BipolarGrowth

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.

You’d see it differently if you were me, but there’s nothing wrong with your interpretation either.

@ivankiss the love is what makes it enjoyable, mostly in retrospect. It can be enjoyed in the moment it occurs as well though, but that’s kind of an “advanced” thing which I definitely can’t do in all cases it appears.

This happened about 48 hours ago or so. It’s easy for things like this to come and go, so we’ll see if it ends up having the staying power it appears to have. The process by which I discovered this for myself is about as simple as 1, 2, 3 for me as soon as I discovered it, so I’m a bit doubtful it’s something I’ll lose access to. If anything it will just fall into the background of my experience rather than actually go away I imagine. Anyway, this is what it’s like: the feeling of gravity as a thing pulling down on everything has disappeared everything, including the body, is felt to float where it is. Instant stress reducer. How mad can you get when all phenomena are “floating” in emptiness? rather than having concepts of there being no ground to reality or thing behind the scenes of what is perceived, this becomes a visceral process. Viscerally felt — this is IT baby ? the space within objects, bodies, etc. is emptiness. Not even space is felt to be there Mental impressions of the body, objects, visual field, etc. are removed, and only what is in front of you remains. This includes what some call “the dropping away of the body” which is when the mental impression of the body disappears and only the sensations present are felt to be real/present. The way I discovered this was by investigating the phenomenon of “dropping away of the body.” You can probably find more info online about that if you want. After examining this in a sensate way, it was realized that the visual field pointing to something other than emptiness within the body (such as seeing a leg in front of me yet the mental impression already being removed and no sensations being present there) also can be applied to all visual phenomena as the entire field is fitting that same criteria the leg was. After that realization, the effects I described above have been continuous. Vipassana experience or other ways of directly investigating sensations is probably a prerequisite of getting results using the specific way I came to this realization if I had to guess.

After a couple hours of some of the deepest meditation of my life, I had the intuition to pick up the book Sikh Gurus last night and opened it to a random page. I really felt the beautiful nature of this journey (life, existence, spirituality) while reading it. I read that page in the video and then go on to talk some on the relationship between some Buddhism-inspired views and God from my perspective. Enjoy ?

Finding a way to reduce your probability of running into such large emotional pain again is probably one of the best things you could work on. Work to remove the trigger and you won’t feel such a strong need to use it again. It’s hard work to remove that specific trigger, but it can be done. If you’re at a loss for how to work on handling the emotional pain, feel free to send a PM, and I can give some advice.

Been there enough times I’ve lost count. You can overcome these struggles. I hope you have some luck come your way ❤️

He’s advocated for/preferred synthetic from what I remember. Watch this. No need to fuck up some toads for unpredictable dosages.

Put on some headphones and enjoy. Worked wonders for me. Pretty related to what you’re talking about.

Sounds like cessation without the appetizer ?

Lol pretty entertaining for us nerds.

All of this is good and very much the case as you describe. I hope what I’ve written below helps you. I’ve seen it do some wonders for myself. Thoughts are Absolute Truth, but if you’re thinking that thoughts are Absolute Truth, you’re probably straying a bit from Absolute Truth. What does this mean? Thoughts are sensations. The mind is the sixth sense door. If you see thoughts as an enemy forever, you will be giving away your peace. It’s like thinking that there’s something wrong with your arm getting an itch. No! The sensation is not the issue. The bundle of sensations which hijack the universe to claim ownership are the issue. BUT seeing through that bundle of sensations (“ego”) deep enough will uncover that there’s actually nothing wrong with it either. What people seeking Liberation really want (whether they know it or not) is to fuse the six sense doors into the One Sense Door. Ego causes resistance, but resisting the ego… well… I think you guys get the idea ? Allow yourself to operate as a machine of natural resistances. Sensations bounce off of each other like billiard balls. The sensations resist each other to cause further movement in sensations (if we’re speaking of a process which relies on continuity — not the whole answer, but okay as a stepping stone). That’s always what’s going on from the perspective of there being a continuity to things. The trick in all of this is to find a way to reduce the meta-resistance which is “ego” caused or rather “ego” itself. By the time you try to act in a more spiritual way, a more present way, or any similar action/motivation, you’re acting on the past. You and you are already powerless to change anything in a certain sense. Free will is a tool of the meta-resistance. Nothing wrong with it, but if you want more direct and continuous experience of Yourself, let the whole machine do itself. Krishna describes some of what I’ve mentioned as the modes of material existence. They’ll do themselves when it is necessary. Do not fear, you can take your hands of the controls, and yourself and Yourself will witness the alignment and synchronization of true power. This is the Tao. Let the Nature/nature of things occur exactly as it is destined. I’m quite confident you’ll fall in Love/love.

This is all great stuff. I agree especially with the intuitive approach. I think proper meditation is way more individualized than any of the major schools or teachers I’ve seen tend to present it. I also think it can be beneficial to your meditation to spend more resources on growing spiritually with other methods at certain points. This is of course just what worked for me, but I see that it could really help a lot of others who naturally struggle with long sits or structured meditation practice. There is the trap that people can forget that liberation is ultimately the goal and that you can hardly get there without optimizing some type of meditation or meditation-like practice. Eventually you have to move from the other methods back to meditation. Meditation was one of the smallest aspects of what got me to reach cessation. Now it’s supercharged by the permanent shifts which cessation triggered. I’m quite confident that I would be much worse off if I tried to follow the advice to meditate a bunch at the beginning. There was just too much resistance. I have too desirous of a personality which has never been high in discipline when things are optional. I certainly did meditate some with mainly meditation in the Heartfulness tradition which utilizes transmission. I’d recommend trying some meditation with transmission with a teacher/guru if you can find someone good. It did seem to be rather effective on me even at beginner stages. Heartfulness also meditates on the heart chakra. I think meditating on chakras can be really powerful, especially if you feel activity in that chakra already. I’ve felt a lot of activity in the third eye area lately which proved to be a great focus object for a shamatha style approach. Using past insights can be a good way to boost meditation. For example, if you’ve had some deep insight into emptiness, you can bring up the memory and work with it a bit to put you in a similar place although it’s more artificially constructed. The point is just to put you in more connection with that space before you start the meditation or maybe a bit at the beginning of the sit. Then just do your normal thing. Using the memories of deep love awakening or similar positive things can be a great way to set a really receptive emotional state to do things probably more on the shamatha side. Do you want to share what helped you transition into the ability to do longer sits? I’ve not been to a retreat yet. I’d love to go, but I’m not sure if I’m ready to meditate as much in one condensed period as what you’d see in a typical 10 day retreat for example. I also have found vipassana and do nothing to be the best. If you want, you can try switching between the two at potentially a bit of a rapid rate in the same sit. I find that going from the contraction of vipassana to the expansion of do nothing together can make both add to the effectiveness of the other.

Hitting the single sense door is great. Meditation is absolutely effortless at that point, and everything is meditation at that point. I really got into the one sense door last night while listening to Frank Yang coaching calls and doing vipassana on the visual field while staring at a bright light. The vipassana just kind of did itself and expanded to what felt like everything. Cool shit for sure.

What is your best advice on using proper meditation technique? What do you suggest? Sit in silence & do nothing technique? Vipassana? Etc?

Here’s something I had in my notes about it: Authenticity is the highest spiritual teaching. Literally just be yourself fully, and God will reward you for that courage. No one has full insight into your direct, personal experience but you. There are no other masters of your individual True Nature.

The whole “subjective” experience awakens. What makes you think the collapse doesn’t lead you right back to where you were at the time of the collapse? You can experience the collapse for yourself, but no one can experience the destination for that which has collapsed because it is not a destination. And such is the nature of the natureless. Such is Nibbana.

This “continuity” is an even greater mystery. What makes continuity occur? No one knows, and the one who knows is almost certainly no one.