BipolarGrowth

One of the earliest large-scale use of the term New Age came from The New Age Magazine which was made by the Scottish Rite of Freemasonry. A number of the most prominent Freemasons wrote many times about Lucifer being the path to the light in books which were most of the time released in private and only available to high-ranking Freemasons that have now been discovered by people not involved with Freemasonry after many years.

A map of the Grand Canyon is not the Grand Canyon, but it can certainly make being at the Grand Canyon more enjoyable, safe, and easy. The same goes for consciousness work. People do so much to get away from thought, but once you become proficient at being with being, you can see that thought does not have to make anything worse. You can be as present with thoughts as you are without them, but this does take some development.

Friendship.

My experience with salvia was very positive, and it showed me a window into sensations I’ve not found through any other technique or substance. It is not a horror trip for everyone. It is radically different than normal experience and quite different from many psychedelics. Some people find value in this. Others find large resistance to it. I wouldn’t be so quick to push someone away from something they are drawn to.

Consciousness work can certainly change vision as well as plenty of other things. I’ve not been able to do the things you describe at will like you, but I’ve certainly had some strange visual changes at times. Nothing about this sounds like psychosis. Explore it and see if you can improve the ability. In time, this ability will likely become less important to you even if it is fantastic now. You will get used to it. Unless it destabilizes your life in some way, there’s nothing to worry about.

I’m confused by your post. What the OP was talking about had nothing to do with Leo’s interactions with women.

Maybe part of the confusion comes from relying too much on Leo’s understanding to fill in for your own.

@Roy yeah I understand the curiosity behind wanting to know why things are the way they are. The issue is that an experience that seems to inform about past reasons for why things are the way they are is highly suspect. Even if you directly experience something which seems to answer this, it still looks like it would be impossible to verify and ultimately be as valid as ideas people have come to just by speculation. The past is also something that really is just happening now, so looking toward a past for answers is already not the best foundation. In the deepest intimacy with the present moment, it’s questionable if you’d even have a body in such a state, so expecting to get answers to deep human questions when not under an illusion of past or future whatsoever seems to be unlikely as everything becomes so Absolute that even if the mind is pondering such questions there is not time to connect one thought to another.

I’d recommend planning to not eat until the end of the trip. Eating and shrooms often don’t mix well with some people. Anything that won’t normally upset your stomach would probably work fine.

That is indeed part of the joke. Congratulations ???

Such is the nature of anicca (impermanence) my friend.

This just in: Leo Gura doubles back on his promotion of heavy metal detoxing after experimenting with the new psychedelic Pu-239 through rectal administration. In his YouTube video released on February 30th, 2022, Gura stated “I’ve accessed a new level of consciousness that no human being has ever reached before after my latest Pu-239 trips.” He went on to warn that the potential of this substance for consciousness work cannot be realized without at least 400 high dose trips and reminded his viewers that they will never reach these states of consciousness and are not awake.

The dose is too high when it causes you to do things that fuck up your life or other people’s lives. It’s not absolutely necessary to go insane on psychedelics, but anyone who does this stuff long enough with high doses will inevitably contact something plenty of people would call madness or insanity if they experienced it themselves. The key is how this affects your life outside of the trip and if you are still insane when off of the psychedelic. Experiencing a ridiculous and intense state in the comfort of your own home is fine as long as you’re up for it. The most intense states of consciousness are more likely to be similar to madness or insanity than they are to be similar to what human beings typically call sane. The human perspective of sane experience is like 0.000001% of what consciousness can do.

@Inliytened1 I’m pretty sure he’s stated before that he doesn’t do psychedelics anymore. What makes you think he’s high? The thread seems pretty level headed to me.

It all boils down to wanting to feel good/satisfied. Getting raped by your 16 year old dad then eaten by a saber tooth tiger later that night doesn’t typically feel good from the human perspective, and ultimately it’s the preferences of one thing over another that drives all avenues of flourishing you described. Why humans have bias to psychedelics or anal sex over being skinned alive is something hard to answer if you’re looking at consciousness or experience itself rather than things like biology which have clear explanations.

Some people can reach states akin to high dose trips without psychedelics or meditation. It can just happen. The likelihood is low for that to happen for 95%+ of people. But meditation can certainly bring you to psychedelic levels of consciousness. Getting to states similar to what is accessed on LSD with meditation is pretty doable. Frank Yang said that he experienced a state 10 times more intense than any psychedelic he’s ever done by meditating on a vipassana retreat, and he’s done 5-MeO before. He still recommends that people use psychedelics if they want to awaken.

Well, when you find Truth, you don’t have to seek what has already been found.

No problem. There can be degrees to form vs. formlessness with the apparent solidity of sensations such as bodily tactile sensations becoming less solid and fixed feeling until they disappear entirely which you might call full formlessness. Even vision and sounds and other senses can also be considered form though. There are points where these can disappear as well, but they seem to indicate a finer degree of formlessness to me when these senses go compared to tactile sensations. Could just be the way things work for me individually though.

This just sounds like some random A&P activity to me. It’s possible that in certain moments of it you could be in formless realm territory. An easy way to tell if it’s formless or not is by asking the question “Can I feel my body?”

You can replace the word dream with experience if this gets your panties in a bunch. It’s the same thing when I use the word. The OP used the word dream, so I matched my language to the context of the thread.

@OneIntoOne there’s certainly some truth to it.

Looks like a decent list. Bhikkhu Candana does a lot of Sutta readings and translations which I find to be really high quality. Here’s his video on the Ānāpānasati Sutta which is probably one of the most important to know:

Well, God can’t control anything either. Control, free will, agency, a sense of self, these are all just clever tricks of an illusion which likes to appear like impermanence does not tick faster than a nanosecond. Not even a single sensation lasts longer than the micro-moment in which it arises. When you can actually feel this, control, free will, agency, and an amalgamation of staggered sensations appearing as a unified self are an amazing punchline to a joke which leaves no room for there to be a person to laugh at it.

Well, if it’s something like anxiety or paranoia, surrendering to these feelings can potentially reduce them as they are ultimately a rejection of what is and accepting what is might counteract some of the severity. If it’s euphoria that is causing one to be psychotic, surrendering to euphoria which is causing one to embrace reality can just lead to more out of control euphoria. In that instance, it is usually best for people to take steps to make them less euphoric by going against the impulses the euphoria is generating, and this is rarely done by the person themselves as their state feels so good that they would not want to resist what it is leading them to do.

If the psychotic break is caused by negative emotion, this might work. If it’s caused by positive emotion, surrendering to it can make things worse in my experience.