Argonaut

This has been one of the most helpful threads on this forum recently!! Would love to hear @Leo Gura's thoughts on @Jannes' question - why disregard baseline consciousness? Is anyone else confused by this?

@r0ckyreed this post was spot on. There's always a higher awakening. One thing I've been thinking about... although its really weird... is what would happen if you tortured a mystic. At a certain point of pain, I think every human would become identified with their ego. We only know how awakened someone is within the limits of their tiny human life. This topic is what has turned me away from some of @Leo Gura's most recent perspectives. Even with copious amounts of psychedelics, there are always higher awakenings, so why harm your body and disregard your human life for a temporary experience of something that you can never stabilize? I'm more of a fan of using psychedelics to have temporary experiences that allow me to raise my baseline consciousness as much as possible and embody the truth as much as my human self can. Seems like the point of the game is to enjoy it, not to constantly worry about trying to play a more advanced game and shit on the one you're currently in.

@Leo Gura do you try to date stage green women who are into spirituality at this point, or do you just go for cute, fun, intelligent women regardless of their spirituality? My own conversations with stage green women about spirituality can leave me feeling frustrated, so I find it hard to imagine you dating one. But at the same time, it's damn near impossible to find yellow or beyond

@Leo Gura why are you flexing on us with your genetically superior looks?

@Majed I only discovered that I have OCD after my intrusive thoughts became a major issue in the middle of my spiritual work. I had to step away from spirituality for a while to learn how to handle intrusive thoughts and start doing therapy. I also found out I'm autistic once I really started looking under the hood and working with a therapist. In retrospect, I think my autism + OCD combination is an incredible tool for spiritual work when I can harness it. I just had to learn how to reign things in when these traits turn into neuroses. Following this work was really dangerous for a period of time when I didn't know I had OCD/autism and didn't know how to navigate my issues, but I feel better than ever now that I've done some serious work on it all. I also might not have gotten to the root of my mental conditions if it wasn't for this stuff! It's all about timing for me. If I'm socially isolated, failing to take care of my basic needs, and battling intrusive thoughts, that's no time for intense spiritual practices. The spiritual work in those times is just getting my shit together.

@Scholar I've done this combination a few times and I feel like it's too hard to dose. Personally, I didn't feel like any of the unique experiences from this combination were even that different from anything I'd experienced on one or the other by itself. And I'm telling you, it was SO unpredictable to gauge a dose. There are so many variations in the potency of batches of shrooms and in different tabs of acid. So even taking one by itself can be unpredictable. But taking them together can be a total tossup. I took .25g shrooms along with 175ug acid one time and had a pretty chill trip outside running around a river. The next time, I took .5g shrooms and 200ug acid from the same batches, could barely walk, got planted to the floor, and became a saxophone spaceship with a band playing soul music floating through the void. Amazing trip lol, but I'd rather not fuck around with that level of unpredictability. As I'm sure you know, psychedelic doses generally increase exponentially in their potency. And if you do them together, the dosing increases exponentially together. So even the jump in dosing that I made between those two trips was a risky massive leap in retrospect! The first combo trip I mentioned at the river felt like a little over 200 ug of acid if I took it alone. The second saxophone spaceship one felt like 400ug if I took it alone. So yeah, I'd just play it safe and take one at a time. Idk about other combinations, but shrooms and lsd together is nuts!

Wait I thought creep game was our specialty here... don't women like the whole DMT desert troll vibe?

I'm confused by the difference between having no identity and realizing that you're God. Aren't those the same thing? Realizing that you're God is almost like a non-identity since you're everything and nothing, right? Identity is dualistic if you're claiming to identify as one thing as opposed to other things... but realizing that you're God means that you identify as all things and also nothing. Realizing that you're God is the only non-dual identity. If nonduality is all about how there's only ONE thing... isn't God a good word for that one thing? Like what else would this magical shit be? Kinda confused about the whole deal with the word "experience" too. I understand that people don't use that word since "experience" implies a process over a period of time, which doesn't actually exist since time is an imaginary concept in the present. Realization might be better, but then again, that makes it sound like an ego had some kind of insight. Same with awakening and enlightenment. Who awakened or was enlightened? I feel like any word that someone uses could be torn to shreds and we're just using semantics as a way to spiritually dunk on each other without actually clarifying anything lmao

24 M in Austin, TX. Is anyone else in Texas or Austin?

@Princess Arabia @Ajax I've been thinking about this topic SO much recently. I have so many neurodiverse people in my friend groups and family that I didn't even realize what "normal" was until I left college. I agree with many of the previous replies. Being neurodiverse can cause people to explore things that the average person has no good reason to actually investigate. Because of this, I consider my own OCD a true blessing. I obsess over things that are uncertain, so of course, I was particularly interested in the big existential questions of life that nobody seemed to have answers for. And thank God that obsessing took me in the right direction haha BUT also, neurodiverse people struggle with things that the average person doesn't! One of the most challenging things I have ever faced is obsessive intrusive thoughts. These are normally taboo, blasphemous, offensive thoughts that get stuck on repeat.... my last big experience with them lasted 8 months on the same terrifying thought. It was SO important for me to use a label, because it just so happens that any advice tailored to people with pure O tends to work shockingly well on me. Seriously, it felt like someone wrote an instruction manual to my brain when I read my first book about pure O. And if I avoided labels, I would still be stuck in confusion and shame. I feel like I did a lot of spiritual bypassing where I would tell myself that I could just meditate my way out of intrusive thoughts or just take more psychedelics... but I needed a damn therapist no matter how woke I was lol. So yes, I definitely think that certain types of neurodivergence can lead people towards spirituality. However, that means us cooks sometimes have to spend a bit more time taking care of our mental well-being in the relative world.

Worrrrdddddd thank you so much @Leo Gura. By the way, if you were a frog, you'd have the best gah damn frog song in the whole pond, sir. Lmfao seriously though thank you for everything. @vibv & others, welcoming your thoughts!

@Leo Gura sorry I didn't mean to press you on this one! I really appreciate your responses! I guess one final follow-up I would love to hear your thoughts on is how this works when we're old, feeble geezers. If we live regular human lives, there might be a good 20 years at the end where it would be a lot more dangerous to take psychedelics (not the best for 75-year-olds to trip balls I would assume). So do you feel like you would be able to fully appreciate 10-20 years when you're old and can't experience transhuman consciousness?

Thank you both @vibv & @Leo Gura!! Aren't there always higher levels of consciousness though? Aren't there levels that make alien consciousness look like silly nonsense? If I was born as a frog, human levels of consciousness would seem incredible and make me feel like frog consciousness is ridiculous and stupid. But it would kinda be a shame if I spent my entire life as a frog trying to have glimpses of human consciousness instead of living it up as a frog while I can, right? Why not eat hella bugs, sing my frog heart out, and live the most immaculate amphibious life possible? Then, I would assume consciousness could play whatever games it wants after that! It could go be a human, an alien, or anything else! Let me know if that example makes sense lmfaooooo. Again, I only go back to this analogy because it's useful, but heroin addicts prioritize temporary drug-induced pleasure over all else, and many of them die because the human body has limitations on how many drugs it can sustain. And if you prioritize temporary drug-induced consciousness over all else, aren't you also incentivized to push the human body to the point of real damage? If this human thing is all silly nonsense, why take care of the body?

I'm so grateful for this community and the fact that I can ask questions like this here! Excited to hear everyone's thoughts. @Leo Gura has been mentioning "alien" and "transhuman" states of consciousness that can only be accessed by psychedelics and cannot be locked in as a baseline state. What makes it a good strategy to pursue more and more temporary experiences of alien consciousness, then? Why not explore human consciousness while we're living as humans and then go explore other levels of consciousness once we're not human anymore? Don't get me wrong, I love psychedelics, and I think they can have a very profound impact on the level of human consciousness that we CAN sustain in a natural state. But Like… if transhuman consciousness is what you're after… isn't the best strategy to just stop being human lmfao??? Isn't it an odd goal to chase something that, by definition, can't be fully attained by a human? Why not master the human realm of consciousness instead of being really bad at transhuman levels? Of course, I mean this analogy with all due respect, but I thought the big reason why people don't do heroin is because the ecstasy it produces can never be sustained and it makes the rest of life feel pretty damn bland. So does that not happen when pursuing temporary states of alien consciousness too? It sounds incredibly frustrating for anyone who values consciousness to attempt to sustain a transhuman level of consciousness that can only be experienced for short periods. It sounds like that pursuit would make you have a lot less gratitude for your life and human levels of consciousness. I would love to hear everyone's thoughts!