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Sometimes I wish I didn't take my largest dose of LSD the day after getting rejected last november, throwing my life into a downward spiral. But hey, at least I have a pretty deep understanding of "unawareness"! And it's not like it could have been otherwise. Past is past. So yeah, set and setting. Do not underestimate those. It's not just some formality for beginners, it actually matters.

Isn't the way the brain is wired totally flexible, especially when using neuroplasticity-increasing substances like psychedelics? Assuming the materialistic paradigm of course, otherwise brains do not exist. Although the topic of the brain and neurons is perhaps not the most woke topic, its definitely something I struggle with right now. I started becoming increasingly worried about "noise" connections in the brain, e.g. meaningless connections which are created by a drug rather by a meaningful event. Studying neural networks in machine learning indicates to me that adding random connections to an otherwise fully functional neural network would indeed decrease the effectiveness. Even if you are looking for Truth, it is not required nor recommended for some parts of your brain to change, like the face detection system or the edge detection system for example. When you look at symptoms of HPPD, especially things like "visual snow" it really feels like it could be created by random connections added to the convolutional layers of the part of the brain treating images. What I would want is to have a fully understanding of how and why those connections are created, yet I lack the knowledge and I wonder if this knowledge is even known to anyone. For now, in my last mushroom trip I directly experienced the "noise" in my neural network, or rather the fear/thought the of the noise. It was showing me meaningless/unbeautiful images which I would compared to a glitched video game. That with constant inner screaming but also in a glitched manner, comparable to a poor taste "ear rape" youtube compilation. Only after this mushroom trip I started noticing my HPPD symptoms. I've gone a long way letting go of them (stopping to focus about them) but it has been haunting me ever since. It's clear to me that I need to have those fears sorted/let go before tripping again with anything and I can't just bring myself to "stop caring about the brain". It's ok if the brain does not exist but I don't want to be creating a reality where I deprecate my physical body for stupid reasons.

Fair. I'm not denying that I have a particular orientation (although perhaps I wish I had none), but I just don't think that having a different one justify letting negative emotional reactions fly under the radar. I wish you the best

The pointers may be biases but not the absence of thing they point to. The concept of a "not being a thing" is a concept but what it points to is not a thing. The word blue is not blue but what it points to is. Is enlightment really a transaction? Personally I would see it like the realization that there's no transaction to be done, no problem to solve, no worries to cling onto. My experience with defeatism is that it arises when there's high expectations which we know won't be met. The ego says "I can't be at peace right now because things are not the way I want them to be". What the self feel is a matter of how the self thinks. No matter what you show me, even if it's the most horrible thing one could even possibly imagine, what the mind makes of it is not determined by what was revealed but by how the self reacted to what was revealed. I see where you are coming from with the empathy for Leo feeling defeatism after seeing crushing truths and I can feel that empathy as well. I just don't think this defeatism is any part of the truth that was revealed but rather a neurotic reaction to it. I appreciate your analysis but my opinion is different. I do not think this distinction matters. One may assume that acting in a way to of reaching happiness avoids finding "hard truths" but the reality is that if you feel like shit, it's not the Truth's fault, it's your fault. For any negative feeling there must be negative reaction to something. Whenever I feel bad, I know I'm doing something bad, somehow somewhere. It might tell me exactly what to do but at least I know I got something to work on. So I don't think it matters why you are seeking Truth. For me I don't really think about why so much. I can generate a lot of reasons (rationalize) but honestly I don't know why I am seeking Truth. On a day to day basis, when I meditate I feel good and when I don't I feel bad.

Sure, all "things" are creations of the mind as a mean for survival and therefore biased toward self. Yet "I" is not a thing but awareness of things. I don't think we disagree here, I just don't get why Meta-Man was met with what I perceived as a negative emotional reaction when pointing out something that is not at all irrelevant to this topic. Sure, the exact words Leo use are not incorrect. "You cannot be unbiased" is equivalent to "the mind cannot touch enlightment". But in-between the lines I feel some sense of defeatism. "You just can't be unbiased unless you're dead dude". Even if the literal words do not communicate this defeatism, the will to convince others of that statement by itself communicate much more. Truth is that it doesn't matter. Fussing about 0-bias being unreachable is a distraction from adopting a mentality that propels further in seeing our own biases. My perception of what Meta-Man was doing is offering an alternative way of seeing the same thing, but without the negative/defeatist connotation. Of course that's just what I see, someone else can look at this situation and think he was trying to pick up a fight. I am inclined to believe what determines which perception we get is our own bias.

Hahaha, then it's quite ironic how I took it so defensively, I apologize for that. Call me blind but I don't see how this applies to Leo and Meta-Man's interaction. If the girl in the video was saying "I can't get rid of my biases" instead of "look at this beautiful tree" would the brown guy's words still be considered foolish? Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think Leo's statements on biases in this thread seem to be quite absolute. Who is confusing absolute and relative here?

Could it be that there's mixing up of the direct experience of a tree and the subjective opinion of a statement being aggressive here? A few months ago, I was dead set of Leo having a problem. I was asking your opinion on it I wanted to know if you shared "my subjective experience". Yet you never wanted to validate or invalidate what I was seeing (whether there's a tree or not), just like how the brown character is doing in the video. You basically pointed me the subjectivity of my own idea and I mean, fair enough, seeing that subjectivity was probably more valuable than getting your opinion on my subjective impression of Leo's vibe in his recent videos. The video you are linking can apply to so many situations, any case where a character refuses to see what's there and uses the absolute as a distraction from the relative. In your subjective experience, this video applies to what I said and makes sense to you. Can you see how it wouldn't for someone who is not sharing your perspective?

I don't know about you but when I'm lucid dreaming, not being able to enjoy the dream because I know its a dream is far from being a problem. I don't feel like I'm "forcing myself to play along", I just do whatever I feel like doing in the dream. Would be great if I could do the same in real life, but I can't only because I'm convinced I can't. (Beliefs) The idea that "it ain't easy when you know you are dreaming" just sounds like one more "why I can't be at peace right now" typical ego reason. Fully realizing the meaningless of life is supposed be freeing. "Ha! I don't need to attribute meaning to what I do anymore". It's not supposed to turn into "Oh no life is meaningless, what am I gonna do". That would happen if there was attachment to life having a meaning.

Do you take psychedelics?

Who took a look at this statement and decided it was an attempt to "fight" (as in a jousting) ? It has no relevance who is right or wrong, Truth is all that matters. Where is the delusion in what @Meta-Man said?

I personally experienced huge regression. Do you have any insight to share on this topic?

How are you ok with the idea that you are slightly degrading the brain? In some ways, I can see myself accepting losing an arm for instance. But having my brain's ability to perform degrade? That's very scary to me. Especially if I know it is slowly degrading but I have no way of knowing what I am actually losing. It's easy to admit that there's attachment to my brain and its performances. But even if there was no such attachment. I must admit that I'm asking an indirect question. But the direct question involves a nerdy neural network way of thinking that's not gonna lead us anywhere. I'm scared of HPPD-like problems since I had a bad lsd trip in november. I'd like to go over that fear.

@noip So basically you went from spending hours a day messaging a guy you like to spending hours a day arguing with some forum users about this guy? Pretty hilarious thread

@Bittu What is the assumption I'm holding that is bringing me the deepest pain?

"I am Mario."

Last november unconsciousness lead me to overfantasize on a poor girl, get rejected and then take the largest LSD dose I've ever taken. The trip went really bad, because I was totally unconscious. I was totally unaware of what my mind was doing, that is, worrying about whether or not I was ok with the rejection (acting like the person being rejected was not me but some inner child I had to take care of) and the LSD just amplified those worries to a point where I was super worried I was going to die because I can't take care of myself. I ended up seeking help from my grand parents(which were not aware I was taking LSD at the time), and feeling lots and lots of shame for being unable to handle my trip by myself and causing lots of turmoil in my family. The story goes on, but the point here is that after this whole experience I spent a great deal of time understanding what went wrong and its obvious now that unconsciousness of the ego was the only problem. "Unconscious" is the word my ego now uses to enter thinking patterns of self-frustration, self-criticism and self-hate. I'm not often in those patterns but I can feel that this judgement of myself as unconscious is always in the back of my mind, ready to be used against me whenever I do something wrong. On top of that, about a week after the bad trip, I went to a bar with a friend which was way too loud. It really hurt my ear but for some reason (mainly because I was doing really bad at that time) I was totally ignoring the pain. This memory of that pain is still very alive in my mind and is identified with the idea of "unconsciousness". I can feel that pain in my ear whenever I judge myself to be unconscious. I don't have much experience with the pain-body as described by Eckhart Tolle but I would say this integrated my pain body. My latest psychedelic trips are insightful but mostly focused on pain rather than pleasure, unlike my first trips. In the end, it's clear to me that I am very affected by fear of unconsciousness. I am scared of doing the same mistake, going back to hell because of my own unconsciousness. How do I make peace with the idea that I might turn insane at any time?

Sure I do recognize that and I used to write long posts about this topic in the past. What I'm sharing is that doing that didn't change Leo and didn't bring me anything either. But perhaps you'd be better than me at convincing him to change his public image All of this is motivated by fear of Leo receiving backlash from the entire youtube community. Who knows perhaps Leo is 100 miles ahead of us, ready to handle all of this backlash and wanting to benefit from all the attention. His channel could easily become a very controversial topic discussed about left and right on youtube granting him lots of publicity. In the end its his business, not mine.

You may be right but I believe there's little value to look at what Leo "should" be. No matter how hard you try you can't design a better Leo. Parents can't even design their own childs.

Honestly I don't think that's a bad video. That's a fair reaction from someone who is a total outsider to all of this and I don't feel like his reaction is particularly unhealthy or neurotic, just ignorant to a field that is very obscure and hard to grasp. It's easy to be too caught up and lose perspective of what "normies" would think of all of this. This video delivers exactly that perspective. Leo probably doesn't care about fixing his public image to look less crazy to potential new followers (perhaps because he's too identified with being radical and crazy!) so I would bet videos like this will increase in numbers.

Then instead of trying to push yourself to do A, B, C up to Z and living the story of being frustrated about the fact you can't do all of that, make your number 1 priority to be free of self pressure and self frustration and once you are free, implement the habits you actually want to have one at the time while always maintaining mental peace as your first priority before the habit itself.

Honestly I think your comtemplation achieved great results. There's nothing that allows me to say I know what I'm talking about any more than you. Perhaps I don't recognize that you can lose an understanding because I cannot recall it happened to me. Further experience with understanding and playing with understandings from a long time ago that I haven't used in a while perhaps will help me get deeper into this topic. I also see the possible trap of "being attached to my understanding" and building an ego around the fact I understand lots of things. Perhaps my attachment to my understandings is what made me reply in the first place because I (ego) didn't like the idea that my understandings are as ephemeral as thoughts or random information.

Very good post, thanks! I believe If you get an insight that is very meaningful to you, the insight itself is much more than just another memory like your age though. The insight is a pointer to understanding and understanding is a link between a huge amount of memories. The understanding itself is nothing so understanding something feels like a release of energy when experienced. When you understand something you realize you now need to keep track of less things because some of the things you were keeping track of can just be asserted automatically from the rest of what you know. (A single neural network call for the nerds) So in this way, there perhaps is value to noting it down not to forget you realized that, but you don't need to remember the insight to keep the understanding. Anyway, this video is what motivates those thoughts on understanding : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y9d0tOpL8ZU

Checkout Leo's videos on it? He's quite good a pulling out giant lists

For something to be "preferable" there must be a me for which it is preferable to. Sure the idea sounds good to my ego, my "me", too. Big fan of being healthy and having my arms. But this is not Truth, this is what I want for my "self". If you fully realize "you" (the ego, the person, the monkey) don't exist you can let go of those things you want for the "me" and you can start enjoying what is here and Now, within awareness. If the body heals by itself or regenerates a new arm cool (for the ego), but it doesn't have to in anyway. What's the problem with having cancer? Body is gonna die (and so ego with it)? Who is this a problem to?