BipolarGrowth

This forum is basically a place where I can perform mental masturbation with people who more or less have experience stroking it in similar ways as me. Of course as Leo and actualized.org become more mainstream there will be more beginners coming into the forum.

I think affection for Leo is well deserved. He’s done a lot of good. I think a romantic relationship with Leo is probably quite low in probability. I share much of your love for him. I think it’s more likely that you’ll find someone better for you than things with you and Leo becoming a reality in this lifetime. Who knows? You two might end up in a lifelong partnership, but I would pay more attention to the love you feel for him and why you feel that way toward him. Why do you desire this? Can the beauty you see in Leo also be found in another? At the end of the day your own awakening journey can provide far more than you could ever get out of a human relationship with Leo. I haven’t gone nearly as far into awakening as many others yet, but what I have experienced is certainly beyond what a human relationship could ever be. Find a way to fully unlock the Infinite Love within yourself consistently, and this will certainly result in the highest good for both you and others.

One important function I hope this thread can serve is to show the reality of how more or less serious spiritual practice and psychedelic use affects bipolar disorder. I almost made a post to the Meditation/Spirituality sub-forum warning of the dangers and also describing the advantages and benefits of this specific path, but I ultimately thought it wouldn’t receive the right reception there. It is incredibly important that anyone with a serious case of bipolar disorder (typically this means type 1) knows the risks of not just psychedelics but even simply meditation. Meditation can cause the same types of psychotic breaks as psychedelics can. It’s happened to me and many others. A lot of people here, and in the world as a whole, have a piss-poor understanding of what bipolar disorder is. This even applies to most people who have it and many family members or close friends of people with it. No one generally thinks about the epistemic aspects/implications of “psychosis.” Psychosis is a somewhat flawed concept as you’re basically being judged by how well your current state of consciousness as well as delusions or even legit insights fit within the norms of your culture. In ancient and some more modern indigenous cultures, what Western medicine calls psychosis was treated as a spiritual gift. In many of these cultures it’s highly likely, if not just downright true, that people with “psychotic mental health disorders” were the leading candidates for shamanism. In some of these cases, the “psychotic” shaman was the ONLY person permitted to use psychedelics in the society. This is the absolute opposite of how Western medicine views psychotic mental health disorders and psychedelics. We are ALWAYS seen as the absolute last people on the planet who should ever consume such a substance. Why is that? It fucks our survival up heavily as current modern cultures have no role for the “mentally ill” person who trips themselves into oblivion to bring back insights and even serious psychic or healing powers back to the society of neurotypicals. Watch this video to hear more about this. You're a Shaman - Your Culture Just Sucks One key thing to note is that these shamans were almost always mentored by an older shaman who potentially also had what we today would call severe mental health problems (at least before he served his life purpose and bathed himself in Truth, Love, and psychological growth for years with psychedelics and other practices). What I’m doing is basically walking that path with no guidance from someone with the same set of challenges. This is partially why I’m making this and videos about bipolar disorder and psychedelics. People need to know the path from someone who has done it before they get themselves or others killed. There’s a real risk that psychedelics will kill me. Not in some physical overdose but in me becoming so fucking conscious that I lose ALL care for survival. The other potential for death comes if I experience a crippling depression after a string of manic episodes and kill myself. I am ultimately not afraid of death. I welcome it, but of course almost everyone in the last moment struggles. As you’ll learn through reading and watching the content in this journal, this is a hardcore ass spiritual path. It is not for the ego lovers. It’s for people who want their ego to die more than they want it to live. We want Truth, Love, and the Absolute Pinnacle of Consciousness and nothing else at the end of the day. This is worth death and many other things I won’t even mention as I don’t think people can handle that. I also don’t want to be portrayed as some villain in the making. This is the opposite of my intention, but it must be understood that madness is at times a nearly unstoppable force. Playing with this for spiritual development is not fun and games. This is absolutely life and death. Many people think they want seriously powerful spiritual experiences and results, but they never suffer the types of serious dangers and challenges I’ll describe because of pursuing awakening. Ultimately, I see the good nature of most spiritual masters as a complete ego construction. Leo talks about everything being Goodness but as if that means you’ll align with the good when you are Good. This is kind of dumb, but I think it’s ultimately his good heart which is deceiving him which is totally understandable. I’ve thought the same way many times before. If everything is Absolute Good, which I certainly believe it is and have had a version of this insight, this means that God loves to kill. To rape. To destroy. To defile. Etc. etc. If you think there’s one side to spiritual awakening to yourself as 100% God and that’s always going to align with your human ego’s good, you’re deluded as fuck my friend. There are evil spiritual forces in so many religions and spiritual traditions. Is this just because someone happened to get creative on a Tuesday night and dream all this up across all these different cultures and times? Lol. Come on. Of course now, we must understand that the most evil person, defiler of Existence itself or anything else is at the end of the day Love, but it’s the kind of Love you experience when your character gets absolutely wrecked by the bad guys in a video game. It’s not what your ego wants. It happens. You hate it. Then, with enough perspective, you realize it made the game as Good as it was. The struggle adds value. The pain adds meaning. The suffering adds spice. I’m planning to make a video on the difference between Christ Consciousness and Lucifer Consciousness. I’ve experienced both. Lucifer is ultimately not as bad as you might think, but ultimately he is selfish when it comes to his highest goals. He has no issue giving money to a homeless person so they can eat. He enjoys doing that in a similar way Christ would, but where Christ would never harm someone or do something considered truly immoral for spiritual growth or power, Lucifer would. Both of these archetypes/spirits/higher consciousness entities can essentially meld into your consciousness and pretty much possess you. As can many other things. Possession by Christ is good. Possession by Lucifer is... hopefully neutral or good, but it could lead you to purchase the skin of a deceased human child to perform a deal with Lucifer which would in theory give you your ultimate desire. I’d avoid that one. Btw, I’m merely sharing my direct experience as true as I know it to be. Could I be wrong about some of these things? Certainly, but it would be dishonest to show a false lack of confidence to appear credible to you. This is, after all, MY journal. The decision to pursue awakening and use high-dose psychedelic trips as a person with bipolar disorder type 1 has reduced my net worth by $50,000 in roughly 2-2.5 years. My income was only roughly $25k last year to give you an example of how much that could do for me. I have given away roughly $10k in cash to homeless people and friends through the selflessness and generosity that mania brings in this 2-2.5 year period. I have experienced about 8-9 hospitalizations in the past 2-2.5 years with all but one being due to manic episodes. The other was a suicide attempt that was halted by friends and family working in conjunction. When I was brought to the emergency room, I visualized murdering all of them including my mother, father, step-father, best friend, girlfriend, and then using my Chinese Visa to escape detection before anything could be done to apprehend me. I had a plan that likely would have worked. I rediscovered something in this experience. I can only visualize things well in my mind’s eye when they are fueled with pure hatred. If I try to visualize a simple object in my mind’s eye now, I get practically nothing. With intense hatred, it’s like I’m standing in the physical location watching things happen almost. Keep in mind this is the first time I do much as had a feeling of hate or anger in probably 5-10 years. I’m usually quite immune to these emotions now. If there is such a thing as past lives, mine must be quite complex. On many levels I align myself with Christ as a shining example or what I aspire to become, but on another level I seem to have a real passion for things people consider pure evil. The evil has mostly been heavily repressed. It just came out for a bit when I found myself unable to end my own life due to others. I was being forced to suffer some extreme existential pain due to their selfish love for me. Of course I love their selfish love all the other times. That was just my darkest day/week in over a decade. I was able to stop myself from harming anyone, and I returned back to my positive relatively loving self within a few weeks. I found the first prescription antidepressant that has ever worked for me in over 7 years of experimenting with my psychiatrist due to this. I guess things work out. Psychotic mental health disorders can produce some of the most, if not the most, spiritually obsessed people the world has ever seen. One test you can do is to look at the lists of symptoms for a bipolar type 1 person or schizophrenic to see how much these align with what advanced mystics or psychics are like. Case in point — Jesus, grandiose? Check. High energy? Most likely a check. Incredibly passionate? Check. Insights and sayings pouring out of him that completely reject traditional spiritual and societal norms? Check. Unmatched spiritual obsession? Check. The ability to alter physical phenomena against the currently understood laws of science? Check. (Yes, psychotic people have an immense proclivity for this stuff, even sometimes needing no spiritual foundation or practices to be able to alter reality — not just some hallucination). Of course many times these events are just delusions and hallucinations, but there are many cases where they are not. These few videos explain some of my experiences which do not have good scientific explanations in the currently popular paradigm for what happened to me. Keep in mind I have no idea how I do any of this shit and have absolutely no control over it. There are other examples I will speak about in future posts on this thread. Supernatural Events & Bipolar Mania Are You A Bipolar Empath? ?? The Grays - My Story of ET Contact This one will sound most unbelievable and nebulous to you I imagine. I’d like to mention that maybe a month after this I was sleeping in my girlfriend’s bed while she was awake. I sat up (I have no memory of this whatsoever and ultimate believe I was not in control of my body), and I looked at her and said something like “4324 we are here for you as well.” My girlfriend adamantly claims that she was sent into a psychedelic trip without consuming anything in exactly the same type of way I describe my strongest telepathic connection with the grays. I now permanently have this sensation come and go at various times throughout the day, usually when I’m in a spiritual context or have an insight come. It is not as strong as when I was manic though. If you think these things sound fishy or not concrete (of course anecdotal) evidence of something supernatural happening, please consider I have picked these out of many ridiculous things that have happened to me. There are so many more examples. One thing was my phone being at 5% or less before a meditation session. I needed to use it for GPS right after the session, so I turned it off to conserve battery knowing realistically there’s no way I’d have enough to get where I needed to go. After about 30-40 minutes of meditation, I turned my phone back on, and it was at 100%. Did I do this somehow? Was it God? Idk. I’m simply saying you don’t see that legitimately happening to many people. To get a taste of where I started 7 years ago, watch this video. It’s actually hilarious to me that I made a video titled “I am God” based solely on information from others who didn’t even understand that concept to any real depth themselves. I even said something like “All religion is bullshit. There’s no hard evidence.” Stage orange dumb ass. I was a stage orange dumb ass co-opting essentially the most Divine Truth there is for my own selfish little thought game to partially build a YouTube channel. I enjoyed the thought experiment. It wasn’t just done for views, but much of it was. I Am God Here are two of my main three God Realization/God Consciousness awakenings described years later after discovering the truth of spirituality. The first has not been described in video by me yet. Note that, in the one based on mania, I basically discredited my own insight to not sound crazy to my viewers. This is pure ego and self-deception as well as deception of others disguised as a reasonable a rational approach. I knew damn well that that was a legitimate experience. Ultimately I think it’s time to shoot another video about God Realization now that I’ve ironed out a lot more details. -2nd God Realization/God Consciousness awakening. Manic Stories Ep. #1 - Becoming God (Awakening to God Consciousness) -3rd God Realization/Consciousness awakening. This was ultimately the deepest one, but it lacked facets such as effortless no-mind to begin the process which occurred in the 2nd. 13 Tabs of LSD - Mapping Consciousness #2 I’m going to post some key videos from my YouTube channel that I’ve been posting on for over 7 years now throughout this thread with explanations of where I was at that time in my life and how I’ve since developed further (or potentially back tracked in some areas). My channel and major life interests consist of topics like bipolar disorder, depression, personal development, positive psychology, practical life advice, entrepreneurship, business advice, credit building tips, personal finance videos, unique thoughts that I’ve had over the years from what may seem profound to some and mundane to others, spirituality/enlightenment/awakening, psychedelics and awakening, awakening and bipolar disorder, bipolar disorder and psychedelics, and some other topics or combinations of topics that are less frequent. I’ve taken on a more spiritual focus as time has progressed. I’d like to create this as a sort of open journal in which I will be keen to interact with all of you. Keep in mind, I’m eventually going to be posting extremely sensitive content related to my illness and weaknesses. I’ll eventually get into my extremely racist adolescent years and how this still affects me now. Even having what to most humans would be unfathomable love for all of reality and all beings many times, I still have racial slurs and jokes come into my mind when I’m back at my baseline level of consciousness. I ultimately know that racism is absolute trash, but this doesn’t stop deeply ingrained thought patterns. Actualized.org has helped me to understand why I became racist on a much deeper level to where I now have absolutely no judgment for that path that I started walking on around age 12. This doesn’t mean I think it was the best thing to do. This means I understand the survival-based drives to defend an already fragile ego that was constantly attacked by my extreme shyness, social anxiety, and natural emotional sensitivity as well as being bullied and somewhat unpopular. You’d think the average racist is some hard-nosed ass hole who has no sensitivity or love for the world or people. This was absolutely the opposite of the case for me, and I imagine many others possibly. I craved connection with other kids. On one hand, bipolar disorder can lend itself to outright delusional thinking. On another hand, it can produce premature insight that your mind does not fully understand. On another hand, it can produce legitimate, high-level nondual insights when paired with a solid foundation of spirituality. On another hand, it’s a free psychedelic as powerful as 5.87 grams of psilocybin mushrooms, 10 tabs of LSD, ayahuasca, or ridiculous doses of concentrated THC taken on little to no tolerance to create maximum potential for full psychedelic effect and insight potential. I’m talking about consuming enough THC that I’ve literally “blacked out” in a very similar way to how alcohol black outs occur. This is the difference between aiming for a recreational THC/cannabis experience vs. an existential THC/cannabis experience. Imo, cannabis is not ideal for this work unless it is consumed in concentrated THC format or edibles. Smoked cannabis simply lacks the punch that high-dose psychedelic trips can have. Even with concentrated THC and edibles, the psychedelic experience can be quite elusive on them, especially if you still have any tolerance whatsoever. This is not something you can do daily for its full effects. Most of the time I just get kind of unintentionally hedonistically high to absurd levels. I’m skeptical that Wiz Khalifa and other popular cannabis aficionados have experienced these levels of consciousness on THC/cannabis. It essentially requires the dovetailing of a psychotic mental health disorder and prior psychedelic use to unlock this potential. Keep in mind that when I mention these doses, I am quite sensitive to psychedelics and THC.

“It is not through becoming skillful at forcing things to bend to your will that produces true power. True power is living in and embodying a state of consciousness where nothing needs to be forced.” In reality, this quote was created by me — a person who has been heavily influenced by the spiritual mastery, wisdom, insight, and gracious bodhisattvic nature of these two people. In many ways, my mind is a partial child or creation of the minds of these two men. Isn’t the interconnectedness of the Tao, God, and essentially all of us as vessels of the Tao and God while simultaneously being the Totality truly amazing? No quote has ever been produced by a single human. The Universe creates all quotes, and we are merely their shepherds.

Watch the video in my signature. The relevant part to pain is maybe halfway in. Cliff notes: on 10 tabs of LSD with a decent spiritual foundation you can unquestionably recognize yourself as God and feel no physical pain, fear, limitation, or negative beliefs among a plethora of incredible positive emotions, sensations, insights, and ridiculously heightened consciousness.

Meditation is Completely Unnatural - Here’s a Spiritual Practice Which is as Natural as You Can Get

Matthew 7:6: "Do not give dogs what is sacred; do not throw your pearls to pigs. If you do, they may trample them under their feet, and turn and tear you to pieces.” Pictured is the execution of Mansur Al-Hallaj. He was an Islamic mystic/Sufi who shared in similar Realizations as the speaker of the quote above and myself. It would greatly behoove you to become acquainted with his story. He also accurately professed himself as God and was killed for sharing The Noble Truth. The quote above is the advice given by a man who unquestionably had deep awakenings into his true nature as God. He ultimately went against his advice regularly which is nearly impossible to avoid when you realize such a thing. His physical body was destroyed by the dogs and pigs he spoke of. If you try to pronounce the same Wisdom he did even in the more developed and evolved modern world, you’ll likely be ridiculed, attacked, and defamed if not much worse by the sleeping mob of commoners wielding pitchforks forged of falsehood and delusion. As one of God’s few Self-Realized agents walking upon the earth with such knowledge, you find yourself with a deep urge to share the Truth of all Existence for the benefit of the deceived regardless of the costs you’ll inevitably pay. I have went against this advice far too many times, and I’m doing this currently as I write this post where thousands may scroll past it and some will stop to read it thoroughly. I will go beyond the teachings sheathed in parables of this great man who is God and instead unsheathe my Scimitar of Truth in the name of Allah, Teotl, the Tao, God, and all other linguistic symbols pointing to the inevitably undeniable to tell you that the only difference between you and Christ or any other developed mystic is that you merely have not had the Realization that you are God yet. This will happen. It may take a millisecond or infinite lifetimes for you to come to this Realization of Realizations, but it is as I said, inevitable and undeniable in the end. You can turn from this teaching in disgust, anger, hatred, or any other emotion, but you will be doing so with the Devil holding the reins of your chariot. You are God my friend, and I, and all of Existence standing there with you, are as well. With Love ❤️ Brandon Rohe I of course did share this to thousands of people in my community because why not dance with the Devil while you are simultaneously God and the Devil? P.S - SuBscRiBe! The Metaphysics of Light - How Einstein Accidentally Debunked Materialism (Spiritual Implications!) https://youtu.be/CZ7Xk8HXEK4

You’re judging based on relative good and bad. The easiest way to at least partially extinguish that is to have a direct awakening to God’s perspective on human notions of good and evil. This is ultimately a bit difficult to replicate, but setting the intention to discover this immediately before a high dose psychedelic trip might be one of the most probable ways to do this. I’ve found that knowing that good and evil are human creations is one thing, but a direct awakening does far more to force your ego to submit to this truth. Good & Evil from God’s Perspective https://youtu.be/7RW0n-KgvZs

@Vibroverse well of course ?

My psychic abilities materialized like crazy after just one moderate ayahuasca retreat which only was two nights of ingesting the substance and a weekend. It’s available legally in the states with several organizations. My depression was also eradicated following the retreat. It might give the immediate relief you’re likely seeking although it likely will wear off. It also helped my PTSD in a way I could’ve never imagined really. This gets into the physic realm.. Anyway, I saw your doc said you shouldn’t take meds. I don’t know you as well as him, but I just want to offer the perspective that him telling you that could potentially be partially responsible for your death. I don’t think you’d be doing all this work if you didn’t still want life to be worth living. I’d recommend, not that you’re asking (bad habit of mine lol), that you at least talk to a psychiatrist about trying an antidepressant with a side effect profile that seems reasonable to you. I’ve found that SSRIs are incredibly ineffective for me. Two months ago I started an NDRI (norepinephrine and dopamine reuptake inhibitor) called Wellbutrin. It’s taken quite a long time to find the right antidepressant, but it can be worth it. I hope this isn’t too intrusive. I know this is your journal after all.

@Vibroverse you’ve got it ?

I feel this on multiple levels. Ultimately, I hope that one day you experience the direct insight that you are the greatest God there is. Not just in some “my ego is illusory therefore I am all of Creation and the Creator” kind of way, but also in the sense that YOU are the master of your “individual” Universe of Consciousness. There is only one Consciousness in that Universe. Take the reins of your own creation my friend and become the Authority of Authorities. Even if you die and find yourself in a realm built upon clouds with beautiful golden gates and a wise, bearded gentleman sitting on a throne professing that he is God, remember that Consciousness as you is the true master there. Nothing there exists without Consciousness as you being present, and don’t let your ego or any finite, temporary form with seemingly greater power than the culmination of your meat suit and mind tell you any different. What’s ironic about all of this is that by heeding these words to any real degree you are still letting a temporary form coming to you in the form of text on a forum influence you, but Consciousness as you is the only thing allowing that to happen.

When you say time doesn’t exist, are you also suggesting change does not exist?

I’m not really clear on how talking about it from the relative perspective aligns with what you said. If you said you were talking about it from an absolute perspective, I can actually totally get how potential is the same as creation. In the present moment, there is absolutely no such thing as a potential for anything other than that which is immediately being experienced (creation). In this way, creation is the same as potential. I kind of think of that in this way: when you are about to roll a die, there’s the potential for six outcomes. This is using one moment relative to another moment and it’s possible outcomes. When you actually have rolled the die and see the result in front of you, if we are examining only that precise moment, there is only the potential for the result you see. Another way to view this is consciousness changes. It’s much more like a television screen than a painting. The television screen is infinite as it can show anything (within limits of course, but these limits do not apply to consciousness). The painting can only show one thing. Creation is static for the painting. Creating is moving for the television. Talk about the present moment being all there is until you’re blue in the face, but you ultimately know consciousness is far closer to the TV example than the painting example. Herein lies infinity. Also, solipsism being true or not true has no effect on something being infinite or not. Just because reality is always viewed from one consciousness does not make it finite. If reality existed in a permanent state, everything would have to be expressed in that state for it to be infinite. Since the state of reality is always impermanent, as far as anyone has ever verified, it can be infinite while only expressing a finite possibility in each individual moment. Really this theoretical permanent state could never be infinite because of features such as location. You can’t have an infinite number of things all expressed in every location in one permanent freeze frame. The way you’re thinking about infinity is actually doomed to only produce the finite. What you are thinking of as finite is actually the only way infinity can exist, through impermanence. Btw, how have things been going with the sleep yoga?

You can rather easily understand mathematical infinity. 0. 1. 2. etc. moving on forever. Consciousness is the same thing. Think of this present moment and all you experience now including imaginative thoughts and everything else. This moment is basically like one of those numbers. It’s one possibility out of an infinite number of possibilities. Due to the impermanent nature of reality, consciousness is constantly changing. It is never the same. This means the freeze frame picture of consciousness in one moment will always be a slightly or even vastly different freeze frame picture of consciousness the next moment. None of these two are the exact same. Because of this you can think of consciousness now as 5. In a second, it might be -467.823. These numbers are arbitrary. The point is consciousness MUST change as far as what anyone can ever verify as far as we know. This creates the necessity of infinity. What the moment contains is in one sense finite as it is fixed, but it can be TOTALLY different in many ways no human mind will ever be able to fully imagine. This makes the process itself infinite. On another level, even this moment which appears finite can be dissected in an infinite number of ways which makes it infinite in a certain sense.

The answer to this question is literally right in front of your face. Potential = Literally Anything. Creation = Only what you’re experiencing right now. If potential and creation were the same, you would experience all potentialities as creation (your direct experience) right now. This is also impossible because creation can have an aspect of time.

People who have not faced deficits to survival because of awakening aren’t very awake in my opinion. It’s a common thing after full God-Realization for me to throw my phone across the room in an attempt to break it or flat out smash it to pieces. This is just one small example out of many things. If you’re actively trying to preserve your body, possessions, reputation, and pretty much anything else that makes up your ego, you’re still not awake to the fullest degrees. Last I saw Alan Watts drank himself to death. He never claimed to be awakened though from any of the talks I’ve heard. He always referred to himself as more of a spiritual commentator. I wouldn’t doubt that his spiritual understanding and experiences could have contributed to alcoholism or suicide though. I’ve certainly experienced many dark night of the soul problems that have been potentially worsened by awakening.

@trenton It’s good to want to improve, but hating yourself will likely never help more with that than it hurts in the long run. Try to focus on things you want to change while simultaneously giving compassion and understanding to yourself for not being there yet. If you ever want someone to talk to the more heavy aspects of mental health that aren’t much discussed on here, feel free to shoot me a message on here, and we can try a call or something if you want.

The conceptual understanding will likely never give you a direct nondual experience, but the conceptual understanding is useful after having a collection of nondual experiences. It’s funny because all the information beginning seekers find early on usually will only be of much real value after they’ve already found their prize.

It was certainly mania but there’s a difference between mania and what you might call “just mania.” For most bipolar people who do not pursue consciousness work, they will experience some heightened consciousness likely to some degree, but it’s nothing compared to what comes in mania with a history of consciousness work behind it. There’s no ultimate law of reality imposed by God that says you can’t be awake AND manic. I would call what the majority of bipolar people experience “just mania.” When you combine a history of consciousness work with mania, these things work synergistically. I personally have found that higher consciousness often triggers mania and mania almost always triggers higher consciousness. Yes, you can be a typical yogi sitting in the lotus position at a high state of consciousness, but you can also experience that same level of consciousness while acting very much against this stereotype. The yogi finds satisfaction in this type of calm expression. This doesn’t mean it’s the only way higher consciousness can be expressed. Many traditional practitioners have a preference or bias to the no-mind state where the ego is generally experienced much less. They likely have not had experiences of heightened consciousness states that can be experienced with full access to the ego. I’ve experienced both. They’re both quite valuable experiences to have. I was mainly speaking for myself when I talked about not caring too much about baseline levels due to risks to survival. People without bipolar disorder (specifically type 1) and possibly schizophrenia as well I would guess will generally not run into these same risks, but their taste of awakening could very well be much different than what a bipolar type 1 seeker might find. For me, I’ve experienced many states where I was so conscious that I literally did not care about anything typically judged as negative that could happen to my ego. Many of us here have probably experienced that on occasion. Experiencing it during a trip in a relatively safe environment or during meditation is much different from living in that state for prolonged periods of time. I’m rather convinced most people are rather immune to this type of experience at the degrees I’ve experienced it. The highest awakenings almost never behoove survival. A normal person might experience this after being more or less “fully awake” plus taking methamphetamine if I had to guess. What no neurotypical person will ever tell you is that mania in many ways is an automatic force taking one closer to awakening. A good way to learn about this would be to look into the connections between kundalini and mania as well as the rising and passing away and subsequent dark night of the soul stages experienced in Daniel Ingram’s models of awakening stages. Daniel Ingram is one of the first serious spiritual practitioners I’ve seen who thoroughly recognizes how blurry the line is between certain awakening stages and mania. Will mania usually take anyone there completely on its own? I’m not 100% sure. It’s probably not too likely. Add in some meditation, spiritual study, and high dose psychedelic trips, and you’re basically on the quickest yet most bumpy path I’ve ever seen or heard of toward awakening. The thing about mania is it is clearly a shift in baseline consciousness. This is pretty much undeniable. The bias comes when spiritual people see that baseline shift and discount it. In many cases mania isn’t awakening, but in some cases it is. The more spiritual practice the bipolar person has behind them, the more likely it’s going to become closer and closer to the latter. It’s very similar to meditators or gurus saying psychedelics don’t count. This is just pure bias to the sanctity and exclusivity of one’s preferred method. It also doesn’t appeal to any neurotypical ego that there is a genetically gifted group of people when it comes to awakening that doesn’t involve themselves. Label those gifted people as having a mental illness (which is really just atypical neurology), and you’ve removed credibility from this group of people with stigma. As a cherry on top, make all doctors say this “illness” and psychedelics should never be mixed and pump the “ill” with medications that numb perception and emotion, and you’ve turned a group that was originally more likely to awaken into one of the least likely to awaken. This is basically society shutting down the higher consciousness part of their awakening cycle to leave the bipolar person in what can oftentimes be a more or less permanent dark night if the soul which most people just call bipolar depression. I can guarantee mania has taken me to higher baseline levels than most spiritual seekers have experienced anywhere outside of a psychedelic peak, and there has been one occasion where mania produced an experience just as potent as any psychedelic peak I’ve ever had without the influence of any substances or even any recent meditation. This likely only happened because of my history with pursuing awakening though. Most bipolar people don’t go into crazy hyper-consciousness nondual God-realization states. They simply go spend money, have sex, and live without much of a filter. That’s “just mania.” Mania + spirituality is a whole different animal.

A fixed, permanent form goes against infinity. Think of consciousness as clay. If the clay were to stay in the same transfiguration forever, it would be finite. What makes the clay infinite is the ability for it to change. Just think of this, you’ve never experienced two moments where consciousness was exactly the same. There’s impermanence staring you right in the face. There’s infinity staring you right in the face. Infinity doesn’t necessarily mean everything will happen imo. It more means there is no limit to what can happen. People don’t realize that the uniqueness of each moment is evidence for infinity sitting right in their lap.

And which one is better? Realize that the real thing, as directly experienced, is vastly different from both of these examples.

Hating yourself rarely ever does any good. How I personally have self-love even when I’ve had homicidal thoughts is to develop an understanding of myself. What led me there? What was the chain of events that specifically made me have those thoughts? How much of that was actually under my control? Is a mental illness playing a large role in these thoughts? I personally have developed to a point where I generally don’t judge anyone for any “wrong” or “evil” action. There are clear things that led that person to act that way. Figure out what makes you do the things that lead you to hate yourself, and give yourself sympathy. You know that you’ve been trying to do what you can for this whole life, so pay attention to that truth. There’s no need to judge when you can see the clear cause and effect of the situation.

I think the word is very useful for this work. I’ve used it as well. It just seemed like you were suggesting it was in some way superior to other words in the earlier posts. THIS has the advantage and disadvantage of making people pay attention only to the here and now. The problem is people probably will never experience THIS as God or infinite or any other counterintuitive things without being pointed in that direction first. Nondualists tend to forget that if all is One and that One is Truth the ego, thoughts, and imagination are also aspects of that One/Truth as much as anything else. Truth in nonduality does not have an opposite.

You never escape desire while in an embodied form and maybe even never escape it beyond that. You merely change from one desire to another. My solution to tackling lower desires that might be detrimental to you is to taste the elegance of the highest experience or realization. Then you will naturally focus on that, and your life will have more net positivity than negativity. Of course the highest experience isn’t some heroin high. It’s God. Experience God, and you will want to experience more. This will slowly reduce your desires for everything else. I can’t even give a shit about playing video games when I literally used almost every free moment of my teenage years playing games. Making money doesn’t interest me nearly as much. The same can be said for sex and everything else. They have all become secondary or even lower on the priority list.