Flyboy

The drop is in the ocean AND the ocean is in the drop

Would really appreciate the share, I have yet to see a method without downsides.

What has this done for you though? How does this affect your "now"? There's a huge part of me that really badly wants to experience this as you have, but when I reflect carefully, that part of me is entirely ego-based. It is only the "I" that wants this, that feels the lack that needs this, that feels incomplete without this. It is the "I" that needs to understand, that wants to experience omniscience or infinity, etc. From a truly ultimate perspective the infinite omniscient "ALL" is no better or worse than a paperclip. All contains one and one contains all. There is nothing that could possibly be more or better than anything else because of this. There's no higher or lower, there's no better or worse. Can you honestly say you experience this kind of absolute equanimity? THAT is what enlightenment and God-realization truly is about. Anything but that is evidence of illusion/delusion remaining. That's why I say you aren't there, no matter how deep your trips are. There is a falling backwards that happens in the heart of paradox, and that is where folks like Angelo and Frank Yang have gone and reside. I am convinced that is much more the point of existence than trip insights.

I'm trying to get you to consider that it isn't BS. Have you considered that during the time you tried all the workshops and classic meditation that you just didn't get far enough to actually start to really get it? To get there requires a really really deep digging into super subtle stuff. You need to get really freaking good at sensing your perceptions, thoughts, and feelings. This is super hard, but it can be done. The result is seeing reality as it really IS right now, which has nothing to do with a state and everything to do with what is actually true. I'm talking about NONDUALITY, and you're talking about transcendent states. To truly realize nonduality, radical no-self is foundational and has to be because it's the fundamental illusory split between subject and object. This is not "no-mind", but literally the collapse of all dualities and all identities, leading to absolute ineffable groundless paradox and non-description, and it only ever is this here eternally now. When you go chasing transcendence, you miss the whole boat because you miss that the deepest truth isn't a state or about any kind of content. This is the truth that brings peace and love and happiness. The very seeking that drives you to desire understanding with psychedelics IS separation from real understanding, from Being. I just see your mind constructing this frame in which there is this "high realization", a Leo that should embody it, and a noble drive for understanding. Break this construction and free fall backwards. Radically accept absolutely everything, even your own resistance and craving, and do this until it melts. Accept every dark emotion and thought. Accept the deep powerful NO that reverberates through your being when you try to let go. And keep going. It is so obvious you are not free, and I wish you would stop being stubborn here because it's just ego, and it misleads people who are using you as their primary resource.

Does anyone have a direct e-vape method with links to all the equipment needed that works reliably every time? Every setup I've seen has been very custom and all have had some notable cons. Still haven't seen a "perfect method" for getting the job done.

What do you guys think about the Listening Society's "Metamodernism" take? I bought the book and did some flipping... I'm a little skeptical as it seems to be pretty in the weeds and lacks the sensibility and predictive power of Spiral Dynamics (which is incredibly useful for general understanding, even if it is not always perfect). The meta-question is... how many "lenses" is too much? I suppose a flexible approach is to explore them and keep the ones that help and discard the ones that don't.

I want liberation, in this moment, for the rest of my life. I want to be permanently and completely free from subject-object duality in my direct experience of every sensation. I want to be free of the continuous suffering that referencing a "self" creates in moment-to-moment experience. I've done enough work to see this suffering very clearly, and from here there is simply no other choice. The deepest love is the acceptance of this moment exactly as it is. That's the purpose of this life, and the meaning of happiness and freedom. If I can get that far, I'll be happy to do all the psychedelics in the world and let you know what I find. But they are dubious shortcuts, and frankly not the real work. I've been to the Source on 60mg of DMT, and yes it was a transcendent experience. But I'm still me, and I still suffer. I want to BE that, not reference memories about it from tripping. What Angelo is talking about undoing is something so much more subtle than anything you ever talk about. It is right at the gateway of perception. It is in the finest details of thought and knowing and the subtle construction of time, space, frame, view, real-ness, self, etc. If you don't undo this, literally everything is filtered by it, including psychedelic trips. There is a reason people say psychedelics have nothing to do with enlightenment--this becomes simply obvious. Reality is already becoming luminous for me, and this is wonderful. Things shine with consciousness, and still there is something underneath that. I really hope you go back and look for this when the dissatisfaction really starts to eat at you, because on your path you can never escape that.

Great example of not understanding what enlightenment actually is. Watch 100 of his videos and realize that he understands mind, consciousness, and reality so much more deeply than you do. (I've watched almost all of them and read his book.) Angelo is legit, deeply realized, very intelligent, and intuitive. His videos all are aimed at directly un-knotting the myriad facets of mind-identification and perceptual filters which seemingly block THIS. If you watch one, you might think it's surface-level advaita stuff. It isn't. Your work is wonderful at the level of conceptual and up. His work is wonderful at undoing the entire construct of conceptual in direct continuous experience, and revealing what is beyond mind (which isn't no-mind!). Only one of those is freedom, peace, love, and truth. You can literally see this in his eyes, look for yourself.

Also, even regarding non-spiritual development, I personally think Spiral Dynamics is kind of weak after Yellow. Turquoise is kind of a blanket "catch-all" category. You'll find more nuance and useful higher stage description in the Cook-Greuter EDT model, imo. Enlightenment is only about what is most true in experience. The truth can be directly known at any of these stages of development. If it is, it will probably ripple into one's life in many ways, but development is by no means a prerequisite for enlightenment. One might argue the absolute self-honesty necessary to get there is more likely at higher stages, but some people find it intuitively on their own regardless.

@Someone here This isn't really solipsism but the shallow end of Dependent Origination. Read Seeing that Frees by Rob Burbea!

An analogy is a garden that represents your ability to imagine. You might consider it very big, even infinite. Yet, you acknowledge that there might be "stuff" out there which you can't imagine. Without close examination, it would appear to you that you've held space for something existing outside your garden. In reality, all you have really done is built a little wall inside your garden, labeled it as "the stuff beyond imagination", and allowed it to remain dark and mysterious--a nice placeholder. You now never have to leave your garden. This is just a trick you're playing on yourself to make it seem like you've considered that which is beyond your mind, while actually staying nice and safe inside it. Not Knowing goes deep. It is radical surrender. It is death. It's the gateless gate. Go there and stay there, again and again.

See this is where the Leo teachings are very misleading. NOTICE: "Absolute" is a concept. Collapsing of dualities is a concept. The capital letter stuff that supposedly captures the conceptual + non-conceptual is a CONCEPT. You are just going meta on concepts with concepts in order to convince yourself you're "beyond" the concepts while still using concepts. Things don't exist or Exist. There is no understanding or Understanding. This doesn't work. It falls all the way back. If that scares you, good. Welcome to the real work of actually surrendering into that unknowing.

Wow, I gotta step up my game

@MrTouchdown That's a very deep question you'll need to read some books for Seeing that Frees is a great one-stop-shop for that though. At its essence, existence itself is a concept which is projected onto "this-ness". When seen through, solidity falls away because "this-ness" has no properties and no substance. But you absolutely cannot take this as intellectual understanding, because that is just more concepts. You must deconstruct your perceptual filters until this shines through.

Quite skeptical of this... IME, Jhanas are the result of decreased mental friction and fabrication... much like lowering the resistance in a circuit. As resistance goes down, an accelerating "superconducting" effect happens (which is why this isn't about effort, really, but the ability to relax into this while maintaining a guiding focus). The peace and joy of Jhanas is probably similar to the Ketamine effect--it is sort of the way things are when you aren't making them otherwise. Ascribing this to a causal relationship with neurotransmitters is quite reductionist, IMO.

Your imagination exists now, too. What "exists" is literally what you experience, and you experience imagination as mental images, ideas, thoughts, sounds, etc. You also experience the world. Except this is not quite right, because existence itself fades with enough investigation (this is the idea of emptiness). You'll eventually conclude things neither exist nor don't exist, as the word almost doesn't apply anymore. In the same way, SELF (even the big God-realization self) doesn't exist either, as self and not-self make no sense from that non-perspective. What we're really talking about is the collapse of all duality (including those within language). Which is why this all gets paradoxical and impossible to really describe or talk about And also why "understanding" is ultimately futile, as understanding and not-understanding also collapse. Enlightenment is not "no-mind" like Leo seems to think, but rather the spontaneous realization that is possible from this place of genuine letting go, of true not-knowing and not-clinging. It is necessarily beyond the mind/concepts.

No, despite my disagreements with Leo about realization, I still really enjoy this channel. Few others have the perspective and holistic view to deliver content that really pushes and grows my thinking the way Actualized does. I do hope he continues, there are a lot of topics I'd still like to hear him discuss.

Just wondering if anyone knows what's up with Leo? Seems like the videos have been super sparse this year.

Yeah, I've had the suspicion that Leo is nearing the end of Actualized work for some time now. His heart doesn't seem as in it anymore. Grateful for all the ways it helped me though.

Spot on. Also be really careful with the idea that conceptuality increases with higher spiral stages. I do not think this is true. Spiral development is multifaceted and involves increasing nuance, not necessarily complexity. The simplicity of intuition moving towards Turqoise actually requires a letting go of the complexity that was nurtured in Yellow, allowing the models to be subsumed into the reality of flow. The journey towards awakening is mostly about finding and unraveling subtler and subtler levels of concepts. This goes way deeper than you realize at first. At first you notice big, normal, verbal thoughts and images. Eventually you notice thoughts that are like micro-blips, ephemeral and subtle, which create the sense of self (e.g. the seer of vision, the hearer of sound, the thinker of thoughts). Other thoughts turn colors and shapes into space. Other thoughts turn conceptual memory echoes, anticipation, and confirmation of anticipation into the sense of time. This goes DEEP, and is not accessible all at once. You can't get there until you get there (which is admittedly a struggle for me, I'm impatient ).

That doesn't look like the 5-MeO I've seen, I'll tell you that much. It's been a brownish white powder and crystalline. Definitely definitely definitely buy a testing kit (such as those from Dance Safe or similar) and do not put it in your body until you're pretty damn sure it's what you think it is. Even then, start with very small doses. I was badly injured by an MAOI powder I bought online that I didn't test. Do not learn this the hard way.

Do you even work here?

Spiritual means actually facing your darkest emotions, traumas, and resistance head on. If you make it all the way through this to liberation, you probably won't even identify as spiritual anymore. So, the ones that do are basically still going through some aspect of this "dark night". That would be my guess It is an incorrect assumption to label this phase "depression" and then to demonize its correlation with spirituality though. Very emblematic of scientific reductionism failing to understand the deeper picture.

A potential counter-point to this though is that men / masculinity is more mission and purpose oriented than the feminine. I would speculate that in terms of "seekers", anyway, that there are quite a few more men driven to reach enlightenment. I could be very wrong, but this makes sense to me.

It depends on you. For me, DMT served a critical function in my journey. I was essentially at a stage Green/Yellow place that was firmly rooted in a materialist paradigm. This was unconsciously unquestioned. DMT broke that like a hammer. I had taken other psychedelics and had great experiences, but no "brain stuff" could ever explain what you experience on DMT. It is unexplainable, unimaginable, uncreatable by a human mind. DMT forced me to re-examine my unquestioned assumptions about reality. That search led me to Leo and the rest of spirituality, and from there I grew tremendously. I do not think this would have been possible, for me, without a direct experiential "kick in the pants." I am inherently very skeptical and self-assured, so for me, the opinions of others never hold more weight than my own. I needed my OWN mind to be changed to be able to open it. This was the true function of DMT for me. Unlike Leo, I do not believe DMT represents something "ultimate" or awakening. I think it is like a random taste of the limitless potential of reality, but to think that even THAT is IT is to miss the thing entirely. While DMT does feel like it "ramps up consciousness", this is still being stuck in model / paradigm. While the sense of Knowing that eventually replaces your egoic identity is dramatically increased, the circuitry of the ego is not unwired through psychedelics. DMT still occurs within perception, that perception is still filtered (in ways we cannot know until they are undone) through our rawest sense of egoic self, and ultimately we relate to these experiences through limited mind. Enlightenment is not of that nature, quite simply. It is the unconditioned, the unfiltered, and it's present right at the heart of your experience NOW (except even the "now" is a filter, but don't worry about that for now). It's just unraveling those filters that is very tricky