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He was worth 50 millions when he died, doesn't seem to like he attempted multiple suicides because he was out of money. Maybe he had not enough money to do heroin until his 60s without making more, but he had enough to continue for much longer. Why would he have chosen suicide over heroin use if heroin use was really all that fun?

If opium can really make you happy, why did Kurt Cobain blow his brain up with a shotgun instead of just taking more heroin?

In the absolute, I can say there's what is focused on vs what is not focused on. But this doesn't say much about focus than it being a concept. There is more that can be understood about the concept of "arm" than it existing or being separate from "not arm". You can learn to use your arms. Likewise, I'm wondering whether focus maps to anything "real" in the body. In the context of using your eyes in the material world, focus is just placing your eyes in some position to align the two images received by each image and produce and interpretable input. That's all fine. But I'm mostly curious about it in the context of "focusing on thoughts vs focusing on consciousness/reality". Is focus something that can be trained? Worked on? Improved? On a similar note, why do meditation even works? Supposedly, by focusing on feeling/consciouness/present moment you stop focusing on identification thoughts. Why? Because focus is limited? Why can't you focus on both? You can only focus on one thing at once? This understanding doesn't sit well with me because it implies some sort of limit we have and it implies meditation is exploiting this limit to achieve de-identification. I'm quite confident there exist a better understanding but it isn't immediately obvious to me. Any thoughts?

That thoughts are affected by neurochemistry... is a thought. That you have thoughts you cannot let go because of neurochemistry is a thought. You can let go of that one. That the present moment doesn't feel right because of neuro chemistry is another thought (feeling not right is a judgement). You may believe that if you think thoughts are electrical impulses in the brain. Those aren't thoughts though, those are physical "symptoms" or "effects" of thought. Thought is duality. Electrical impulses in the brain may be affected by drugs, brain damage or neurochemistry (you may forget things or suddenly find it easier to experience different thought) but it cannot create a duality or prevent you from letting go of one. The equivalent of neurochemistry controlling behavior for computers would be "After banging my computer with a baseball bat League Of Legends opened by itself and now I can't close it (X button doesn't work) but the game works fine. Guess my computer can only play League Of Legends now ...". Thought is to software what neurochemistry is to hardware. The only "input" thought gets is consciousness and any impairing of the hardware can only impair the software, not force it to function.

Brain chemistry is a result of thought, not the other way around. If you have sad thoughts, those will be observable in your brain chemistry, but that brain chemistry doesn't mean you can only be sad. Changing your thoughts would change your brain chemistry. This misunderstanding is a symptom of traditional medicine specialized in real illnesses being applied at conceptual or mental illnesses. Science is all about observations, not assumptions. But mental illnesses are never observed, only assumed.

@Blackhawk Can you give us more context about the trip that went poorly? Did your prepare for this trip? What intentions did you have prior to tripping (did you do it to help yourself or was it for some other reason?) Can you think of any reason why it went poorly? What was the dose?

That there is "a hidden programming", a "subconscious" or "levels of consciousness" is all a paradigm you are thinking right now. If you took enough shrooms, or meditated for long enough, all of this thinking would be seen for what it is. Whether you want to see that on psychedelics, or develop your ability to see that right now while sober (which has much practical utility) is entirely up to you. In no way I'm advocating for taking more psychedelics instead of integration. That "tripping too quickly" had negative effects is also another thought story. Anything that didn't happen because you didn't take the time to can literally happen now if that's what you want. Any integration that "didn't get done" can be done now. As I meditate, I still make sense of things that happened in my trips from 2 years ago. But if what you want is integration, why not just integrate instead of making a problem out of psychedelics? This whole idea that "you have guilt because you tripped too much" and that now you are forced to re-evaluate how you take psychedelics is just a big story your ego is making to avoid actually integrating right now. Unless you are forced to trip on a specific schedule, I don't see how you can "lack time to integrate". What do you feel you want to do right now? Integrate, meditate? Do that. Later you feel like tripping? Do that. No need for guilt, no need to take any hard decisions on what you allow yourself to do and not do, just do what you want to do.

Is the problem really too much psychedelics or not enough integration? What makes you think you would do more integration if you tripped less? Perhaps this feeling is telling you to integrate now rather than doubting this or that. To me, it feels like you are trying to use psychedelics as a scapegoat for your lack of integration or practices.

So believing misconceptions is a non-issue?

Ah yes, so just this one simple substitution and everything will be fixed. Right? Right?!? Can't believe I was one pop away from being out of there...

Snap, I really wish this hypothetical scenario where I wouldn't believe things be the case. Why would I ever do that? And what are the things I believe? I can, from logic, conclude that your answer is not needed to do particular tasks and surviving is one of them. But In my current experience, no part of that experience in particular seem a good fit for labelling it the "not needing" part of my experience. I can experience apples, bananas and many things but the experience of not needing seems highly abstract.

There is no such thing as a feeling of fear that arises. "Fear" is an idea/interpretation that is believed because of the situation. Feeling is consciousness/the present moment. It never "arose" and was always there, independent of ideas (fear). It just doesn't "follow" the thought that arose. Thought do not control feeling, feeling just is. Whether you want to say "thought controls the body" or "body controls itself" is fine, but what they control is physiological reactions (sweating, heart pumping, etc.) which is used in some sort of confirmation-bias to validate the idea of fear.

Curious how "I'd" do that. Does that mean I'm not doing that right now?

Do you think through "inspection & seeing" and "letting go" I will immediately see what you mean? How long will it take? For instance, If I decide to use my dreamboard, how much dreamboard usage time will it require before I get there? As much as I recognize time is a concept, the expectation of immediate results seems unrealistic to me. Perhaps you want to throw out of the window the whole idea of "progress" toward enlightenment, which is fair. But then what about you? Are you still at the point where you meditated enough you don't need to do meditation anymore? If there's absolutely no such thing as progress, then why would I do meditation and not you? Why would I practice anything if this practice doesn't matter?

You are right, I shouldn't blame anyone else for my misconceptions. His quote had nothing to do with feeling at all, feelings are not reaction to thought. If you define feeling like that, it's a thought, not feeling. In his quote he is actually describing the physiological component of emotion, but backward. He implies that the body reacts to what the mind thinks but in actuality the mind controls the body in accordance to what it thinks. He also labels that imaginary reaction as "emotion" when in reality emotion is interpretation of the state a self is in. "I am angry" is not factual, it's merely an idea. When believing the idea of this state, you may react physically to it (tense up your body) but in no way those tensions are "what the emotion is", which is what Tolle says in his quote. In any case, this is nitpicking.