Flyboy

From an energetic perspective, getting the tongue into the nasal cavity all the way up to the soft nerve connection point to the pineal gland is THE most important part of the whole practice. That being said, you should really carefully think twice about whether you WANT to provoke this energy before it is naturally ready to come out. They're not kidding when they say that your energy body is full of blockages related to your stored conditioning / stress / issues. If you force Kundalini to rise by creating this huge potential difference, it's like arcing electricity at high voltage -- you have no idea whether it will damage anything or take the wrong path (it's very dangerous unless it travels straight up the spine--if it arcs into one of the nadis you're really going to get messed up). To me this feels like a dangerous "short cut" attempt to have some mystical experience. You'd be far better off deepening insight with clarity and concentration, while working through your emotional / ego issues in parallel. Such practice will gradually and holistically unblock your energy system as they progress. When you're ready, Kundalini will arise naturally to help the process unfold (I think it acts kind of like a turbocharger). This is much safer and healthier than skipping all that and going straight for it.

What are you trying to control? What are you craving? What are you clinging to? These will point you towards the cause of your suffering, even if you don't like the answer (such as: you are clinging to the spiritual path, to enlightenment, to Truth, etc.). Paradoxically, the way forward is to unwind this clinging, even to things like spirituality. MCTB is a great place to build a deep understanding of the meditative path / maps. However, I think it also has huge limitations, and is particularly poor at addressing the proper place of emotions, love, and heart (which Ingram himself admits). I really recommend Seeing that Frees, as it is deep and profound but starts simply, and is "whole" in its treatment of wisdom and love. Sounds like you need that. Also, don't forget you're super young. At 19 you're still a kid, no offense. Don't be in a rush, you have tons of time and lots of life to live. Handle your education, relationships, emotions, building a healthy ego, financials... all that stuff. You will need that foundation to live a good life--awakening will come when it comes. Also, personally, I'd relax on the Kriya. Kriya attempts to be a weird jack-of-all-trades practice combining energy work, concentration, self-inquiry, insight, and a bit of snake oil, all in the hopes of a mystical "glimpse." I'm sure it can work, but I personally think you'll make much better progress developing concentration and insight separately, and truly understanding what you're trying to accomplish with each branch of inquiry. Kundalini can be super dangerous and disruptive, too, so just let that happen when it's ready. I've lost way too much sleep this past year from unwanted energy stuff.

This is great advice. I am quite happy to let people argue until they are blue in the face about politics. It's not that the truth "can't be known," but in fact that there is no truth. There is only perspective, based on webs of conceptualization and categorization, based on infinite regressions and varied individual direct experience. Letting go of your attachment to "knowing the truth" is definitely the first step towards wisdom! You can of course take stands and have opinions based on nuance and principles, but hold them lightly and always admit that ultimately you do Not Know. In the end, all judgement, blame, and criticism is untenable. And clinging is the root of suffering, so just let it go, brah

@Leo Gura Still really want you to talk with Frank Yang (wouldn't be an interview, more of an open discussion). I was fully onboard the Actualized train until Frank made me deeply ask if I was missing something. 2000 pages of reading later and a lot of meditative work, and I'm convinced he has a valid point that your teachings may be missing. Heeding your own words on self-bias, ego, and open-mindedness would serve you well here, I think. If you don't question the belief that you have had deeper enlightenments than "these lowly meditators," well, I think that's... unwise. Hope you'll consider it.

Dosage is definitely not a competition. Shoot for that which helps you achieve new and deeper insight. Sometimes, that is a LIGHTER dose. And so much depends on how you approach it and the work you do outside of the trip. After months of meditation, setting serious intentions, and having some very deep questions in mind, a very light 4-ACO dosage took me into literally DMT territory for 2 hours. I didn't realize this was possible until it happened to me, and this was not my first rodeo with 4-ACO (or DMT, for that matter).

For the life of me I don't understand his reasons for "having a big secret." It feels so immature. If you really wanted to keep something secret, simply don't announce that it exists. All this announcement and subsequent hiding just feels like an ego trip. But please, feel free to prove me wrong.

In addition to these two books, I HIGHLY recommend "Seeing that Frees" and "Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha". You need to read all 4 of these books to gain a balanced perspective: the analytical side (Ralston), concentration development (TMI), maps of the path and insight meditation (MCTB), and putting it all together with heart and wisdom (StF). Seeing that Frees is the most important book in this series, though also the most advanced. Read it multiple times. You will unlock a million directions to explore by starting here. Be patient, it will probably take a lot of time and effort before you see fruit on this path. But it's possible if you truly desire it. Also, the most advanced community you will likely find is http://www.awakeningtoreality.com/ However, don't be surprised if you don't understand a word of it right now. Just bookmark it and come back to it one day.

I love Anna because she is a balancing perspective. She definitely has her own flavor and way of speaking, but I believe her awakening is authentic and that she speaks from it. It's very hard to find a feminine flavor of these teachings, and I would suggest that hers are generally for people who are farther along on the path than for beginners. I think Leo is correct that for beginners, this won't help much. But beyond a certain point, the deepness which belies her simple-sounding statements begins to become apparent. Imagine someone telling you "Love is the answer." You could hear that a million times and dismiss it. But when you truly start to understand the Universe, that statement takes on layer after layer of deeper and more profound meaning. I think her teaching is like that.

You sound like you have a very strong / solidified ego, with lots of splits and separation built-in. Lots of victim thinking, lots of shadows, lots of anger and feelings of "me-ness", and a lack of connection to your heart. I say this very directly only because this was also me. There is a way out, but it will require a deep desire to stop suffering and to open your heart. The way life works, it may be that you simply need to suffer enough that this desire forms. However your path unfolds, I hope you are able to get to a better place. If you have the capacity for being brutally honest with yourself, I'd really recommend integrating your shadows before going any farther with anything else. You gotta cut the anchors before you can set sail! Existential Kink is an interesting book for getting started with that.

What Nahm is really getting at is that the "I thought" nests itself into MANY of your experiences. Every time you have an intention to do something, the I-thought latches onto it immediately and "takes credit" for the intention thought. In reality, the intention happened first--and no sensation can take credit for another sensation. When you see, there is no watcher, only that which is seen. I challenge you to find ANY separation between the two. When you feel a sense of self, that is usually a felt body sensation + emotional background pattern + I-thought. Or, alternatively, you could notice that the self-sense arises IN RESPONSE TO interpretation of phenomenon. For example, when you see a car, you fabricate out of the colors and shapes an "object" which relates back to YOU and how YOU could use/benefit from that object. When you feel pain, you fabricate a YOU that is "feeling" the pain. In reality, there is just pain arising. With close observation you can see this in 100% of your experience. And finally, when Leo trips, and God arises, the I-thought latches onto God. But there is only God arising

Just another classic case of spiritual narcissism. Sigh.

I agree with Leo, ultimately. I glimpsed infinite intelligence on a deep mushroom trip and frankly it blew me away. I always had a lot of ego about my intellect--that experience helped me to realize that having an ego about being smart is like a 3-year-old bragging to the 2-year-olds. "My" intelligence is NOTHING compared to infinite intelligence. Though, I hope I will one day completely see that I am That too

My IQ is around 150-160. In my opinion, this type of intelligence (IQ) is a combination of nature and nurture. I was certainly born with a good brain, but I also received a ton of intellectual nourishment during my entire childhood, including encouragement to be "smart", curious, and the drive and self-confidence (slash independence neurosis) to pursue difficult challenges. I constantly challenged myself. I loved to learn, and of course my ego was firmly rooted in it too. My greatest pleasures came from the successes of my mind. Now, as an adult with a good bit of meditation experience, I've watched my brain think and observed how it works in quite a lot of detail. The little processes are extremely quick and advanced. Bits of information from global memory are accessed and linked and iterated on with astonishing rapidity. Intuition fuels "pictures" which surface out of the subconscious and then inform the left-brain's analytical work, and meta-feedback loops of this kind happen almost automatically and instantaneously. The whole thing is spectacular. On psychedelics, it's even more amazing: emotion, intuition, logic, and language are freed from their "lanes" and allowed to dance in unison in a glorious spiral. I guess my point is that though you are given genetic "hardware", a great deal of intelligence is based on how well you learn to use your mind. Because it is such a global process, this can't really be trained as much as it is simply the result of a total lifestyle that nourishes its growth. If you really want to be smarter, challenge the hell out of yourself. Learn diverse things that are really difficult for you. Constantly be curious, and pay attention to how your mind works. Exercise and nutrition and meditation will all help as well. That being said, I'd frankly encourage holistic growth, relationship development, emotional mastery, and life purpose over intentional intelligence work. Being smart is useful but also a burden. The ability to conceptualize well means you are trapped in a web of illusion 5x stickier than most people. This is why most super smart people are deeply unhappy, I think. Plus, the most useful thinking is done when you understand the big picture. Smart people can be REALLY WRONG about stuff when they are stuck inside of paradigms or fantasy worlds.

I have to agree that Leo is sounding more and more spiritually narcissistic. His latest video just made me shake my head. He is missing basic tenets of ego (e.g. giving someone $500 and not saying anything is NOT divine love, but rather cultivating the self-image of being a "good person" which will then project outwards as a reinforced part of your ego construct). Between that and saying no one on the planet could possibly understand his enlightenments, I'm getting sick of it. It doesn't matter if that is TRUE--the fact that he announces it loudly every 2 seconds is the problem, and indicative of a great deal of arrogance on his part. Leo does not speak humbly or open-mindedly anymore. He thinks everything he says is "from above." He thinks everyone he encounters is beneath him in thinking or development. This simply isn't the case. I value his work a lot, but I wish he would take feedback like this to heart and take a hard look at his own ego, which seems to have escaped his notice. You don't hear people like Adyashanti talking the way Leo does. I don't hear compassion in his voice very often. Open up the heart.

But don't you see, if there is no YOU, then your suffering is the direct result of your delusion. They are interconnected and co-dependent. While unraveling your delusion all the way is quite the task (ie. full enlightenment), reducing your suffering can happen immediately by changing how you look at things and by breaking the links of delusion one by one. In this case, notice that you are creating a conceptual imaginary field of experience in which you are solidifying the "idea" of having other people's experiences, and also notice that you deem those experiences "bad" through the lense of your own self-biased ego and personal survival perspective. That's like saying I would never wear your pants, because they wouldn't fit me! In this way you start to unravel the coarse level of illusion, and with it, coarse solidified levels of suffering. Eventually, you can deconstruct reality at finer and finer levels to reduce suffering more and more (such as realizing that even the feeling of good and bad is itself a solidification of smaller and smaller sensations, impermanent, and not to be identified with). This process applies to agency, identity, duality, time, space, and every possible mind state. With each dissolution and disidentification, you expand and open while suffering diminishes. In the end all dualities collapse, subject and object vanish, and there is Only This

And you believe that? I'm not arguing with Leo. I'm saying YOU are believing him and then using that belief as the basis for a strong mental conceptualization, rooted in your own ego, self-bias, aversion, and delusion, and thus causing your own suffering. Stop doing that. Stop believing, stop conceptualizing, stop craving and clinging, stop creating fantasies and their associated self-image reflections and body-mind feelings. From "God's" perspective this delusion does not exist, and thus experiencing these things is not suffering for God. It is only suffering as imagined by your finite separate self / ego. You cannot integrate this from that perspective, and thinking about it conceptually like this is really a mistaken endeavor. Free yourself first.

@Leo Gura Seeing That Frees. This book replaces even Not Knowing for me as the most profound book I've found on enlightenment. If you haven't read it, I think you need to. As evidenced in some of your arguments with Frank Yang, for example, I get the impression [though acknowledge I don't know] that you have neglected the "machine code" level of enlightenment in favor of the grand fireworks of psychedelics. As profound and helpful as your insights are from those experiences, you yourself state that if your epistemology isn't 100% correct, neither is ANYTHING else you think you know. I hope your self-assuredness doesn't stop you from open-mindedly considering that perhaps you are missing something important at the very foundation of self and reality. You have said you prioritize "understanding" over the elimination of suffering in your work... I think this is actually a somewhat ironic thing to say. What if true Understanding implies Freedom, and until you have it, your epistemology actually fails to connect to Absolute Reality? I'm implying something profound without stating it, as I think that is best discovered on your own. We're all in this illusion together, and my aim is solely to find the deepest Truth, as I'm convinced yours is as well. Much appreciation for everything you do, you have been a tremendous help in my own journey.

I like to think of TMI as a great place to learn the "fundamentals" -- i.e. good habits that will give you the foundation and groundwork to eventually reach mastery levels. A master, after all, is really only someone who is so good at the fundamentals that the endeavor appears effortless. The interludes are especially useful as well for building a framework of how the mind works. That being said, a trap I've run into with TMI is that you can definitely over-think the techniques... he gives you so much to think about that it's easy to get neurotic and stressed out about trying to remember the 17 things you're supposed to be doing every second. Balance his techniques with a willingness to playfully explore and experiment. This is the single best piece of advice I've come across in all of the books I've read. The actual real-deal skill is simply more nuanced, complex, and intuitive than the grindy mechanical techniques can address. They are like starting points from which to explore, not rigid rules to be followed in every moment. I hope this helps! I highly recommend Seeing That Frees as a counterpoint to TMI, as this attitude of playfulness and heart (which is missing from many instructions) is fully developed.

Albino Penis Envy - it's a strand of magic mushroom

The Law of One, as spiritual sounding as it is in many regards, is still something which requires you to BELIEVE in the source if you consider it "true". Structurally, this remains on the same epistemological plane as any religion, ideology, or conceptual idea. I would suggest that you consider it "entertainment" if you choose to read it (in terms of how you hold its truth). That does not mean you cannot get some great ideas to contemplate from the material! The same is true for religious texts and scriptures. There are lots of great ideas in many of them. Just always be vigilant to retain your precious Not Knowing when it comes to anything outside of your direct experience. This will keep you from becoming a zealot or zombie

"No Mind" is not the goal of "traditional meditative enlightenment." This statement by Leo is simply incorrect, and therefore the distinction of a consciousness axis that is God-mind to No-mind is also incorrect. [This highlights a blindspot of forsaking meditation/self-inquiry for only psychedelics, IMO] Mind itself is a distinction, without which the experience of "thought" could not exist except as a raw perception [Ralston, Genius of Being]. Mind is a distinction that is only possible by considering oneself to be separate and limited. For God to be a mind, you must project the distinction of mind onto Reality. This is a subtle but terrible Map vs Territory error. God is that which is the source of all distinctions yet none of them, yet also not separate from them. The same mistake applies to Self and Consciousness. Why do you believe everything is Consciousness? Only because you cannot imagine a universe that isn't "known" by something such as consciousness. That does not mean, however, that such a universe isn't possible. Why do you believe God has a "self"? Only because you are still looking from within your "self", and cannot conceive of an experience lacking such. But GOD IS NOT AN EXPERIENCE, but the source of all of them. Even existence and imagination are concepts, themselves more limited than Reality. Everything you think, absolutely everything, is MORE limited than Reality, even your idea of Absolute Infinity. Even using the word Reality is wrong, because "realness" is a fabrication too. Pure, limitless, infinitely intelligent imagination isn't even IT. Why? Because we can conceive of it. Where does this leave us? Nowhere. Not Knowing. The Mystery. The last surrender is that of understanding itself. But this is very advanced, as Leo loves to say. And it leaves you Right. Here. Right. Now. The universe dances. This is it.

If you look closely, "I am" is just a thought + sensation. It's a very powerful one, as it feels "fundamental", but it's just another ground that you stand on. All sensations and thoughts just happen on their own... none of them own or are aware of each other. They exist WITHIN awareness, and even that is wrong, because awareness wouldn't exist without them. Awareness IS them. You cannot find any separation between that which Knows and that which is Known.

While I get what you're pointing at, this isn't super helpful because at the end of the day it's just getting picky about the meaning of "searching". Undoing could easily be bucketed WITHIN the category "searching". Searching is not necessarily external, and as long as this is recognized, I think it's still appropriate to recognize that intention is still required from the perspective of the separate self to undo identifications and attachments. Without intention (aka searching), you will remain separate. Just because something already is the case does NOT mean it will be known simply by not doing anything. The Earth was always round, but many lived their lives as if it was not. I'd recommend that the search continue until the idea of searching becomes silly. When it is PERFECTLY KNOWN that there is nothing left to search for, you can simply let go and rest in Being. But not before

Point 2 feels very self-biased to me, Leo. Time may technically be an illusion from an "absolute" standpoint, but we are not living that in our day-to-day experience. Regardless of our true nature, we are living these human lives from the perspective of these body-minds. Within this limited context, the only time that matters is NOW, and psychedelics only leave you with a memory occurring NOW, which is conceptual, flawed, and by definition Not It. How you can you so fiercely defend this? Your own warnings of self-bias seem very appropriate here--you have experienced non-duality/etc. with psychedelics and haven't achieved permanent awakening through meditation/contemplation. Is it not self-biased to promote the former and downplay the latter? I don't think it's healthy OR true to tell people the NOW doesn't matter. It is the only thing we have within this human experience, and personally, I want to awaken in the NOW. You're right that it's very hard to do and that people have to be committed to do it. But it doesn't take 40 years, nor is it impossible, and I think you really downplay the spiritual journey that happens within that process. You will never be free until you are free right now.

You must be extremely conscious of how you can run people over with your logic. I have found developing my feminine side / empathy / listening skills to be extremely important to balance this weakness. And you'd be surprised, when you let go of dependence on logic alone, the world gets a lot more colorful and rich.