Tim R

@Bulgarianspirit What about the desire to reach Mahasamadhi?

@Brandon L I can relate to you very much. My parents are also rather conservative and have no clue about psychedelics, they throw them in the same category with weed, crack, meth and heroine. Drugs are drugs to them and they don't have any benefits. When I was 18 years old, I started getting into spirituality and so forth. I only smoked weed, but a lot of it. Weed is a great and gentle teacher, if you don't overdo it. One evening, I visited a good buddy of mine, I came back rather late. Because I didn't tell my parents when I'd come back home, they started worrying (to this day, my parents start very easily to worry) because I was riding on my bike home. I arrived late at night, without any lights on my bike which drove my parents nuts; I could've been killed in traffic (I had to ride home for about 1 hour because my friend lived in the nearby village, the roads lead through the forest and very rarely have any light). Anyway, when I arrived home, I went showering. Suddenly, a thought popped up in my mind: "they just found out". And I was right. I went upstairs, saw the lights were switched on in my room, I heard some noise and there on my bed was my father sitting, in sheer disbelief about what he had just found: In my bag, I had a glass pipe (you know, for the weed, not like those damn crack pipes), some weed, and all my other smoking utensils, all neatly packed into a back box I prepared the other day, which was now spread open on my bed. Now, guess what: Just the very next day, I would move out to an other city for university. Well, my father was absolutely appalled. He leads a workshop for mentally disabled people and he knows about the horror stories of drugs ruining your psyche forever. He didn't tell my mother, because he wanted me to do it. He didn't cope too well with these news; that night, he couldn't sleep at all and so he came to my room every hour and switched on the lights so I couldn't sleep either. The next day, I told my mother. It was probably the hardest thing I had ever done to my parents, because they didn't know anything about weed at all, so my mother just had a complete breakdown, she couldn't believe her sweet little boy does drugs. My father doesn't know anything about it either, all he ever heard about drugs are the horror stories of how disruptive of an effect they can have on your psyche... I tried to explain that I used it for spiritual and recreational purposes, they didn't care. All they heard was "drugs", which triggered the most negative associations you could ever think of, and only that. You know, schizophrenia and pictures of heroine addicts who look like an abused scarecrow. I moved out. Finally, freedom. The relation between my parents and me developed very well since I moved out, I see them every 1 or 2 weeks. I know very well what you mean, when you say: Try to develop yourself to the point, where it doesn't bother you anymore. That's the trick. You won't ever get them out of their belief system/ world view, simply because they don't want to. Moving out will provide you with immense freedom and an opportunity to learn who to grow up. Don't cut them out of your life, they're still your family and they love you. What you will find out eventually, is that you love them and all their bullshit too, because that's who they are and it wouldn't be love, if it didn't include their world views and bullshit. Cutting them out would not be the right thing to do, I think. That's a real spiritual practice for you; how to love and accept people who you think are full of shit. Don't forget that you're full of shit, too.

I've tried to explain certain very, very basic ideas like "a word is not that what it stands for" or "your values are your own, subjective ideas" or "there is no objective right or wrong" to people I love, mainly to my family. They are however incredibly stuck in their materialist, illusionary, reductionist, and rationalist (even if they oftentimes aren't rational at all) worldview. I can't share any "advanced" philosophical ideas with them and more and more I feel misunderstood and excluded. To the very, very few good friends I have (they are into spirituality, science and so forth) I also can't properly present some of my visions and ideas which require a huge interconnected web of spirituality, politics, science, philosophy etc. It's just... I feel the misunderstanding and intellectual exclusivity has grown to such immense size that I just fear to become this one seemingly crazy, slightly passive-aggressive loner who thinks he knows better than everybody else. I am very wary of intellectual hybris, although I feel this is to a certain extent one of the traits of a mainly stage Yellow person. This is utterly nerve-racking and I get irritated. It's getting lonely. Help?

I just had an insight. We tend to glorify the teachers we follow and love and we want to hear everything they have to say and teach, what we ought to do in order to find happiness. But what we oftentimes don't do, is looking at the teacher's mistakes and learning from that. Despite all the teacher's wisdom, he fell into a certain trap. There's so much wisdom you can derive from that... What a trap it must've been, that even the teacher didn't make it. We forget that they are humans just like us who listen to them. Nobody's perfect. I particularly had to think of Alan Watts' drinking issue.

Hey @Leo Gura I was wondering, have you ever participated in an Ayahuasca ceremoy? If you haven't yet (which would surprise me), would you consider doing it?

A fancy term for the recontexualization of your perception of reality.

Yup, true. There can't be anyone apart from awareness who in turn is aware of awareness. That is why awareness is nothing and you don't exist - so nobody is aware of nothing. That's the point.

Hey folks, do you have any advice for microdosing with mushrooms?

Why not? Only because 5MeO is stronger than NN doesn't mean you can't try it, and Ayahuasca isn't just smoked/vaped DMT, so...

That's because the hierarchy is about Self-Actualization, whereas awakening the transcendence of the self implies... Thus, the hierarchy becomes obsolete

@solene You could stop drinking it altogether, of course. Since you only drink 1 or 2 cups a day, even if you were to immediately cut it out of your life, the withdrawal symptoms wouldn't be a big deal. Maybe some craving, slight irritation, a bit of a headache but really nothing severe at all. You don't experience craving with green or black tea because 1. the don't contain as much caffeine 2. due to several other ingredients like certain bitter compounds in Camelia sinensis (the tea plant, black and green tea are the same plant), the absorption of caffeine is slowed down Whereas with coffee you don't have these compounds and you just experience a peak high after which you sort of crash. That's where the craving comes in. You could substitute coffee with black tea and after that, substitute black tea with green tea (it contains even less caffeine). If you don't want to miss out on coffee and just reduce (not stop) your caffeine intake, I suggest you switch to decaf and get my substitution plan going.

I was just surfing through the NCBI ( National Center for Biotechnology Information https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Center_for_Biotechnology_Information ) for some information I could use for the uni research paper I'm currently writing (correlation between serotonin and personality), when I stumbled upon this relatively new paper. For all you other Actualizers who just like me, love science, philosophy and spirituality Here's the link: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7053547/ It's just lovely to see how science begins to recognize that the whole universe is consciousness

Many people say "well, money doesn't buy happiness, but it buys freedom and independence. And that's what makes me happy." Leo says the same thing "[...] freedom to not be someone's else's bitch." Well, what they don't get is that you become money's bitch. You become dependent upon money to stay independent regarding other domains. The problem therefore hasn't been solved entirely, just condensed and relocated. But yes, it's better than being poor... Unless you're actually free and don't care whether you're poor or rich. Which is way more difficult to achieve than simply getting a job

Question above. I haven't yet found any proof for siddhis being real. I suppose they can be real though. I also think a yogi who has obtained any siddhis wouldn't brag around and levitate through the village all the time or whatever. Does anyone here know more about this?

@BipolarGrowth Could you elaborate?

Yeah and I always feel good after I've eaten something sugary or after I've taken drugs, doesn't mean that it's healthy or good for me. Becoming fat is only one way of your body telling you that something isn't going quite right. You don't have to become chubby for being unhealthy. You can be as scrawny as a stick and yet suffer from diabetes, or some organ problem. Don't be naive.

LOL?

Language is not something only humans use. All creatures communicate and all communication is based on "meaning"; language is a pointer. Even if it's something like chemical communication among plants, certain chemicals mean something. Humans have developed the most complex language among all creatures, as far as we know. Some say the communication between dolphins and whales are very complex, too. And concerning ego... Well, some animals can recognize their body in a mirror, while young humans can't (yet). You can literally talk to a bloody gorilla.

Humans are animals...

No, not quite We share a common ancestor with plants, but animals are not the descendants of plants themselves. As a matter of fact, we are closer related to fungi (mushrooms) than to plants.

We certainly don't experience the world in the same way as other beings. Apes probably experience something very similar, but as "lower" the life form, the more primitive its perception/experience becomes. Bacteria for example have incredibly primitive perception; they don't perceive anything visual, acoustical, haptic or gustatory. They can perceive "scent" thanks to chemo-receptors, which isn't real smelling but some other sort of chemical perception. The experiencer who underlies all experience is the same though. If an bacteria could describe its sense of "I", it would have to describe the same "I" which we describe; nothingness/pure, empty awareness.

@lmfao I know how you feel. During the winter months of 2018 I had to slow things way down, because I started to have panic attacks and to a certain extent derealization and depersonalisation, which both in turn perpetuated my anxiety. I experienced some shattering realizations within a very short frame of time and I had the exact same thoughts as you are having now; "maybe I'm neurotic/maybe I'm not ready/maybe it's just an excuse/ etc". You have to listen to yourself. Don't dismiss what's happening. It is a very valuable experience and a chance to grow. Pay attention to what is happening and don't let your mind go haywire. Slow things down, maybe stop for a while. Remember, you can come back later and pick everything up where you left it. Ground yourself, develop a routine, engage in "mundane" activities. Go to the gym. Don't forget to eat healthy foods, although you can make some exceptions of course. Listen to calming music. Calm yourself. It's alright, you don't always have to do spiritual work. You did it because you chose to and now you chose to rest for a while, you deserve it. Easy does it through here. You got this The time will come when you'll know, you'll feel that you are ready again to do spiritual work. But don't hurry anything, don't worry about the progress you're making, you're always good where you are at. Here's something I wish I knew before:

Your toenail is the absolute... Edit: where's the comment about the toenail? Without it, this comment seems just nuts... But true nonetheless!!

I'd say it's the result of both the Christian mythology of Jesus as Gods son and our association with the word "God" - both are part of this Christian mythology and we are its psychological inheritors, whether we like it or not. Don't read too much into it. I also don't think it's a delusion of grandeur, because you are clearly aware of the fact that you're not somehow better than Jesus.

I have to disagree... Yes, with Einstein! Many people understand certain things extremely well, and yet they are just horrible at explaining. @Red-White-Light If you don't understand something, at least don't blame it on others.