Consilience

Christopher Bache wrote a book called LSD and The Mind of The Universe detailing his experiences mega dosing LSD. 500-700ug range. Really fascinating book.

Thank you for the advice everyone. Going on ahead and taking them.

I know this question wasn't directed at me, but a really amazing meditation teacher named Shinzen Young developed a mindfulness based meditation technique that uses noting and labeling. I've personally found it to be extremely effective for untangling and loosening the grip of background stress, emotional dysregulation, and being able to drop into a very powerful states of mindfulness. It's got a really great synergy with stereotypical meditation techniques like anapanasati (mindful breathing/watching the breath sensations) or self inquiry. What's even better is that the technique is extremely easy to practice even as you're bopping around living life. It takes a bit to build up momentum, but once you find a groove with the technique, it really starts to take a life of its own. Here's a link for instructions: https://www.shinzen.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/SeeHearFeelIntroduction_ver1.8.pdf

That's awesome man Was your spirit guide physical, like a tree, or something non-physical? Was the guide encouraging you to commit more to meditation or something?

Some sort of error with the quoting feature. Let me fix my bad haha

Expecting Leo to be on the level of Christ is a misunderstanding of the role Leo should play in your life. Actualized.org is not a religion, Leo is not a spiritual master nor claims to be; he shares insights that either resonate or don't. Actualized.org should be one of many, MANY, sources of information you're learning from. So yes, the teachings of Christianity can play an intimate role with facilitating awakenings, but so can Zen, Theravada, Advaita Vedanta, Neo-Advaita, Islam, Judaism, Daoism, etc. The mistake would be to think Christianity is suddenly THE ANSWER because you've had a few awakenings. Oh I completely agree Christ is way more powerful than what's typically on this forum, but if you're creating a duality out of you and Christ, out of God and World, you misunderstand God, you misunderstand Christ. God is this moment, God is this forum, God is the source of your soul, YOU are God, the emptiness out of which experience is constantly arising and passing into moment by moment is God, the experience that arises out of and passes back into emptiness is God. To think Jesus is somehow your savior is to mistakenly believe there is someone to be saved. You are no one. Jesus was no one. You are the whole of reality pretending it is someone that may or may not be saved. Heaven is this present moment. Heaven and Earth are one in the same. When the Buddha became enlightened under the Bodhi tree he realized Heaven. All mystical traditions point towards the same truth brother. I only say all this to say... Just don't let yourself fall into the illusions of contemporary Christianity. You are God. You are Jesus. Just because you don't resonate with Leo, that does not mean he is dangerous or that we need saving from Jesus. I was outside meditating today staring into the sky. My heart spontaneously exploded in ecstatic compassion for the suffering of all beings and I weeped for the grace, salvation, and perfection of the world. There was only God and not once did Christ cross my mind. He is not needed, only your own direct experience of what you are. Much love man.

You can but seeing emptiness, no self, God, etc., does not require a quiet mind. A quiet mind helps to see clearly into the nature of reality, but a permanent state of no mind is not the goal or a necessity for Awakening. Speaking from experience chasing after a silent mind and finally seeing the futility.

Why all the jesus talk? You realize you’re christ right?

*gets b*tch slapped by a Zen Stick* u rite tho

Lmao. Yes congrats everyone and thank you as well

God doesn't get bored. The mind get's bored. Therefore, God gets bored. The universe was not created out a boredom. That's an incredibly human centric projection to place on The Infinite.

I wouldn't say it's normal, but everyone's experience is different. I would make the claim that there are changes happening in your mind, but your sensory clarity, the sensitivity towards your mind and the transparency of the surface level of mind to the depths of mind hasn't cleared enough for you to be able to accurately discern what those changes are and what's actually happening experientially. The changes can be insanely subtle. Sometimes after meditating, it literally feels like nothing at all has happened. Even for experienced meditators. However again, I would make the claim this is not the case and if you had a more highly trained mindfulness ability, you'd be able to detect these incredibly subtle shifts in mind patterns. If you really wanted to feel something, again sit for 4 hours without moving and you'd 100% feel the mind reacting to the practice. So it's not about meditation not creating a change. The changes will eventually be felt if pressed hard enough. If you expose yourself to enough of the stimulus, you would feel an effect whether positive or negative. Ultimately I have no clue if your ego/mind/body/sense of self would resonate with meditation. From what I've observed, most people don't, but this does not mean most people shouldn't practice. It is my belief that most people should. Even for someone like myself whom I consider to be pretty serious with my practice, I still struggle regularly. The human mind is not designed to sit in its own presence. Most people, especially for the first 3-5 years, are going to be grinding away with this practice. But if you seek out good teachers, techniques, and are playful, experimentive, curious, and have a vision of what mastering meditation actually does for the mind, you will make a change and at some point the changes start to become exponential. If you can't sit down for an hour and focus on the breath for the full 60 minutes, then work to train your mind until you can and I will PROMISE you, you will not feel "identical to normality" at the end of all of the work it takes to have that level of attention stability. Normality is running around, tensing up and turning away from painful experiences, reacting to our emotions, being bored and addicted to various dopamine sources, and generally working to manage an immense amount of unconscious background suffering all while acting out unconscious survival patterns and agendas. The normalitly 99% of humanity walks around with is utter insanity and dysfunctionality . 60 minutes per day for 6 months will give you a good idea of whether this path is for you or not. If after those 6 months you still feel nothing, yeah fuck it. What I did when I first began was a 60 minute sits broken out into six 10 minute segments. Id do one technique for 10 minutes, a second technique for 10 minutes, a third technique for 10 minutes and then repeated that cycle. 1 Hour meditation session: 0-10 mins - technique 1 10-20 mins - technique 2 20-30 mins - technique 3 30-40 mins - technique 1 40-50 mins - technique 2 50-60 mins - technique 3 The variety helped me start to get a feel for how different techniques do different things and kept the boredom from being overbearing. Maybe you could do something similar to help with it not feeling so ineffective. Last thing... Don't worry about meditation creating immediate changes anyways. Just let experience do whatever it does in that session. If that means feeling normal for 30 minutes, then do that. Experience is always shifting. Meditation is just slowly cultivating new channels.

Your first 1000 hours of meditation, very little will probably happen. Don't stop though. The practice is working at extremely subtle layers of mind that are normally inaccessible for surface level awareness. Just because you don't feel anything, this doesn't mean nothing is happening. The changes happen gradually, with intermitted bursts or breakthroughs a long the way. Using psychedelics while also committing to a rigorous meditation practice also helps speed things along, as the psychedelics can help you gain insight into your practice, the nature of experience, the nature of sobriety vs. altered states, etc. For example, if your goal was to squat 500lbs, don't expect 1 month in the gym to be very meaningful. Don't even expect 1 month of perfectly optimized, intense training to even matter. If you're wanting to use meditation as a practice towards transforming the mind and/or awakening, the first phase is just retraining the mind out of it's lifetime of conditioning. Once you can sit down for an hour without fighting with experience, then the real work begins.

“I don’t like protein, I have steroids for that.”

Who says? The problem is all of this spiritual stuff is intellectual for you, it’s not actually grounded and embodied in your experience. Meditation is the practice of integrating all of this theorizing and arm chair non-dual philosophy into real, lived experience. The world is only an illusion insofar as it’s not an illusion. Your reality is what it is. If you want a solution, stop the mental masturbation. Or hey laugh! The devil will make any and all excuses not to turn within and face itself.

Meditate for 4 hours straight without moving and then let’s talk about child’s play

Why can't joy arise spontaneously? Why can't there be joy with playing a game and pretending? Everything is fundamentally distinct. There is an underlying sameness yes, but there is also an underlying uniqueness to everything. No two things or moments are identical to one another. Each moment, hell each momentary flux of the existence of a single object, is the same moment to moment. There is no such thing as a moment repeating. Once something is gone, it's gone. This impermanence imbues all of life with an inherent beauty, a divine reverence one can only awake to when the value of something is not derived out of its meaning, but its existence and the deep honoring of its transitory nature. This is all bullshit. Your ego is coopting something it's heard from Leo and pretending it's actually awakened to this truth. If you understood what it meant to be truly, existentially alone, you would also realize it is literally impossible for you to be alone. Let go of this identification my friend. Less spiritual theory and more meditation, more grounding into the actuality of your direct experience.

Lmfao wut.

Learn to be able to sit with yourself alone, without stimulation (or attention) and be happy. Meditation. Hours upon hours upon hours of meditation. Slowly you will learn that the deepest levels of fulfillment are found within, not from the attention of others. If you have a mental health condition, meditation alone won't be enough. So if you have a mental health condition, seek therapy and/or another type of mental health professional.

The technique instructions I prefer to follow are Shinzen's: 1. Sit down. 2. When you notice an intention to control your attention, drop that intention. 3. If you can't drop that intention to control your attention, it wasn't an intention - i.e. don't worry about it. What you'll come to notice after many many many hours of meditation practice is that being lost in thought has super subtle layers of intentionality baked into it. At first, yeah it feels like being lost in thought is something we should allow because we're doing nothing. But actually at unconscious levels of mind, being lost in thought in an intention the mind is choosing to carry out. Please note, YOU are not choosing this anymore than you choose any of your intentions to spontaneously arise. The mind is choosing. Yet this can create an issue, you might not think "oh I shouldn't be lost in thought if being lost in thought is an intention to control attention!" However, having the intention to not be lost in thought is also an intention to control your attention. The tricky of this practice is to go on full auto-pilot. The trick is to let the mind start to automatically notice intentions on its own and drop those on its own. Thoughts appearing in and of themselves are not an issue; you will find that many thoughts appear during Do Nothing practice. But just because thoughts appear, this does not mean thoughts have to have the stickiness of dragging into thought loops we're normally accustomed to during meditation. When we get pulled into thoughts, it's because a certain percentage of our mind (a higher percentage than the rest of the mind) wants to be thinking about whatever we're thinking about. When we notice that intentionality of the mind that wants to be lost in thinking, drop that and return to doing nothing. This doesn't mean thoughts or any aspect of our perceptive experience changes. It means the context of our holding of perceptive experience changes, but this changing of context is an automatic happening, reality cultivating mindfulness on its own. Overall, it takes practice to determine what is and is not an intention and whether you're actually intending to be lost in thought, or whether the lost in thought is a genuine act of automatic happening. It's actually both lol. The key is just sit down and experiment. You'll start to find a groove. In many ways, it feels like the Do Nothing technique is where all meditation practice ultimately leads. The dropping of the "meditator" and a surrender into the flow of reality moment by moment. It seems that regardless of what technique one is choosing, it is just a variation of the Do Nothing technique, at the highest level. So why not just cut the bullshit and sit down, do nothing? Well there are good reasons for that too but that's beyond the scope of this post.

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@Leo Gura your video was extremely well put together. Thank you for such an honest, nuanced, and deep discussion on this topic.

Yep I was thinking it was Brendan and Peter as well. When I was doing their workshops, one of the participants literally went crazy. They had a mental breakdown, become totally unhinged from consensus reality and had to end up leaving the workshop prematurely. Ralston ended up telling the group that this wasn't the first time something like this has happened, but that in every case he's witnessed the person always had some sort of predisposition to mental health issues. And to Brendan's credit, he handled the situation very well and managed to get the workshop back on track, and get the group refocused.

One of my fundamental, perceived, disagreements is your dismissal of manual practices like meditation. Not that you dismiss them per-say, but that you significantly down play their effectiveness due to a personal lack of success and label the people who have serious success with them as “spiritually gifted.” Yet I do not believe that should warrant me leaving the forum or to stop watching your videos just because I perceive meditation differently than you. In my view, the healthiest reaction would be for you to be open to the possibility that meditation, for example, is much more widely effective than the “spiritual genetics” argument claims and for me to be open to the possibility that most people will never have any hope of grounding high levels of God realization while sober. Id appreciate the opportunity to share my views on this in the future though without being labeled as a contrarian and asked to leave. Ive been working on a series of posts which may fall into the categorization of contradicting your teachings. Not in the ultimate nature of truth, but in the accessibility of truth regarding states of consciousness. Where does the line get drawn with too much contradiction? Having a community providing some level of criticism is healthy not only for you personally, but for the overall health of Actualized.org

What happened here speaks to the depth of these teachings. I believe this is why someone like Peter Ralston considers himself a "facilitator" (specifically not a teacher) and is incredibly cheeky, and at times, totally ambiguous with his communications about the deepest truths. This is why someone like Shinzen Young is so strict about teaching about mindfulness and not the philosophical implications of what the practice reveals. I believe this is why Gurus, Zen masters, etc., have a reputation of intentionally holding back how much they're willing to share with their students. If the student is not ready the results of repeatedly hearing these types of teachings can be disastrous. Yet on the other hand, even if someone where not psychologically ready to hear, "life is a dream, you are God, you were never born, you'll never die, your entire self and life is imagination, etc." I do not think the results would be suicide or self harm. At worst, someone may be plunged into an existential depression and at best, it could be the shell shock they needed to hear to begin their spiritual journey. For those with genuine mental illness, it doesn't really matter what the trigger is. It could be radical non-dual teachings, or it could be utterly self-derived delusional thinking. I do think there is inherent risk with the way Actualized.org has so successfully marketed itself across the internet, and the unintentional consequences that could result from these utterly radical ideas becoming so mainstream. However, I think there is a deeper risk with these teachings not becoming mainstream. Humanity is at an inflection point with our level of technological power; we are so severely lacking in a mature, compassionate, wise level of self-understanding. While these teachings may be utterly radical, and anti-thetical to the modern world's way of thinking, and therefore poses a certain level of risk, they are honest and authentic to one's direct experience of who and what they are. This type of radical self honesty is what the world is going to need if we are going to effectively face the growing number of existential threats on the horizon (increases in extreme weather events, rising sea levels, pollution of the oceans, world wide mass extinction, destruction of the rain forests, artificial intelligence, job loss as a result of artificial intelligence, gene editing, 3d printing, surveillance capitalism, virtual reality...) In essence, it seems that what Actualized.org has done with advanced spiritual teachings may not be ideal for the individual in every case, but given the need of these models and ideas for the collective development of the world, it seems the collective impact of Leo's work outweigh's the inherent risk for any given individual. That's my view. As is explicitly specified in the forum guidelines, this work is not for those with mental illness. Sometimes mental illness does not present itself as depression, but can at times present itself as delusional thoughts and feelings of connection and bliss. There are many flavors and forms of mental illness. It would be unreasonable to expect that moderators or Leo to have the capacity to monitor for this type of stuff. We are a community that exchanges ideas and communications, not a professional mental health service. Of course if the signs present themselves it is paramount that we take the necessary steps to help the individual. I think this applies for all of us, not simply mods. But again, mental health services is not the function, nor was ever the intention, of this forum. It was truly a tragedy with what happened with SoonHie. It's affected me more deeply than I thought it would. I have no words for his family and loved ones other than I'm sorry for what has happened, and I'm sorry you have to continue without him. There are no words that can fill that void. May his soul rest easy and may you all feel and heal deeply. With love.