BipolarGrowth

Yeah… that Buddha guy wasn’t very awake.

I just said to be careful not to make an assumption. That’s all. I was just trying to give you an answer.

Just adding from my experience: sitting meditation and following rules is “for the birds” as they say. Maybe you need it for now to build a good foundation, but effective meditation can be done in any pose or while doing or not doing anything. Most of the time I just lay the fuck down, listen to some good music or a Frank Yang video, and directly investigate the sensations which arise (vipassana). Sometimes the sensations which arise are self-inquiry, do nothing meditation, crazy exalted states of consciousness, w/e. Just investigate. Frank Yang says vipassana means to penetrate and see clearly. Daniel Ingram and others emphasize focusing on the three characteristics (no self, dukkha, impermanence) within the sensations as being vipassana. They’re ultimately the same thing, but starting with the three characteristics as a foundation taught me how to do vipassana effectively. When you’re doing any meditation well, you should have access to a ridiculous amount of energy. This might be a settled/peaceful energy, but you’re not going to fall asleep unless you’re a Navy Seal at the end of Hell Week and sleep deprived to all hell. None of this advice might be right for you right now, but at a certain point, freeing yourself from traditionally stressed ideas of the “shoulds” and “should nots” of meditation can be incredibly beneficial. You cannot embody things to the level of Realization (permanent baseline consciousness shifts) with any ease if you are running against your intuition and nature. You deviate from the Tao when you try too hard to align with it as one old master said (forget who). You can pound your head forcefully into the concrete in 10,000 hours of meditation against your True Nature and get somewhere, or you could just let yourself flow as the Nature/Tao you are authentically. In truth, you never can change anything at all, ever. You’re on a rollercoaster ride rather than driving a car wherever you want, and somehow, the sensations of choice are an integral part of that Natural, infinitely linked chain of causation happening only right here, right now. Good luck. Godspeed. And remember to enjoy the ride ??

No, it’s not. It’s an assumption from direct experience of the Absolute based on the way you’re presenting yourself here plus his experience of dealing with many people on this path. He could be totally wrong in his assumption, but I wouldn’t be too quick to assume you’re the one with the better judgment of the situation either. Ultimately, it makes zero difference if he’s right or wrong on that assumption or where it came from when it comes to how you should move forward. Do the work to the best of your ability, and I hope you prove him wrong.

Psychedelics are just making you see things more compassionately. There’s nothing wrong with eating meat, but it certainly is a phase of moral growth to notice you’re having these feelings. A plant-based diet done right can be really healthy for yourself and good for the planet, but eventually you’ll see that it is okay to go against that limitation if you want. It’s just personal preference. I’ve been vegan/vegetarian a number of times. It’s overall really great, even spiritually, but if it’s unsustainable for you or causes too much suffering to you, you’d better serve the world to remove the excess stress the diet can sometimes cause and focus on awakening to Love and Emptiness directly. If eating that way is congruent with who you are, by all means continue that great decision. If it limits you too much and makes your life worse, consider that this itself could perpetuate more suffering in the world than just eating meat. We are part of nature. Part of it is death. Part of it is suffering. Part of it is survival of the fittest. Part of it is compassion for animals. Just be natural man. However that looks for you.

Here are higher insights put into words. I have verified the majority of what Frank speaks of here in my own direct experience, not as a temporary experience but also as Realization/permanent shifts in consciousness. It’s easy to discount things Frank says from below/lower perspective/lower insight. Be careful of that trap. It’ll hold you back from what you truly want. I also would love to hear deeper insights from Leo. It seems like he is more focused on lower teachings for now though which are more helpful to the majority of people. It is really cumbersome and difficult to communicate things like what Leo experiences, and I totally don’t blame him for focusing efforts elsewhere. It’s probably a wise move for his life purpose. At a certain point, talking about the peaks of one’s awakenings can be a less effective way to teach as no one is even close to understanding them and language limitations/projection keep the message from actually being received.

Pretty good quote. Most people never reach neither existence nor nonexistence. It is essentially the core of Mahayana Buddhism’s Two Truths though. It comes to anyone who experiences Self/God then applies proper discernment and reaches the collapse/annihilation of experience (cessation/Nibbana) then applies proper discernment to that as well. The missing part is applying proper discernment. Most people treat God as an ultimate ground of reality. Less people treat Nibbana as an ultimate ground of reality. Even less people see the inherent impermanence and lack of inherent existence of both God and Nibbana. Tao is probably the most accurate common word related to what comes after, but some choose to still use God/Nibbana/Self/No Self/etc. to describe it although these words are problematic as so many others use these words with a lower level of understanding. Beyond Tao is ________ as the most complete word to describe this. Here’s a pointer for anyone interested: Neither _________ nor _________ but always ________. Sit with that for a while and watch your mind and emotions to see how they react to it compared to “God” or whatever ultimate word you want to use. It’s not about filling in the blanks. It’s about seeing the blanks are are already full with emptiness. As the Buddha said, all the Dharma is empty. It seems like David probably has some strong experience of the territory to be able to put a writing like that together. I hope he’s gotten to the Realization phase to lock it in his direct experience permanently.

Why is it effortless to breathe air but hard to breathe iron? Because there are conditions of existence/experience currently in place. Bending those conditions becomes harder and harder. The question of a bearded God in the clouds isn’t even a question. Numerous people have experienced that vision of God. It’s just a projection/misunderstanding though to think a single thing, being, image, etc. is God. The experience itself is as valid as eating toast. One is just more rare. All are equally actual when the experience occurs. It’s just as true to say everything is real as saying everything is imaginary. Both miss the point. “Everything is ______” is better. “_________ is _________” is even better than that. More importantly is just ___________. This spaghetti monster question is mostly mental masturbation which is fine if that’s what you want for yourself, but I imagine you want more than that, at least I would hope. It’s not even that it’s a “bad” question. It’s just that this line of inquiry is far less reliable for getting you to the understanding of Reality than many others.

Well, for example, gravity is just a mental impression lol. You can be “weightless” 24/7 if you understand the nature of sensations and perception in your waking, sober life. Removing the illusion of gravity altogether is far more radical than being in zero gravity in a scientifically measurable way as an ego who believes gravity is real. Even the laws of physics you think are real are much more bullshit than you’d believe. The laws of physics to reality are like currency is to value. Arbitrary overlay on top of bare sensations. Remove the overlay, and you’ll see it was way different underneath than you could’ve previously imagined. It works somewhat similar in practice/theory to Leo’s older video “Brains don’t exist”, but it’s quite more radical of a shift and harder to break the illusion.

It can be done either way.

It’s possible to have just as direct experience of a Flying Spaghetti Monster as New York City if you focused on that goal long enough in your life and psychedelics/other methods. A lot of what psychedelics do is confirm what you’re already focused on, believe, etc. The thing is that no one gives a enough of a shit to do that with the Flying Spaghetti Monster lol.

Suffering is definitely a strong teacher and creation of energy and motivation on the path.

@aetheroar to stabilize the realization, I think the best thing to do is just more vipassana, more direct investigation of sensations wherever they arise. Do vipassana on your brain/head space that the realization came from. You might find that you still have some tiny and hard to find solidity left there that you think is fully gone. If you find nothing, that’s great, but if you find more solidity, that’s even better. It means you caught yourself thinking it was gone which is going to be what really locks it in for good. If you accidentally feel like the solidity is gone too early, it can put a pause on your progress in that direction.

Leo > Daniel Ingram > Frank Yang Doing vipassana while listening to/watching Frank’s content is like a high dose psychedelic pinpointed at enlightenment Realizations (permanent baseline consciousness shifts). Very powerful stuff. He seems to have really gotten something at a depth I’m not finding elsewhere. Krishna & Buddha had the biggest impact as far as historical teachers go.

This seems like the conversation has just turned into a dumpster fire lol…

I don’t have fear of death on any type of existential/spiritual level. Pain is still unpleasant for the body due to the way it is conditioned to work. At super high levels of development, you can certainly withstand more pain than before because the suffering is not attached to it, but the body reacts to pain on its own. Trying to eradicate pain is a bit of a fool’s errand IMO. The Buddha taught about suffering, not pain. Much of the middle way is about the fact that ascetic disciplines focused on experiencing pain don’t work to become enlightened, at least for the vast majority compared to a more balanced approach.

Yep. Avoidance of pain has nothing to do with losing or not losing the fear of death really.

I got to stream entry/cessation with psychedelics as one of my main tools/methods. They help me to progress even past stream entry. Regardless, I’m a huge outlier. Daniel Ingram, whose book taught Frank much of what he knows, supposedly said something like 1/1000 people get stream entry through psychedelics as their primary method according to my friend who has spoken with Daniel directly on coaching calls. Psychedelics usually just send people into an early stage of the progress of insight over and over again unless they send them into Dark Night of the Soul territory which is actually further along in the map surprisingly. Too many God Consciousness experiences (almost always occurring in the Arising & Passing Away stage) without progressing through the other stages is mostly like spinning your wheels or prolonging the process if your goal is permanent baseline shifts. Read about the stages here. https://www.mctb.org/mctb2/table-of-contents/part-iv-insight/30-the-progress-of-insight/

Just watch this… best thing I’ve found yet.

This is beautiful! It sounds quite close to what I’ve been doing which is basically delta 8/delta 10 THC vaped then putting on Frank Yang coaching calls and using vipassana/do nothing as I literally automatically meditate effortlessly the entire time. I stumbled on this entirely intuitively a bit like you mentioned. It’s been giving me huge shifts which last on into the future. Everything accessed in those states is more or less accessible at all times. Even saying accessible is a bit funny when there’s viscerally felt to be no self there to try to access anything. Here’s my favorite video I like to meditate to of his. I think you’ll really enjoy it as you’re already in the territory of what he’s talking about.

Congrats! Whatever it was, it sounds quite significant to your path. You wouldn’t equate it to these attainments/rarefied states if it wasn’t a big moment. Did you “experience” cessation/Fruition? This comes about half a second or so after change in lineage when you first attain stream entry. Examining if there was cessation is the most phenomenologically-sound way to know if change of lineage or stream entry occurred. This is the best possibility out of all the things you suspect happened. It’s okay to feel good about yourself with such a thing. I can almost guarantee you that anyone who got there and realized what happened felt that to some degree no matter how anti-celebratory their tradition might be of attainments. From Mastering the Core Teaching of the Buddha 2nd Edition/Version: “Fruition (phala in Pali) is the fruit of all the meditator’s hard work, the first attainment of ultimate reality, emptiness, nirvana, nibbana, ultimate potential, or whatever extrapolative and relatively inaccurate name you wish to call something utterly non-sensate. In this non-state, there is absolutely no time, no space, no reference point, no experience, no mind, no consciousness, no awareness, no background, no foreground, no nothingness, no somethingness, no body, no this, no that, no unity, no duality, and no anything else. “Reality” stops cold and then reappears.“ The advice depends quite a bit on what you actually got to. These terms mean many different things: “boundless consciousness, "true self", nothingness, void, radiant unity, one-ness, the Buddha smile, and "Change of Lineage".” Samadhi is another different thing. Stream entry is another different thing. My best recommendation is to continue spiritual practice as you normally do but also read into the phenomenology of these different things so you can know more definitely where you’re at. Being clear where you are at can really impact growth in profound ways. It also has an amazing ego-burning rubber band effect as you find out how great of progress you actually made vs. examining yourself honestly to see how hard you *potentially* overestimated things. Either way, good understanding of the specifics of all of these states/attainments will help you a lot as you move forward. I’d be happy to discuss this stuff with you in detail if you wish. My first cessations occurred on 5-28-2021, and I have spent a lot of time developing an increasingly deep understanding and visceral experience of most of the terms you are thinking might have been “it.” Just send me a PM if interested. I can give much more specific instructions if we nail down exactly what happened.

I laughed while reading this. Not because of a lack of empathy or disconnection from what you’re going through but because I was there SO MANY times. I was laughing because it’s just like I was reading essentially a post which just as well could’ve been made by myself in the past. I didn’t realize earlier on that the depression/disconnection/nihilism is PROGRESS. You’re actually kicking ass right now. It is actually in many cases more evident of progress to be where you’re at than experiencing God Consciousness over and over is. You’re in the Dark Night of the Soul stages of insight right now (everything after the Arising & Passing Away and before Equanimity on the graph — don’t mind the y axis here — the x axis is the important part). Why I say this is progress is simply because you are further/later along the progress of insight map. You’ll cycle through this process many times on the path. At some point, you can finally get yourself into a deep and high equanimity step where cessation/the first taste of Nirvana is possible. The best thing to do right now is to continue practicing. Do whatever is your thing — meditation, yoga, etc. The Dark Night stages come inherently with nihilism, loss of confidence in the way the process is going, and usually less motivation to practice. If you can manage to keep your chin up (as much as you reasonably can — no need to guilt yourself) and practice to the best of your ability in these often incredibly difficult stages, you have a good chance to move through these suffering-filled stages more quickly and reach Equanimity which will not only feel amazing, peaceful, refreshing, and recharging but will give you a much greater probability of really gaining traction on the path to further progress. The posts here and Actualized content in general can give the impression that moving to these temporary yet profound Arising & Passing Away experiences (most “God Consciousness” experiences fall under the umbrella of the A&P) are the pinnacle of pinnacles. That’s not to say there’s anything fundamentally wrong with the teachings or engagement here. That impression though is what keeps many people away from more rapidly reaching the more lasting peace, happiness, and permanent/radical baseline consciousness shifts that you are really seeking at your core. God Consciousness before having those permanent shifts is weak sauce compared to the God Consciousness experiences and even far more profound/mind-blowing things that can come after the permanent shifts start locking in. I cannot recommend enough that you take a look at this book which is completely free online and a bit of a masterpiece of practical spiritual information and familiarize yourself with the progress of insight map therein. Vipassana meditation (focused on the three characteristics of no self, dukkha, and impermanence) as it is described in this book can really help to break through the especially sticky phases of the Dark Night. https://www.mctb.org/mctb2/table-of-contents/part-iv-insight/30-the-progress-of-insight/ How to Escape the Dark Night of the Soul With Love and Faith in your ability and progress ❤️??, Brandon Rohe

Yep, dependent origination. The fly on your wall is also in the equation of whether you eat pizza or rice, and this has nothing to do with the fly somehow affecting desire more than other aspects of existence. Everything is the reason for everything. Desire is just something which seems like more of a central or direct cause than the other things.

Stop the fight, and see the Light. ❤️??

Fear only persists through mental boundaries. When boundaries dissolve, fear cannot persist in the same threatening way, even if the sensations of fear are still present. They aren’t “fear” anymore.