impulse9

I often get into very strange states of mind by pondering on the idea that I exist at all. It is incalculably weird that I, or anything else, exists.

I don't know what the way is, lady Salvia wasn't specific LOL. And I'm not criticizing psychedelics, I'm criticizing the idea that they can be used as a vehicle for enlightenment. It is literally just another form of attachment, therefore it will lead to suffering.

Language really messes us up. Consider a world without language of any kind. In this world "meaning of life" is a useless mouth noise, or a bunch of irrelevant symbols. The reason you ask is because you don't know. Knowing is when you don't need the question.

Your reality and everything you consider to be "real", is you. "What you think, you become" isn't a metaphor, it's the fundamental principle. Placebo is simply becoming what you think, in action.

He is correct, you will never find enlightenment using any sort of substance. You may find glimpses of enlightenment, and you will definitely widen your perspective significantly, but the ego will always come back to haunt you, make your life miserable, and make you forget who you are. This is inevitable because the power that you borrow when you take psychedelics is temporary. This becomes immediately evident when no matter how deep your insights on psychedelics are, you will forget 100% of everything the second you come off, and only the residual feeling will linger on, but you will forget the actual insight because you can't humanize it, you can't English it, and you can't fit it into human logic, so the ego has no ground to stand on. The best use for psychedelic is as a tool to break down egos that are so solidified and so cemented in place that any other method of trying to probe them will fail. This is what Don Juan did to Castaneda. At some point he stopped using psychedelics and literally said "from here on, those are useless". With enough power, you can enter those worlds and beyond, on your own with your own power. I typically love your content Leo but when you say "these gurus are full of bullshit and high on their own dogmas" you fail to realize that the same holds for you. Ram Dass mentioned in a lot of his talks how he gave his guru ridiculous doses of LSD to see what happens, and nothing ever did. His guru supposedly just said "oh, these give you siddhis, right?", smiled and went on about his business. This baffled Ram Dass to no end but in the end he settled for the simple explanation "if you're in Cleveland, you don't need to take a bus to Cleveland". The fundamental truth of psychedelics is they are powerful entities which you can -borrow- power from to have essentially power experiences, in other words magic experiences. If this power isn't yours, then the experience is a passing phase and you will never get the point. If you over-do it, all that is liable to happen is it will make you mad by tearing your sense of identity apart. But this isn't enlightenment, enlightenment is out of this world, quite literally. And the reason these gurus don't talk about truths you find with psychedelics is because gurus have to treat everyone as kids. I've smoked a potent Salvia extract a number of times in my life, and by far the most insightful experience was when lady Salvia whispered into my ear that "this isn't the way". It is a good light show though.