JakeR

What do people think of this critique?

I hope you aware of the 10 day vipassana courses offered by dhamma.org These courses are by donation and if you are of low income there is no shame in not being capable of donating at all, there is no pressure. These courses are run in many locations around the world. In my experience they have great food and facilities. I have done this two times after the time that I did the solo retreat at home. It is extremely powerful but maybe in a different way. I learned so much from this course and can meditate a lot more effectively due to this. Of course, there are no psychedelics there. You also cannot write in a journal. Everything is about meditation. I strongly recommend both options.

Hey, I have done this and it worked out extremely well for me. This was the first time I started to take this work seriously. People underestimate how powerful this can be. I spent 10 days in isolation at home. I attempted to not use the internet at all but I did end up breaking this at some point but not to a serious degree and I still found great benefit. I also fasted for about 6 days. I don't recommend this unless you think you know what you are doing and are sure that you can do so in a healthy manner. The fasting was an important part of this for me. I tried to meditate a lot every day but I was not well experienced and found it extremely difficult. Towards the end I got a lot more disciplined and could meditate for longer periods of time but don't be put off if you find it very hard. The whole experience was very difficult but very rewarding. Because I found it hard to meditate so much I instead ended up doing a lot of thinking and analyzing myself and life. I ended up having a few extremely intense dreams one night, including some lucid dreams. These dreams were all about my psychological issues which I had suppressed and was basically unaware of. I got up and wrote these dreams down and analyzed them, this was of HUGE benefit and I learned a lot and let go of some baggage I was carrying. The next day I ended up writing a lot in a journal. I basically wrote out my entire life story of all the most important life events that came to mind. This was some of the most powerful psychological work I have done for myself and I came out of this understanding myself so much better. On one of the last days I smoked changa (mostly DMT) and this took me deep into understanding more about the nature of reality and more meta topics than my specific psychology. On the final day I went to a float tank (sensory deprivation) and had some more great insights which combined my understandings of reality from the changa experience and my psychological findings. This really rounded things up nicely and was perfect as a kind of debrief and conclusion. Highly recommend. When I returned to my usual life I certainly noticed some changes and I was a lot more grateful for my social life which I had taken for granted. I am not saying you should follow what I did. You probably have your own ideas which might suit you a lot better, but I hope this was useful.

In my experience salvia gave me similar insight as DMT. It showed me how bizarre consciousness can get. It is, in my experience, the most strange thing possible. It is much stranger than DMT. It defies logic. It increases your understanding of what is possible.

I think that I have understood a lot of what Leo talks about. I think that I understand absolute infinity and that I am God, that life is a dream created from nothingness, etc. I have been on this path for years now including 50+ psychedelic experiences and multiple 10 day meditation courses. But I still feel tired and frustrated with my life on the relative level. I have had periods of time in which everything feels magical and the whole world is incredible as I see beauty in seemingly the most mundane of things. However, I still don't want to deal with life. It feels like a huge burden to live in this modern society. I can't find a job that does not feel mundane and pointless. I can see the joy in social interaction related to the job. But the job itself feels like part of a pointless and harmful system. I want to die. I don't want to deal with this. I'd just rather not. I'd rather not have to contribute to this toxic society we live in. I have very few people that I can deeply relate to. Most people are completely sucked into the system and don't really think for themselves and so I find it hard to connect. I feel the pressure to get a university degree, get a "real" job, and start a family. But why? Society overall seems to be very harmful. It seems like only a minority truly benefit and even then they seem to be in poor mental health. My instinct/intuition has remained mostly the same for most of my life. That is to move out deep into the forest in a remote location and live off of the land in a somewhat peaceful manner. Is this my life purpose? It does not seem to directly help others. In fact, it seems to harm my family and friends who I abandon. It genuinely feels like the right thing to do though. Learn the necessary skills to hunt, forage, and generally survive. My energy will be put into direct usage for my own survival needs. It will become work or die. Is this naive? Ordinary life makes me want to kill myself. I wonder if I am still lacking metaphysical/ontological understanding of reality and that if I obtained this understanding I could act in the world without this depressive tone. Please let me know if you think I have posted in the wrong part of this forum; this feels like a serious emotional problem to me. I feel empty and depressed, even with my seemingly high level of consciousness.

When talking about reality as an infinite fractal I believe Leo has said that the universe is infinite in both directions so you can keep zooming out forever and you will reach no end to the size of reality but you can also keep zooming in forever and reach no end. I can kind of understand this but I am struggling to grasp the idea that we can zoom in forever and why that must be true. This would mean that there are no fundamental particles to reality which are essentially the building blocks (or waves) that are indivisible and cannot be seen as made up of anything else. So this seems to throw out the empirical findings of quarks, electrons, the Plank length, etc. Could someone please help clarify this for me. Cheers