty whore? How would that hurt your ego/survival? Why are you giving people that power over you? What is vanity/appearance REALLY giving you? Love? Happiness? Success? Self-esteem? Hint: it's giving you something positive, otherwise you wouldn't keep doing it. What if your self-esteem was completely independent of your appearance? What would be bad about that? What if you were ugly and yet you still loved yourself just as much as when you were pretty? Sit down and really contemplate all that in a brutally honesty manner. Also, get very specific and clear about what you mean by "vanity" and "appearance", as these are very vague notions.

@tentacion There's actually nothing behind this physical reality. That nothingness is what you are, what God is Nothingness and Infinity are identical. So this Nothingness is infinitely intelligent. That's what you are intuiting but not yet fully grasping. P.S. LSD or mushrooms are very good alternatives to 5-MeO. They can show you this too.

@voidness What trips most people up is that they underestimate the radical relativity of reality. The bottom line is, reality cannot have a substance because there is nothing within reality which can be used to as a ground, and no one to arbitrate between any truth claim. Being cannot know itself precisely because it is itself. Or rather, being can come to know that being is fundamentally groundless and therefore mystical. There cannot be a ground other than emptiness because any other ground would itself be in need of another ground, and so on, ad infinitum. Besides which, the ground vs not-ground is also a distinction. Here we have reached the end of language. Anything said about the Ultimate Ground (The Groundless Ground) must be self-negating because the ultimate nature of reality is nondual, but all language works by creating dualities (distinctions). So anything we could say or think about the Absolute will be dualistic, which is the opposite of what it is. But... also not the opposite! (See how I have to negate my own words when talking about it?) Because to say anything about it is to give it a specific, distinct quality. But the Absolute is unbounded, infinite. But... also it is bounded and finite! (Again, I have to negate any quality I attribute to it). This is why Zen is so Zen. The Truth breaks logic and language alike because the Truth is infinite while logic and language are finite. Arriving at the the Absolute requires a leap in consciousness.

@Scholar Suffering is very easy to contemplate because it is so palpable in your direct experience. DO NOT think about what suffering is. OBSERVE what suffering is in your direct experience! You suffer every day. The next time you suffer, OBSERVE it, and contemplate what you are observing. Avoid speculating or philosophizing about suffering. You don't need to speculate about it, it's RIGHT THERE every day in your life! P.S. Not only is it there, you are creating it! Another good question to contemplate is: Why did I create this suffering? Again, avoid speculation. Stick as closely to direct experience as possible.

Like I said, I've tried those scales and they never gave me consistent results. Microscoops are better. Just because a scale is 0.001g does not mean it can actually measure out 10mg precisely. Most of these scales will barely even register a 10mg dose. It will read as zero on the scale many times. These scales assume you're weighting a fairly heavy object to begin with, like 100mg, then it will give you 0.001g accuracy. But not on a 10mg sample.

@tentacion The problem with such trust is that it becomes an obstacle to doing the work towards ACTUAL consciousness of the Truth. You can intuit and trust, but none of that it is direct consciousness of what God is. It's easy to get lulled into a false sense of comfort with such trust. Billions of religious people do it every day, and it becomes a huge obstacle to awakening. Trust, but verify. That's where 5-MeO becomes very handy. It will show you where that trust fully leads. Right now it's sort of like you're saying, "Yeah, I trust that Japan is a real place. I've never been, but I trust it." Okay, that's better than distrusting Japan. But it's a whole nother thing to actually go to Japan and roam the streets of Tokyo. It would be a trap to trust in Japan so much that you never actually bother traveling there. None of your ideas about Japan can compare to actually being in Japan.

Distinction is a very tricky issue because distinction is the very nature of being. If you fully understood what a distinction was, you would understand the ultimate nature of reality, and you would be deeply enlightened. Distinction is NOT a concept! Distinction is the "substance" of reality. And what then is the nature of a distinction? Nothing! Yes, paradox here is not a mistake. What you're starting to intuit is that reality has no substance. It's a set of distinct appearances which are actually just a hallucination. Reality is not made out of matter or atoms or energy. Reality is made out of distinctions! Creation is distinction. Without distinction you have pure formless Infinity. And with distinction, you also have pure Infinity! The formed side of Infinity. Form is formlessness. Formlessness is form. Duality is none other than nonduality. Infinity contains an infinite number of distinctions. It's highly worthwhile to contemplate: What is a distinction? ------- Mind vs not-mind = a distinction Automatic vs not automatic = a distinction Consciousness vs unconsciousness = a distinction Real vs unreal = a distinction Subjective vs objective = a distinction Truth vs falsehood = a distinction Creation vs destruction = a distinction The universe vs me = a distinction ------ Consciousness is the substanceless substance within which all of these distinctions occur. Like an LCD screen on which images are rendered. Everything you've ever seen or thought or experienced is a distinction. Including existence itself.

Yup, that's nonduality. What else can be said?

SD is a complex model which requires serious study and contemplation to understand fully. All of these issues you brought are up only apparent issue because you haven't fully understood the model yet and you are not quite properly interpreting history. For example America was not more Green in the 60's than today. That is confusing the hippie movement with the average level of the entire country. In the 60's America was heavy Blue/Orange. Atheists are not Blue, they are just stubbornly Orange. Each stage builds on all the prior ones, so there is no contradiction in a Green or even Turquoise person starting a business. Business takes place at every stage, just following different values.

@TeamBills It's not a function of time, it's a function of how well you research.

Not so what. More like: HOLY FUCKING FUCK!!! But you don't get this yet because you have no idea yet what "I'm God" really means. To you it's just an idea. Which of course is "so what?"

@outlandish Microscoops are more accurate than milligrams scales. Those milligram scales are still way too imprecise. They cannot properly measure a 10gm dose. To them, 10mg to 20mg all feels the same. I have used several different milligram scales and they are all terrible. Consistency of powder is a non-issue if you're using the same batch. And even between batches is it not much of an issue unless you have totally difference sources.

Said the ego. Good luck with that.

@emind Your forum account is not the same as your Actualized.org store account. Sounds like you probably don't have a store account yet.

Teachers have different styles. This is why its good to study hundreds of different perspectives. Each one will expose you to some new facet that the other ones didn't. Teachers place different emphasis on things due to their unique personality, cultural background, path through life, and even their gender or level of testosterone. Never expect one teacher to explain everything to you. It just isn't possible. In a sense, finding a teacher who you resonant with perfectly is bad because then you will tend to blindly accept what he/she says without thinking for yourself or considering other sources. Focus more on grasping what is being taught in your direct experience rather than daydreaming about or judging the teacher. The teacher you resonate with very much depends on what your particular needs are at this moment in time. In a few years, as your needs change, so will your teachers -- if you don't commit yourself to worshiping just one. My teachings are definitely not complete, and definitely contain some mistakes and shadow. This is not a problem so long as you think for yourself, make use many sources, and do your reading. Just listening to me is not enough to succeed in this work.