Azrael

Yes, highly kind of interesting. I got into that when I had my first deeper experiences because I was now pushed in the sensory world and couldn't believe what is going on. It brought me to tears many times how stunningly beautiful and intelligent nature is. It still does sometimes. When you're out of your head and into your senses, even just seeing things feels like an orgasm. I remember one time sitting in public transport, going home from sport, and hearing a baby cry. And everybody else is kind of sick of this shit. You don't wanna be there, you wanna arrive, now this baby cries and so on. And I was so grounded this day, I completely melted with the experience of hearing and began to hear Big Voice (or let's say God / Tao / it ...) in this baby crying right now. It was like God's talking to me. And I had to really keep my shit together because it was so beautiful. Some people saw that and I earned some funny looks. But it was worth it. How much can you change when you hear a baby cry and find it to be the most beautiful harmony you every heard? How far out can you get?

I have something similar going since I did 5-MeO-DMT. With normal psychedelics I always have an afterglow for maybe a day or two but with MeO it's now about 4 weeks that I took it and I still get random hits of awareness. It feels like a MeO-onset but then goes away and leaves me relaxed and fresh. Sometimes it's quite weired, because I'm like in a restaurant ordering food, speaking with somebody, and then it hits me and I'm like: "Dude, you can't have a no-self experience right now, you're ordering food." So for me it's bursts of awareness that break through. Very cool.

At some point in the practice the barrier between the subconscious and the conscious will break through to a large extent. For me that began to happen after I watched your "Free Will"-video and meditated on the question "What will happen next?". It was a very physiological feeling of opening that then resulted in basically 4 months of the deepest existential crisis I have ever encountered, because all the repressed shit came to surface. But, along the horror came 3 major awakenings, every one deepening the one before and the last one being a Kundalini awakening. I just found that out months later because I didn't know what happened. In retrospect I'm very happy that his purged out "so fast" and now I'm pretty good and relaxed and my mind is calm. But throughout the opening of the unconscious I got several semi-supernatural abilities. I know this sounds cheesy, but it's basically increased intuition. I can consciously close my eyes and start dreaming - like really seeing pictures and hearing sound, being in a dream. I can consciously talk to my subconscious and it provides answers if it has answers or if not it estimates. I can bring my whole body to a very relaxed/focused state in 1-2 minutes in kind of every situation. I can consciously hallucinate if I want to (this is nuts). I can meditate w/o a timer for an hour and my unconscious will give me a hint in the last 5 minutes that I'm done. The list goes on and on. It's really crazy in the beginning because one never knew that this is possible. And it feels like this is only the beginning. Maybe I make a more detailed post about this in the future.

Yes and no. I do mainly use this principle in my work because it correlates with the Taoist way of life and the way Zen does its thing and I follow both because they are highly effective. So yes, enough awareness curates most shit out of your system over time, however you can at some point consciously decide what you want to change because you are so aware of the negative behavior that you can just drop it w/o much battle. So, let awareness wash you clean automatically and then take it to polish certain qualities of yours if you want to. It's fun. You cannot ever indulge consciously in unhealthy behavior. That's why awareness kills it off. When you do something unhealthy willingly and consciously you must've interpreted it as something healthy, otherwise you couldn't do it. Awareness wouldn't allow it. Take suicide as the most extreme example: You simply cannot kill yourself until you've constructed your reality in such a way that it is seen as the savior, as a healthy action to stop your misery. No, that's stupid and doesn't trigger learning. Learning is triggered when you try something (that you really wanna accomplish) and then you fail. And then you fail again. And then you win. And then you fail again. In this process your neurons are actually weighting themselves to get the wanted behavior going. That's why at some point everything seems easy. So just keep doing your thing, you'll fail many times along the way, I'll promise.

Thanks, my whole persona "Azrael" + the signature is inspired by Army of the Pharaohs' song Azrael. I loved this.

Since the psychedelic videos I've seen a lot of criticism here on the forum on @Leo Gura's approach to things and the direction he takes Actualized.org. And I think it's important to talk about that, no question about it. Then @Rali came up with his videos and the whole thing blew up into very, very ambitious discussions. Honestly, Azrael loves this shit because it's just way to much fun, but I can see why Leo doesn't want that to happen here. And that should be respected. Of course does Leo project meanings onto things in his videos. Everybody does and if you want to communicate to somebody effectively you will project your meanings and ambitions onto things. You will use your attitude to get a message across to a certain audience. And if the audience is intelligent, it notices that and lets it happen so that it can have a shift in perspective, to see things in a new way. Every good teacher does this. And me personally, I have some differences with Leo's approach to things. I also have differences how Alan Watts did his thing, how Mooji looks, how Matt Khan talks, how I go about my own shit. And that's fine. Would be very uninteresting if everything would fit. And I respect every attitude that a spiritual teacher or student brings about, because I know from experience that it will change dozens if not hundreds of times throughout the whole journey. One time, your will be very passionate about your opinions and want others to see it exactly that way. Another time, you may see how things just happen and how you really cannot do much to change this. This is the journey, getting intimate with all of reality. So please see through the shells that the spiritual teachers wear and suck the good shit out of what they are talking about. Because they all point to the same thing, with thousands of different approaches and stories. And your task is to find that god damn thing, and have a good laugh. And lastly, if I'm honest with you guys, in all of the discussions on Leo's approach and the topics he investigates I also had very strong opinions some times that I wanted to express. I sometimes wrote half page of a comment and then hit delete for one very reason: Leo and Alan Watts mainly brought me to the place where I'm now - and I'm at a fucking good place right now - and when I see that Leo goes off in a direction I am not interested anymore I might stop listening to his videos - although I cannot think of a scenario how this shall happen because it just gets more interesting for me - but even if that happens I simply cannot deny where these people brought me already and that's basically why I keep my mouth shut and respect their journey. Cheers

Totally.

Leo does present - in these days - lots of realizations that come from the fact that you remove a lot of garbage from your perception, raise your awareness and suddenly see how certain things work + he introduces techniques how one can make this happen. And how I see it personally he can just present a very tiny subset of these realizations and patterns in life because there are in the end just way too many to draw a conclusive picture. So yeah, you can master all of these different subjects. It's more of an increase of awareness that then leads to the seeing of how stuff works that then automatically and/or by conscious will lets go of the unnecessarily shit we busy ourselves with. Here I'm talking of course about the higher psychological principals the talks about.. not about the "How-To's" he started his channel with.

Well, I'll give it a shot. The very energy / flow / changing form that birthed this angry soul into life, has now complicated itself so much that it built a thing called brain with which it could model the world it perceives and because of this limited model now goes out and argues for it. It's the same with every one of us. He just seems to be very ambitious about how the world works in his head. But it doesn't explains or can ever argue with a) the still moment in which this guy is talking and b) the ever-changing flow that appears in that still moment. Because it comes before all that. Before all the argumentation and interpretation. It comes before his own appearance. And it seems to liken the play called "What if.. I weren't God?". You can see that all over the world and it's a funny game. People go very far out for it. But I gotta give 'im some credit for criticizing new age. I personally - gut feeling personally - don't like a lot of new age as well. I needed weeks before I could watch the first Matt Khan video and it blew my mind. I don't have many new age resources except him though and I think they did a very bad mistake: They talk and conceptualize too much about it. They model it too much. And this is not bad in and of itself, it's normal that we humans do that. But it makes them attackable. That's why you won't hear so many people standing up against Zen (I'm huge Zen addict..). Because they don't talk about it. And if they do, it's like a secret language. You need months, years and decades to really understand what they mean. And they don't have many books. A few and even they are hard to read. And I think that's their advantage. And for me personally, when somebody who doesn't know me asks what my whole meditation is about I like to say: "It's about sitting." Then they give you funny look and stop asking. But yeah basically, what we are talking here about is not religion, or you might say "true religion" in a new sense of the word. Nothing you can ever fathom with words. As we try it, we fail, discuss about words and meanings and it always slips through the fingers. That's why you sit silently, until nobody is talking no more and you suddenly realize that the thing that is doing the talking is the same that makes the birds fly and is the same that makes a wall a wall. So you'll laugh because you suddenly see that every game you every played, every conflict that exists, every duality that we encounter is God playing with itself because it's so much fun to pretend.

With no doubt the one and only Shunryu Suzuki. He gives all the secrets away, it's too good ...

Funnily, you just get this attitude after you had some awakenings. At least this is how it seems to me. In beforehand enlightenment was the most important, serious thing to seek. When it comes down on you, you lose your entire "spiritual persona". All your "I meditate for x years"-beliefs, all your "I had these kind of experiences"-beliefs just drop, because seeking disappeared. For me seeking disappeared even before the shit hit the fan and was really necessarily to get it down. When you want it too bad and then see that there's really nothing you can do and thoroughly give up, it'll come and you'll laugh your ass off silly. It is that not serious. It is God / it / Tao / ... playing the most funny game with you that could be played. You play it with your self and you directed it all of the time. It's that nice. So, very important point to mention. Or at least very helpful to consider. @Rali Good seeing you around here, I wondered how long it would took. I hope for some spiritual warfare in the future or least some fun discusses. Have a good one! Cheers

Very important subject. I underestimated how bad the journey will fuck in the beginning and went through a very rude awakening. In the end I was lucky to have such a phase because it was simply too much for my head so it had to reorganize at a higher understanding, but in retrospect I would argue that there are a damn lot of people who just can not stand this and will end up in therapy or even worse in a mental hospital because they don't know whats happening. Seems dramatic, is really just an understatement of how crazy it can get. How will you react when you are still rooted in a false self when you experience how you have no free will, how you have no control over thoughts and actions, how your whole world view collapses. Will you embrace it and dive into it or will you go crazy. I would suggest that a good handful of people will at first go crazy and then if they're lucky and wise can shift that into awakening. But you really gotta be wise to see through all that.

Every Zen / Taoism talk from Alan Watts on YouTube. Probably also his books. He is very enjoyable to read. I got all my intuition knowledge from him. It's insanely inspiring.

And here, I see just another time God taking the form of a suffering human being that persists in the illusion that the world isn't perfect as it is. That pain and suffering are really bad and need to be diminished. That the killing of innocent animals is any different from a wonderful flower growing in peace. It isn't. It's a fucking game and as long as you take any of it seriously, you'll fight for one side or the other. When you stop engaging in it seriously and just look curiously how it can be that there is such an amount of beauty on the one hand and such an amount of suffering on the other, you'll find out that God aka it / Tao / nothingness / ... needs and wants to express any limitation there could be because it is so infinite, peaceful and complete in its non-dualistic essence. Every dualistic game there is is just the counterpart of the non-dual bliss out of everything arises. See that, and you'll laugh yourself silly. Cheers (...and don't take my rant here to personally, I'm merely having fun with my very limited opinions - you are of course right that we humans are all to bad killing these innocent animals and eating their fucking delicious meat on 3 occasions in the day not giving a shit at all ... fuck I did it again )

"When I'm not at work, I'm not stressed or bored." "When I'm not being insulted, I don't feel bad or wrong." What do all of these hold in common? They blame the suffering on the phenomenon, not on the internal process that is occurring inside of you that is actually responsible for the created suffering. With that attitude you'll try to calm your mind for the rest of eternity, with very little progress (because trying to calm your mind is the least effective thing you could do to attain a calm mind). What you could to be effective then is this: When you suffer because of thinking / emotions, go right to the cause of what is fucking you: the thinking or the emotion. Localize it. Where is it? Maybe in your head if it's thoughts or in your abdomen if it's fear. Then go to the localized sensation of "not feeling good" and hold your attention on it. While doing that, be curious. Be curious why this sensation makes you feel bad. Be curious how it can do that actually. Isn't it weired, that just out of a sensation like a contraction or pictures / voices in your head can arise a feeling of being unwell. What actually makes this sensation into something that you don't like. When you think you got it, go deeper. When you think it's the contraction in your abdomen that makes you feel fear, ask: But why is contraction generally bad. Why is contraction bad and feeling light good? Why is that. Then go deeper into the contraction. Go as deep as you can and stay curious. You'll eventually find that all suffering is an illusion you put on yourself and can only be held up if you look at it without much attention, suffer from it subconsciously and don't investigate it. If you do, it will just go. Don't try to get rid of the phenomenon like having thoughts or emotions. Understand what they do inside you. The deeper I dip into non-duality on a permanent day-to-day basis, the more thoughts vanish automatically and only a few very inspiring or fun ones remain. Most thoughts go after you've unlocked them. But I never asked them to. They just leave because they not longer are needed. And I'm now at a place at which I find it highly interesting and inspiring to have a thought. The phenomenon itself is very mystical. It's like being sucked into a dream that comes out of nothing, has its time and then leaves. Same with emotions. When I have a negative emotion these days I'm thrilled by the power it carries, by the way it makes me react, by the thoughts it stimulates. It's really like being in cinema. You come to this point when you get intimate with all of these, not by pushing them away or denying them. I personally know that this is hard when you're fucked up, trust me. I had my head screaming at me for 4 months this year plus my body fucking me up with every kind of emotion it had. And how did I get out of that? By letting it be okay, feeling sorry for my shadow that it has to to that and by being interested in it. Cheers

With mindfulness and meditation in general it's very weired in the beginning because you don't really know whether you are doing it right or how it's supposed to feel. Well, it'll feel every kind of way you can and can't imagine along the journey, so that at some point you stop asking this question. There'll be times at which it will feel very tensed in your body and especially your head and it seems like you really have to make an effort just to sit. There'll be times at which you just sit and everything happens automatically. This'll ping pong in cycles for some time and you'll be introduced to deeper and deeper levels of this throughout. So just keep on the show and watch. Everything that happens is just fine. One secret I wanna give away though is this: You probably try right now to always look that you don't lose your attention and that's what makes you so tensed right now. Cuz you wanna be mindful, right? Well, it'll take some time but at some point you'll realize that the holding of attention and trying to not get in thought stories is itself just a thought or let's say a game you play with yourself. So what you could do you eliminate a lot of suffering is simply sit and when nothing is on your mind recognize that. Simply be aware that you are empty right now. You are anyway. Don't try to hold it or try to not have thoughts. Simply recognize that you are empty. As soon as another thought story comes up and catches you, you'll automatically lose your awareness and go through the thoughts. At some point you'll get aware again that there are thoughts. When this happens simply be aware again that you are empty and conscious. And this will happen dozen of times. Don't try to not lose awareness or to not have thoughts. This is still neurotic because you think you could decide what happens next. Well, you can't and you'll find that out throughout the practice. That's why you are aware and conscious when you are being given the moment for that and you are lost in fairytale when that is happening. Take it as it comes and you'll have a wonderful practice. Cheers

Nice to see another Psychonaut going the path here. Keep posting, I'm very interested. When you snort the MeO, snort it with the least amount of energy up your nostril (so that it stays there). Put a finger on the nostril opening, do the other one, keep a finger on that one and then tilt your head upside down and massage it into your nostrils. For me, with this technique, I begin to get heavy effects 3-5 minutes after I do that, with nothing even remotely running down my throat. I wanted to take my next dose a few days ago, but I'm a little sick right now. So I gotta wait until next weekend. I'm thrilled.

The one and only thing I have learned from Matt Khan and from nobody else - as a matter of fact everybody else teaches you the exact opposite and that's why self-help never really works fast and good - is: All your weaknesses, all your negative emotions, all your limitations are not the devil trying to make your life shitty and neurotic. They are the coping mechanisms of your lower self (your inner child / your unconscious) that built up while it was trying to handle all the situations in which you were mentally attacked. And even when your mother told you that you can't have that toy you were mentally attacked, because you had to face a situation that was not according to how your ego likes to have it. Over the time we all built frameworks, interpretations and mechanisms to work with misery and out of that comes something like: feeling fear, anger, doing stupid stuff when you are afraid, having compulsive thoughts ... Now, this in its essence is a neurosis that built up over time and that you can just get rid of if you learn how deal with negative emotions and events, see what they really are and change your internal processes. And easiest way to do so (like Matt suggests) is to be sorry for your lower self that it has to do all these neurotic things to deal with negativity. In that way you get access to it, it'll feel safer and the neurosis will begin to melt away. And that's what you ultimately want. You want to reconnect with all of yourself, not just the things you like about you. So, to start with that integration treat your lower self like a five year old in pain. Not like your ex that fucked your best man. When you really get that, things will change really quickly. At least they did for me. Cheers

To really mean it. Picture this: If you walk the Rocky Mountains and fall off them and one of your buddies catches you in the last sec, that kind of gratefulness you'll have then is really authentic.

All this work we do, all the contemplating and meditating and all the frameworks we spin around it, all this does is putting every experience including fear into its proper position. As long as you are a human being you'll have fear, love, boredom, wisdom, overwhelm ... as an experience, just because life happens to be that way. What can change though is the way you internalize these experiences. Right now you're maybe very afraid of fear and negative emotions. You might be wired to do everything to get around it. But why is that? What is it that makes fear such an unwanted thing? Is it the experience itself, the blast of intensity that it carries? Is it the way your mind makes it into this huge ball of thoughts, emotional reactions and triggers? Find that out. Make it clear to yourself what this is and why you are trying to get away from it. When you've decluttered all the mayor emotions and triggers that make up your individual self and you know it intimately, things will fall into place. And you'll come out at place at which fear will blast at you and you have a smile on your face and say: "God, what a show. What a beautiful show."

Yeah, but don't forget that it's not your conscious decision to bombard yourself with all that. You basically have to completely re-evaluate all of your programmings, the whole society, how nature works and how you stand in relationship to all that to really see that everything is okay and there is nothing to be worried about. And you come from a position in which you are completely lost and every earthly attempt to get out of that gets you even more lost. So it's a twisted game.

Stop believing your own story. You seem to take your issues extremely serious and there is probably this big fear in the back of your mind that ... what if this whole thing called your life doesn't play out? What if? What if you lose? Well, I have a suggestion. It's a fun one, so listen. And I'll guarantee that if you do that, you'll hugely transform. Every morning - starting tomorrow - the first thing you do after you wake up is go down on your knees, bowing to the sky and talking to yourself innerly: "I'm grateful for [...]" and in these brackets you put every issue you listed above, your whole nightmare story. You say that you are grateful that you have the time, energy, the life and the power to be completely lost in this fairytale. It would be kind of good if you reach tears at some point of your practice to really get into the attitude, here. I'm not kidding. Read further. In addition to that every time in the day when your negative thoughts and emotions come up and you can remember what I'm about to tell you, you do this: You say to yourself (as well on the inside - don't be a psychopath talking to yourself out loud when people are around ) that you just cant fathom how masterful you are in spinning the worst kind of nightmares and creating the most painful kind of life scenarios. Be astounded how good you are at this. Astounded like you saw one of your buddies hovering in front of you out of nothing. That kind I mean. Now, I'm not joking here at all. I'll guarantee that if you start doing that - starting tomorrow - and you make little notes in your calendar, or your mirror or wherever that remind you of doing that, that you'll lose most of your negative thought chains, your emotions will come down and you'll eventually achieve what you want to do. And all of this much faster then if you would started meditating today, read 20 self help books, become addicted to that crap like the rest of us and spend your life doing nothing else then researching that shit. Guys, don't take me to seriously with that one, I'm having fun here. But the essence is this: You desperately believe that the story you tell yourself is real. And what I just offered you is the fastest and most direct way to show you that whatever you tell yourself is a story and not reality. And by working with my story the other one will automatically melt and you come out somewhere in the middle, being pretty grounded. Have a good one!

Be careful. You get a weak idea here. Just because external objects, purposes and whatsoever will not give you the fulfillment you project onto them, doesn't mean they aren't fun to play with. Your whole life, everything you do is like a dream in which you can do whatever you want. You can get completely lost and play the most far out games that there are, and if you look at society it is perfect at doing this. It is completely lost. What we say with this whole enlightenment crap is simply: To the people who really are interested in why they're never really happy, why life can be such a drag or what this is all about.. there is a way to find that out and there is a recognition inside of you that can take place and then you see for yourself who you really are. So to those, who'd like that, go do it. But that doesn't mean that this wonderful playing ground called earth is useless and sick. It is what is, and that's fine. Have fun with it while knowing who you are and it'll be a fun ride.

Yeah, you do it right. But I'd suggest not meditating more then 20 minutes in the first 3 months if you wanna do it consistently for the rest of your life. If you try to go for a hour right in the beginning, you'll quit in about a month. Be assured. Start slow and then increase the time as the habit is rooted in your daily routine. There is no race you can win here by over-doing it in the beginning. You'll just lose motivation.

@Psychonaut Could you throw some into my apartment, please? This is way too epic.