Tristan12

I've struggled for a while to be overly open-minded. I've been aware of that and I've tried to be more considerate of other opinions and perspectives whenever they are presented to me. Because of that, whenever someone challenges my opinions or perspectives, I put in a lot of effort to consider what they are saying, and I don't assert my own perspectives very much, because I'm trying to be open to new perspectives. However, I feel like I am always the one trying to consider the other person's perspective, and never the other way around. I find that there are a lot of things I feel strongly about, things that feel very true to me, and when I don't assert my own opinions and perspectives, It hurts me and feels like a boundary violation. I feel like I don't stand up for myself and what I feel is true or right, because I'm trying to be open-minded. Why do I always have to be the one who is wrong, who should be considering other people's perspectives? Why shouldn't other people listen to and consider mine? I'd appreciate if anyone could give me some advice on how to reconcile this, because I'm tired of people constantly challenging my perspectives and beliefs, and me never upholding or enforcing them that strongly, just because I don't want to be close-minded to what they're suggesting to me.

It doesn't help, it's just spiritual bypassing

What kind of health problems do you have?

I'd imagine that to Leo, the thought of doing this with his content would make him want to cry😂

I love this thread, thank you for making it

@RightHand That might get you there😂

Or while wearing one of these:

22kg under the tongue 😎

I don't know, I bought 500mg of 5-MeO-MALT and I emptied it into a glass vial, it seems fine.

Leo says it’s best to keep 5-Meos in a glass vial since they can leech through plastic over time

I'm in an extremely difficult life situation and I'd really like some advice on what to do. There is so much I could explain, but I'm going to try to keep this relatively short and just get to the point. So I've been suffering from extreme mental health issues for the past 7 years. It has been absolutely unbearable, and the suffering gets deeper and deeper as time goes on. I've spent the last 5 years trying to heal myself by making my own trauma healing technique, but I never succeeded with it. I finally decided to stop working on it, because I was going to end up killing myself, so I decided to go do ayahuasca. I spent 5 weeks around October this year doing ayahuasca. It ended up helping me tremendously and I felt totally transformed. Once I left the retreat, a few days later I lost almost all of my results, and they haven't returned since (it's been a month now). A week ago I had a really amazing mescaline trip that I felt I got a lot of good healing from, but then two days later the results were gone. I've gone through so much suffering and spent so much time trying to heal myself, almost 5 years, then I finally decided to throw in the towel and do psychedelics, just to stay alive, and now even after 5 weeks of ayahuasca I'm still in the same situation I was in before. I could write paragraph after paragraph explaining this, but you have NO IDEA how exhausted I am and how much I hate being alive. The fact that after all this time and effort, I still can't heal, I am so done, and I want more than anything than to be dead and put out of my misery. As a side note, over the years, as I've suffered more and more, I have developed a really deep connection to existential love. I can feel it and access it very easily, and I've come to realize that developing that connection has been the point of everything I've been going through, and that's helped me to hang in there. But it's gotten to the point where I don't care about that more and I just need this pain to stop, and I want to die. I hate being alive with a passion. I've been thinking though, considering that I haven't been able to heal even with psychedelics, and thinking about this connection to existential love i've been developing over the years, I wonder if the way this chapter of my life is supposed to end is for me to have some kind of massive awakening, to merge with existential love. I feel like if I could stay in my physical body, but be totally dead inside, I would be happy, and I wouldn't suffer anymore. Because of this, I have been thinking, maybe if I take a large amount of 5-MeO-MALT or 5-MeO-DMT and have complete ego death, maybe that would help me. I don't really expect that a state like that would stick, but maybe it would heal me in some way? Either way, if I was to do something like that, I know it would not be easy and it would totally terrify me and traumatize me. My ego is so sensitive and fearful that there is no way it would let go without putting up a fight, despite how much I hate being alive. I really don't know what to do in this situation, so I'd appreciate general advice, but I'd also like advice on the psychedelic thing, on if people think going for ego-death would be helpful to me, even if I have to go through a terror trip to get there. I want nothing more than to die and become one with God/existential love. I fucking hate this stupid human life. That's why I think an experience of ego-death/God realization could really help me, but I'd have to be sure it's what I really want, because I'm sure I'll have to go through a terror trip to get there. @RendHeaven going to tag you here because you suggested a large dose of malt to me before, and it kind of got me thinking, so I'd appreciate your advice as well

Thank you for your responses guys. I read through them all and they were helpful.

That's true. The challenge for me is that it's hard to enforce my opinions when I haven't spent hours deeply contemplating and deconstructing them, making sure I'm very very certain of everything I'm saying. Even if I did, I can't do that with every single opinion I have. Previously I would almost discard my own opinion for the sake of considering another person's opinion. I would still believe my own opinion for myself, but I wouldn't really enforce it, I would put it aside and fully try to consider and take on the perspective of the other person to see how I felt about it. I think putting my own opinion aside so strongly is what's hurting me. I think I should still stick with my own perspective, but be willing to discuss other potential perspectives, and only change my opinion and fully discard my own perspective once I see that another perspective is actually superior.

@Sincerity @QandC Are you guys not going to say anything else? You guys gave me tough love and said some harsh things, which I’m open to, but then I gave a rebuttal, and you had nothing else to say. Is that it?

So when you realize you never know anything 100%, you try to make sense of things to the best of your ability, but you are always open to other ideas and perspectives, and you never cling to one perspective too tightly, because you realize you can never know anything for sure? Also, reality is so big and complex that one single, narrow perspective would never be the whole truth of something

I think I understand what you’re saying, you mean you should never stop looking for deception and illusion that could be getting in the way of truth, because ultimately you can’t know anything 100% and you will always end up reaching a state of not knowing? …I think? What do you do if you can’t ever know anything? In that quote from my previous post, talking about atheism and religious beliefs, how could you even make a decision about what to believe in? How can you recognize errors in your epistemic process if you can’t know anything for sure at all? Maybe watching the video Leo linked would explain it

@Leo Gura Thank you

@Leo Gura Can you or someone else here explain what epistemology means? I have a rough idea of what it means but I don't understand it as well as I'd like to. My current understanding is that it refers to how you know something is true, how you can prove the validity of something. I have this section in the note I took on your video "the psychology of being wrong". You used this word, and I don't know if I fully understand what you're saying. "Ask yourself “how did I fall into this self-deception?” because most likely, that’s what you’re dealing with here. Think about what the epistemic gaps in your sense-making are that led to you getting this wrong. This is important because if you don’t do this, you will likely fall into a similar trap again. For example, if you were an atheist, it’s not enough to realize that atheism is wrong, you have to inspect the epistemic assumptions that led you there, because otherwise, you will fall into a similar trap, like religion or new age spirituality. You’re not going to see the problem with that because you’re not examining the structure. This is what it means to examine your self-deception, and this is how you will come to really understand self-deception. There’s a big difference between understanding self-deception as a concept, and seeing where you’re self-deceived." In regard to the quote above, does investigating your epistemic assumptions mean investigating how you decided your religious beliefs, what logic and rationalizations led to you deciding to become an atheist? Then questioning if those reasonings are really valid or not? Reading this is what made me think to ask about the word epistemology. When you say "epistemically grounded", does that basically mean it was thought through and contemplated effectively, it is based in truth and isn't clouded in self-deception, bias, etc?

I currently use 5-Meo-DMT or DMT around 3 times a week, but I only use small doses and I’m not going to be doing this long term. I’m only doing this right now for emotional healing purposes. I can imagine that if my doses were higher and my trips were deeper, I would get pretty ungrounded tripping multiple times per week. I think tripping once a week is fine, but as the guy above said, listen to your body and do what feels right for you

I can imagine that being absolutely hilarious while on a psychedelic😂 One time when I was doing ayahuasca, after the ceremony ended and I was riding out the effects, I was watching this video from 3:15 - 4:06 I laughed so hard for almost 5 minutes straight. It has to be one of the hardest laughs I’ve ever had in my life that video already makes me laugh a lot sober, but on a psychedelic it was the most bizarre and funny thing I’d ever seen

I live in Canada and it’s very easy to get your hands on psychedelics here legally. If you have the money you could move here for maybe 3-6 months, get whatever psychedelics you’re interested in, dedicate your time in Canada to doing the work you want to do with them, and then you’d be able to go home with many trips under your belt

What country do you live in?

If you close your eyes from 4:50 - 5:20 it sounds like a cartoon dog getting it's nails cut

I've heard the name, but I don't know him

I use 5-MeO-DMT only in small doses, for emotional healing purposes. I'm not ready to dive into ego-death or other deep spiritual experiences yet. My ego is too sensitive and fearful for that right now, and I've seen a few times when I've taken doses that have pushed my limits for what I can handle, I get very fearful and resistant and I can tell there is no way I'd be able to get myself to surrender, so I stick with small doses for now. Last night I took a small dose (one hit of a vape), and my intention was to receive deep love to help me cry out and release a lot of the emotional pain I've been dealing with lately. I wanted to see that true love is possible, because I've noticed lately that deep down I really doubt that it is, but I need to be open to receiving love to be able to heal. So I wanted to see that real love is possible. I started to feel into a lot of the pain I've been dealing with lately, and crying it out. It soon started to feel like I was communicating with something, like I was crying out my pain to this higher power. I wasn't fully conscious of God, but I think I was experiencing a very mild and introductory version of it, like I was starting to become conscious of God. I felt like I was crying to God, showing God my pain. I started thinking to myself, it's really beautiful that I'm able to have this interaction with God, without having to go through an ego-death that I'm not ready for. It felt like the intelligence of the substance made that happen for me, so that I could have this beautiful experience in a way that I could handle. As I had that thought, I suddenly realized, it's not the intelligence of the substance doing it, it's me (as God) doing it to myself! I as God am giving myself this experience fully catered towards me, so that I can start to awaken. As I realized that, Leo's words "God is gently pushing you to awaken" (or something like that) I think from his video "the ultimate structure of reality explained", came to mind, and it felt like that's exactly what was happening. I felt like I as a human have always been at the centre of a ball of yarn, tangled in all these strings of illusion and deception, and I felt like I had started to claw my way out of it and stick my head up out of the ball of yarn, and I could see that this whole time I was God stuck in all these illusions, and I was waking up to myself and what I am. Watching the transition happen from me being identified with my human self, and gradually starting to dis-identify with him and awaken to myself as this higher power/God, and looking back at my human self and seeing that all he is is an illusion that God is stuck in, until I, as God, wake up to myself, that was absolutely incredible to watch. From that point of view, I felt like I was watching my human self (Tristan) like he was my child, and I wasn't identified with him in that moment. I started to think about painful things that have happened throughout my life, and it was so clear that none of it was actually real, and I've been imagining all of it. I looked outside, at the trees and the sky, and it was also so clear that it was all my imagination. There's more that happened in this trip, some emotional healing related things, and also some other spiritual experiences, but this was the most significant part, and I wanted to share it on the forum. 5-MeO-DMT is such an incredible substance, I've noticed multiple times now the intelligence of it, and how it seems to recognize what you need and cater your experience towards that. I think it was so cool that I was able to have a partial, introductory God-Realization that didn't require me to go through an ego death that I'm not ready for.