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There was a time in my life where I worried a lot about HPPD symptoms. I had a big bad trip at the time and I started to believe "I screwed myself" seeing symptoms such as noise in vision, after images, floaters etc. This is long gone and I'm now taking shrooms quite often with no issues at all. From my experience, everything about HPPD is total bullshit, let me explain. Everything that is considered an "HPPD symptom" is actually a normal part of your biological experience that you already experience right now but might not notice. Let's take noise in vision: This noise is the result of your optical nerves picking up random signals and it is a part of being a human being. Does it get worse when you take drugs like shrooms or LSD? No. But you may start to notice those things and if you never noticed them before, you might believe they are new or that they are a result of the drug. Then once a person get's paranoid about whether or not they "caused" this phenomena, they keep making it into a problem and focusing on it all the time. It becomes a perpetual proof of "a me that screwed up", at least it was for me. Ultimately by focusing more and more on it as if it was a problem, it becomes "bigger" and more of a problem. On top of that, by focusing more and more on those symptoms you become "good at spotting them" which ultimately gives them even more place in your field of view. You can see for yourself that things like tinnitus, after images, floaters, halos around objects are of the same nature. Essentially those things cannot be made into a problem unless you turn them into one. If you just accept the fact that your nervous system picks up noise randomly and it's a normal thing then there's really nothing HPPD can "do" to you. The reason you can't find good studies on this is because of how subjective it is in its nature. With thoughts we can invent any mental illnesses (depression, psychosis or even HPPD) but then it's not easy for doctors to study those when they happen in our mind.

That too is an idea. Why would brain damage prevent you from ceasing to use your brain? You can find studies that link those heavy metals to irratibility and then start believing you can't be at peace right now because of heavy metal but obviously, this is just more thoughts and worrying which prevent you from being at peace right now. You probably can't rid of 100% of the heavy metals in your brain. There's might always be some remaining. But you can stop worrying about heavy metals in the brain and be free from that. I never checked for heavy metals and I will never give a shit. Too bad if this reduces my cognitive potential but I got other things to do than worry about those. At the end of the day I don't need that cognitive potential to be at peace. The only thing that's holding you back from enlightenment is thinking you can't have it. Everyone has their different belief about why they can't have it and be at peace right now. You seem to agree about Leo's blind spot but then bring your own blind spots to the table, claiming that those reasons one can't attain enlightenment are the real reasons. None of those reasons are insurmountable either.

Of course my asshole is awake! So are rocks, trees and anything that does not think. Do you think rocks are depressed about life? Awakening is when you stop seeking. I cannot describe it because it's literally nothing. It's not about maintaining the concept of a "self that is awake". You don't need any brain power for awakening, it's about stopping the neurotic use of that brain. When you take psychedelics you just force the dismantling of your thoughts and beliefs. The idea that you can't stop believing without psychedelics is just one more of those beliefs.

The donkey doesn't need someone to tell him this, he doesn't judge reality as being brutal or unfair. He might have small donkey problems sometimes but I can tell you most of the time he's just vibing. Animals are already enlightened, they don't have a concept of self to misconceive about. Reality doesn't need to be soft or fair. You just need to accept it as it is no matter what it is and that's all there is to do. To think that it is impossible to accept it is wrong and that's why it feels bad. Reality doesn't "work in a fair way" because that idea would feel good to me. But I am able to accept the "harshness" of reality (or stop judging it as so) because I'm the one creating those dualities and I can simply stop doing that. You can too obviously. If you don't use feeling to tell whether you are right or wrong, what do you use? No matter what you come up with as an answer to this question (scientific litterature, hearsey, etc.) How can you say that a particular source of information is true without feeling?

How you feel is the Truth EDIT: I mean this literally. This whole idea doesn't feel good because it's not true. There is nothing that can rob you of your happiness and "awakenings". If thoughts arise and you get caught into them it's not because of genetics, it's because you think those thoughts are unavoidable. You can stop thinking that right now without any psychedelic.

You can have a psychedelic trip and resist to it if you want. But that doesn't mean you are resistant, that would be identifying with thought. That woman seemed to identify with the idea that awakening was impossible for her. I feel for her too.

Do you feel good about the "fact" things are like that? If somehow you became god and could do anything you want with reality, would you change things such that people's genetics no longer hold them back?

You don't miss any "hardware". You are god. There is no you that is missing anything to awaken without psychedelics. You just believe you do and that's why you hold back from it.

The body is indeed a biological machine. But are you the body? How do you know it's not the other way around? Scientists identifies a lack of dopamine to depression, but how do you know it's not the depression that causes the lack of dopamine? What if terrible thoughts lead to low mood which lead to a lack of dopamine in the brain? If I were a silly scientist, I could correlate obesity to lack of calcium in muscles. Indeed whenever you contract a muscle your body emits calcium which makes the muscle contract. Therefore people who don't use their muscles do not emit much calcium in their muscles. Would I fix the obesity by forcing your muscles to contract though by injecting some form of muscle contraction drug though? Scientists can look at correlation but causality is always assumed.

It's easy to demonize republicans when Ben Shapiro and other right wing figures are out there making videos defending legislation that makes it harder to vote. If we only base the definition of an echo chamber on the point of views we bring up, I could as well suggest there's not enough pro nazi point of views being expressed on this forum, therefore it's an echo chamber. This is silly, you don't beat an echo chamber by including every possible point of view that there is. The echo chamber is what is commonly believed by the community. What is our common dead angle? What do we all assume that is false? Bringing more beliefs just doesn't fix much. I don't really think this forum is much of an echo chamber in the politics section. It's way too much of a free for all. Everyone shares their opinion, and perhaps there's a "more commonly agreed upon" opinion, but with the total lack of upvotes, it doesn't really matter much who agrees with who. Leo doesn't make politics video very often nowadays so it's not like we have a "right way to think" being presented anymore. Now I would think that Leo has some sort of "personal echo chamber", supporting the belief that he "went deeper" in spirituality than other teachers for instance. But really this has nothing to do with politics

You are infinitely loving. Do you disagree? Probably because you have a belief about yourself and how loving you are. If you take a psychedelic, all your beliefs will be relaxed, you'll literally believe them less. Maybe you'll realize a thing or two. Those realizations will stay with you as memories but the belief relaxing effect of the psychedelic will wear off. This can be good or bad. Not only your bad beliefs will be relaxed, the ones you consider useful will as well. You probably believe the floor is solid. You might stop believing that. Other crazy beliefs might "slip in" and give you a bad trip. How can you mitigate that and ensure the psychedelics are properly used to challenge the beliefs you need to have challenged? I would argue that's what meditation is for. It gives you a framework for eliminating beliefs and then you can use the psychedelic as some kind of "booster" to get meditation results faster.

@Leo Gura I appreciate your answers. When you say Let's make an analogy. Let's say I spend years looking at clouds non stop. For fun I "see" or interpret things out of the clouds, like here's a lion, here's a cat, etc. What you are saying amounts to saying "all those things are just clouds!" which makes total sense. I'm just so used to my stories in the clouds that I forgot I'm looking at clouds. My problem, and my question, is how can one interpret stuff without the clouds? Can you start interpreting and seeing shapes out of a totally blank sheet? When you say "you can't stop something from coming out of nothing", I see how this statement is not totally correct. I would personally prefer "interpretation is always possible". There's infinitely many ways to look at the clouds and there's infinitely many ways to interpret nothingness into life. Many things are still unclear, but thank you for the answers.

Why is it possible to make things into things? Isn't there some thing that is doing that? If there was truly nothing there would be no one to turn nothing into things.

Whatever it is, there's still potential for it to be interpreted into life. Yet if it was all "turned off" or black then there would be no potential for interpretation. In a way, isn't that a thing that there is?

Why is there random noise instead of no noise?

I really liked what Anna Brown said in one of her video. We are often said "you can wake yourself up" and this can lead to the self/ego thinking it needs to "change" itself into an "awakened self". As if being awake is a property of the self. "Oh my god! I'm not awake right now! Ok gotta try harder! Ok let's go". None of this leads to awakening. I think it seems random because it doesn't happen when you try hard but it happens when you stop trying or stop thinking there is a self that needs to awaken.

If having a psychosis is to no longer be able to distinguish the true from the false, the real from the unreal, how do you know your psychosis is real and not just imagined? The emptiness you feel is not a "proof" of psychosis or schizophrenia. It feels bad to believe things that are false. Whatever you do, I highly recommend having an open mind to therapy. If you go in with the idea that it's not going to work, you might be turning that into reality by yourself. I wish you the best.

You opened this thread as if you wanted to obtain the truth about this phenomenon, but you seem to be quite enjoying it. You may be scared about the possibility of you fooling yourself and so you'd like some validation, some other "woke" person to confirm to you that your idea is right. I think whether or not this experience is true is not something you'll find on an online forum, but rather by listening to your heart. Perhaps it's not really about the Ouija board, but about healing and letting go of past relationships you had (with your father for instance). And perhaps that healing those relationships is more important to you than figuring out the science behind the Ouija board. Wish you the best

@Adrian325 And what does those spirits have say? What kind of messages do they spell out?

https://globalnews.ca/news/7573815/magic-mushrooms-blood-injection/ Poor dude, but why would you inject it though

Being more conscious is not doing activities you label as "high consciousness". How do you feel when you steal software? Ignoring that feeling is "low consciousness" (literally not looking) but the action itself is just an action. Maybe you are like me and you don't feel so bad when getting photoshop off of pirate bay instead of paying hundreds of dollars for personal use. Maybe there's things to feel right now that matter more to you. Maybe there's no point in guilting yourself and it's just another excuse to feel bad about yourself. In the end only you can find out.

Everytime I do shrooms (more precisely 4-AcO-DMT), I suffer a pretty bad headache afterwards. It doesn't prevent me from doing them, as I still consider that a good tradeoff. But it's bothersome. I don't want to misquote him but @Nahm previously said something along the lines of the pain doesn't come from any physical factors but rather from having a "self come back" and that being painful. While my direct experience did not lead to this conclusion, I really wished and still wish it is true. It would be so great that none of that pain has any physical consequences and I could just avoid it by remaining present. I tried very hard last time to achieve that. But the headache still came and it's always at the same timing, pretty much when the medicine starts to come down. I realized no-self and stopped all thoughts at a moment during peak but I didn't manage to do that a second time during the headache period. I really tried though. Now with this inconclusive attempt I still have no idea if fully being present/re-realizing no-self during the headache phase would have stopped the headache, but I at least got an opportunity to contemplate the feeling of pain. At some point it was like 8 nails going through my head and overall I would qualify this feeling of very "physical". Maybe that's just me fooling myself though. This whole idea of a pain to which I can't pinpoint what's going on is quite fishy to begin with. When I was a child I had headaches once in a while (strangely doesn't happen anymore) and I never really figured out why it happened. Suggestions like "you are hungry/thirsty" would be thrown at me and I really didn't have a better explanation on why I had a headache anyway. Since the relation between the headache and the body is fuzzy, the idea that headaches are entirely conceptual has some merit. But what kind of concept only "hurts" when I'm coming down from shrooms (and not LSD)? This idea that the headache is a result of holding a painful idea like a self is "a nice idea" but no matter how I try to look at it, it doesn't add up. Especially since I don't ever get headaches otherwise. If you've overcame shroom headaches in the past, please let me know. I'd love to hear your story.

@Nahm Thanks! I don't think I would have challenged the shroom headaches without you. There's scientific studies stating it happens in approximately 30% of people and there is links to similarly shaped molecules that are used as headache medicine. It would have been really easy for me to just "blame the shrooms" and accept the headache as a part of my brain's reaction to them or as a property of the molecule itself. The only thing that made me doubt my explanation is your previous comment. It is indeed amazing and it really begs the question, what else do I just assume to be true that might not be the case? Problably a heck load of things and every one of those things is gonna be a bliss to find out @peanutspathtotruth I agree that's a better way to name them.

Peter Ralston does a great job of deconstructing pain in his book of not knowing. Long story short there's a difference between the sensation of pain (skin being torn, bones being broken etc.) and pain. The sensation of pain is only painful after the sensations are being interpreted into something bad for you. There cannot be pain without resisting a sensation or something else. For instance, if you are fully awake and fully aware that a vaccine will boost your immune system, it will not be painful to receive it. In Ralston book of not knowing, he describe how he got a dental cavity fixed and refused to get analgesia because he wanted to contemplate the sensation of pain. It's pretty normal however to dislike a sensation of getting cut or any other way in which your body gets damaged. IMO, if you are fully awake (e.g. no thoughts) there can only be the sensation of pain since pain is a thought. Pain is not necessary in the end. Consciousness alone is enough to get your body out of any undesired situation. But hey that's just the way I see things right now. Maybe I'm wrong. Who knows? If you want to know the truth you can only get it by yourself. No matter how convincing or unconvincing I am, we aren't going anywhere with this. And my headache is coming back, probably because I'm being way to pretentious