Keryo Koffa

I'm in a big transition phase in my life since I started doing psychedelics in September and had the greatest highs and lowest lows I ever had. At best, I discover deep traumas within me that subconsciously shape and determine the whole course of my life, all my experiences, desires and shortcomings and traps. At worst, the ego backlash makes it feels like I'm the worst and most pathetic person to ever exist, am wasting my time, am not worthy of actually existing and should go sacrifice myself for any first random cause I find and give up all and any desires and feelings I have or just end it altogether. With each trip, I peel of a layer of the onion ego and am astounded how impactful it is. Experiences include: "So that's what it feels like not to be in fear 24/7" or "That's what love feels like" or "I didn't know I had these feelings" or "I can't believe how much bs I'm tolerating and how little I think of myself" or "I wish I didn't end that relationship so abruptly or at least say how I really feel" or "I can't believe all these things that I found so difficult were actually this easy" or "In this state of mind I can do anything, now let's figure out what's worthwhile and make a plan" or "How far does this rabbit hole go and how do I transcend all the transcending?". I feel like I'm not doing enough and like introspection is a waste of time but in truth it made a massive difference: - Led to to quit my toxic job which was a literal assembly line with nothing of value to be learned - Reestablish a life purpose in the things that matter to me the most - Sign up for college which I postponed because I wanted to learn it all by myself but it offers accountability, environment, opportunities, like minded people and I don't have to go into debt - Travel outside the country and with the train for the first time in my life, spontaneously bikepacking for a week - Build foundations on basic life skills like cooking, managing the house, repairing my bike myself - Go outside and enjoy nature more - Become enthusiastic about my hobbies which I fell out of due to excessive perfectionism - Get inspired about learning new things about science, spirituality, art, psychology, practical things etc.. But with a list like that, I'm objectively making more progress than ever before in my life. It feels like I'm on a long retreat, not having to worry about any work or responsibility at this point in time and am trying to balance myself in 0G and create a foundation, learn to carry ever greater burdens, not to actually see them as such and balance it with self-compassion, to be content as I am and simultaneously continue to grow and improve. Learn to act out of an abundance mindset, face negative emotions head on through awareness, sit with them and inquire about their source and find ways to transmute negative energy without doing spiritual bypassing in the process. I am ever thankful for leaning the term "Ego-Backlash" from Leo's episode on it. It's a feeling of wasting time and simultaneous anhedonia, excessive unrealistic expectations, mental torture, reduced self-worth, alienation from others feeling like they have it all together at all times and I'm the only one struggling, being alienated from my own struggles despite their impact they made on me, lack of energy and existence itself requiring massive effort not to collapse under the weight of the incoming self-judgement, nevermind the energy to do the smallest things. It's mostly after trips that I face it but on one of my trips lately (50g Truffles + 3g Syrian Rue) I was somewhat immobilized purely by the mental strain of having to justify the mere act of existing to myself against being selfish, useless and a detriment to the universe. Every psychedelic trip expands my sphere of understanding, action taking, confidence and comfort zone. I often think that "that's it, now I can do things hard or easy and not suffer". When effort itself becomes a bodily sensation, not a mental strain. It is like pain without suffering, but it doesn't even have to be painful since that's a property of framing. Psychedelics made me realize a lot of things: - I live in a first world country, why am I so paranoid and miserable? - Why do handicap myself with a scarcity mindset and limit what I can do? - I have so many resources and opportunities, why not use them? - I am capable of overthinking the littlest things, it's absolutely bonkers, it's like an art form. As I laid my thoughts down in this writing, the backlash subsided, I started practicing sitting with discomfort without using external means like food to change my state of mind and take those feelings away, which I used to do. But as I'm getting a grip, it seems new layers are revealed. The ego backlash/homeostasis mechanisms I have identified so far are: - Anhedonia: No enthusiasm about anything and feeling like nothing will ever matter again - Distractions: - Surface Level: Junk food, porn, drugs, entertainment - Deeper Waters: Productivity, being useful, external validation, workaholism, routines, habits, exercise - Ocean Floor: Reframing, spiritual bypassing, self-care, friends, life purpose The deeper it goes, the healthier it gets and many of those activities are healthy lifestyle choices that are great by themselves for their own sake but they can also be used to avoid facing the shadow, so it's tricky. Sometimes, the feeling of ego-backlash might instead be a sign to engage in these activities but then again, the need itself and discontentment are a seed of problems in themselves if these activities are done out of need and fear instead of love or as an avoidance mechanism, though the presence of them usually indicates a larger/healthier and more flexible ego. Feelings of Shame / Guilt / Blame / Fear etc.: Can be framed/understood and integrated OR be paralyzing, lead to unhealthy coping mechanisms, detrimental mindsets, self-deception, internal zero/negative-sum conflict, paradigm lock, reckless behavior, mistrust, alienation, prejudice, limited perspective and self-suppression. The Fear/Disgust Combo - The Source of Discomfort: Weird feelings akin to an innate discomfort, uneasiness, the source of the feeling of disgust, of irrational phobias, of obsessive/compulsive behavior, sometimes fear of the unknown, of psychosis, a feeling of repulsion/fear, of ugliness, of resistance and avoidance, deterioration, gore etc.. This is a feeling I can trace back to childhood that can get entangled and associated with certain things and cause lots of suffering through coping behavior creating a paradigm lock. In the end, I work through it all, I learn new concepts to help me understand and face it, to propel me forward through the deconstruction of what holds me back. I face ego-backlash a lot and sometimes forget to identify it for what it is. In those times, it feels like I'm worthless and always will be, that I'm wasting my time, am overcome by Shame/Guilt/Disgust am Self-Blame and that all the progress I made is for neigh. I get "Aha-Moments", which are the expression of intuitive intelligence that expands perspective and breaks paradigms, but instead of appreciating that success, I feel like I discovered something obvious, everybody was already aware of and I'm just stupid for having taken so long to get there, yet it reframes all my understanding and makes me magnitudes better at handling my emotions/desires/relationships/goals/purpose. When unaware of the ego-backlash being just that, it feels like my entire world is falling apart, like all that I worked towards and all the positivity I cultivated is a fools errand and I'll be eternally miserable and I feel the need to live up to saints and superstars, to perform every feat that collective humanity and all the most skillful/spiritual individuals are capable of, that I need to be able to do everything, regardless of whether I want to or not, in every and all disciplines, or else I'm worthless/selfish/lazy/useless/bad, not even evil, since that's a role one can be effective in playing, but rather pathetic. And yet, I enjoy hours of research, learning new things, creating systems, learning how to learn, inventing omni-dimensional approaches where instead of learning by cutting the cross section of a topic 8 times, I just cut it once across three dimensions, getting the same 8 pieces with less effort/repetition and more understanding/inventiveness/context, increasing knowledge exponentially instead of linearly. To recontextualize all of reality through every new concept. It's the difference between the curiosity and an enthusiasm/abundance mindset and insecurity and neediness/scarcity mindset. Sometimes, in the absence of ego-backlash I feel like I'm given opportunities to face discomfort on my own terms and do something healthy, it's quite rewarding but I got to maintain self-compassion at all times. The more empathetic I am to myself, the better I feel and the more I do and I end up enjoying/loving the experience instead of being actively deterred from repeating it due to having to rely on discipline and shame to motivate me. It often times feels like making decisions from this mindset is overly slow, but repetition becomes effortless and fast. It's not what I'm used, Metaphorically, it's like switching from energy drinks and fast foods to tea and salads/fruits (though that's also what I've been doing lately) and learning to operate on consistent energy levels that don't peak but also don't fall and gradually grow. Ego Backlash is a real struggle, can be very debilitating and sometimes I have to sit with it for hours, but I feel like I'm getting the hang of it, especially when I journal about it like this post, maybe some of you will resonate, or have advice. It sure felt excruciatingly painful when I started writing and now I feel relaxed...

@Breakingthewall I had a profound experience before that felt like what I hear described as a kundalini awakening. I felt uninhibited for the first time in my life, like I broke through, like confusion/tiredness were not due to a lack of understanding or bodily imbalance but intentional ego mechanisms to maintain my barriers. It felt like I spoke for the first time in my life, like my throat had been a complicated system of dozens of gears and cogs until then, that were all discarded. I prayed properly for the first time in my life though it felt more like a confession and then my laugh and tears flowed like never before, like they were 100% unregulated and real. After all that release, I did not know what to do or where to go next, like the foundations of my life were things I had to invent myself, they were not given then, though I felt a profound sense of having to do something. It wasn't the end, I felt depressed shortly after and felt a deja-vu of not having made nay progress over the last months and then I faced a fear I had forever, that of solipsism, accepting it irregardless of whether it was true or not and I did and then I felt naked, despite wearing clothes, my mind was free and empty, I felt like a huge weight had been lifted off my heart, I felt so light, as if I was light headed but I wasn't, I felt like I was floating, I had to check whether I really wasn't, like I was being pulled up. I went into nature, expressed anger freely, then started thinking and all kinds of concepts flew through me, mixed and mashed in some many ways. On the following days, I felt anhedonia, though I went outside and maintained some qualities, but it felt like a peak that's been fading, like trauma had been released and I'm going back to baseline, sans those weights that burdened me so. And recently I had another release, I realized the root of a deep desire from my childhood, a sense of loneliness, that manifested in all aspects of my life, that I felt through. Being aware of it seemed to dissolve a lot of pain. Following that, I've been more active, though I'm facing ego-backlash a lot now. I've been integrating it all, I can see how emotions and mindstates are built by time and habit but are in truth like an snow ball turning into an avalanche of identity while my true nature is independent of that but gets wrapped up in all the build up. I am trying to integrate all that knowledge and feeling and intuition since...

@Water by the River Thank you for that long read and sorry, I really end up saying stupid things. These ideas go oppositely of what I usually hear, but it feels intuitively right. There are so many perspectives about the Buddhist "cessation of desire", the infinity of experience leading to a never ending chasing, ever biased perspective due to a less than infinite ego and I wondered whether one can short circuit it by going the opposite way, but that perspective was rooted in scarcity problem solving, not authentic/creative self expression. That would require shadow work and integration, I have been wondering about the ever growing extent of things to learn and experience and where resistance comes from. It innately feels right that mastery is a more desirable state than surrender, yet there are times where surrender is necessary, but as mechanism of expanding one's field of vision. There is the whole materialistic world view of acquiring more and more and that not leading to contentment, though that's likely to be due to neglect of spirituality and distraction from discomfort, rather than the positive experiences of attainment itself. I have been facing a lot of ego-backlash lately and sometimes I can't visualize myself content, no matter what I do or accomplish and then I wonder if I have been doing it all wrong, despite all progress and if the path must innately be suffered through without a reason or if that's a signal that I'm doing something wrong. Aspects of reality of interconnected and complimentary, there's lots for me to learn, so thank you for the guidance. That presence you conclude your post with is something I am trying to cultivate, because I chasing enlightenment makes me discontent and stressed in the mean time and it's an infinite self-realization journey, then with the wrong mindset, it sure would be a miserable one. I try to balance being content with the moment, enthusiastic in the activities I perform, patient about embracing the journey of learning new skills before they can be manifested in action, letting go of resistance and not confusing it with spiritual bypassing/reframing, unrepressing myself and aligning myself with that which I find personal meaning in, but it's not always straight-forward.

Whatever psychedelics do to the brain, imagine if we simulated those receptors in an AI and watch the effects. Or what if we input all the content from Leo's videos and let it make sense all of all of those and contextualize all of that teaching it holism, a great deal of experiences and human nature and all the philosophies and the means to create ideas and insights from scratch without context but just data. Or we do both and simulate psychedelic effects of the framework of all the data, or input human brain patterns before and after psychedelics and from many humans to generate an artificial reflection of our consciousness. But that's just a theory, A GAME THERORY! We'd either discover the multiverse and accelerate humanity by millennia every second, or maybe it'd destroy the universe, who really knows, sounds dangerous and exciting, a job only suited for a crazy scientist!

I don't seem to hallucinate or get out-of-body experiences the same way I hear it described in reports and portrayed in videos but when I move and leave my current environment on heroic doses, I seem to lose my train of thought, sense of self, environmental awareness, and experience an increasing sensory disconnection. That is to say, my vision seems to reset and lag behind in a way, that I do not know if I'm experiencing the present, past or future. I get the feeling that past senses overlap my vision, that my mind is simulating the future and overlaying it and that I do not know what is actually happening in the present. Maybe all I see is just precognition simulated by my mind while I am actually somewhere else, maybe I lag behind when I close my eyes and appear somewhere else and this false simulation will crumble and I was actually somewhere else, maybe I walked somewhere different and this is overlaid imagination. Maybe my mind is always simulating the future to an extortionary degree without my awareness to prevent terrible outcomes, maybe when something bad does happen it resets to a previous configuration and induces amnesia. At this point I have to use my phone camera to see more linearly even though it is still part of my vision, it seems more consistent. I have to kick the ground or grass or step hard and even when I see or feel that movement, I am unsure how real it is. I see tracers on moving objects and sometimes am not sure if an object passed twice or just a similar looking one behind it. I also get an almost 360 vision and everything in front of me is clear and the detail is maintained no matter the angle, objects look very distinct and contrast well against the environment, trees look more alive than ever, more sleek and organically colored, the branches having eyes and looking like alien antennas, trying to point to something, though I can't tell what, I just get the feeling they're like machines with the purpose of transmitting love like a radio in a radial fashion. The forest floor is made of clearly distinguishable geometrically related clearly identifiable pieces of branches, leaves etc. Well, weirdly enough I don't actually seem to be running into any objects despite the lag and even the back and forth lagging is reset to the present, which is weird because that includes going from future back to the present, like my intent is seen before its materialized. When I gaze long enough at a spot, my vision fractals, at some point my whole vision becomes spherical and I get the feeling that I am the center and cause of my environment, a self-projected reflection and the epicenter of experience. The whole inter and intra-sensory disconnect, past, future, present separation, geometric recreation, vision singularity, it all really feels like my mind is making it all up on the go independently creating and choosing the world it is apart of and which changes to accept and bend to, phasing through existence and experience, like it's not just identifying an external world but actively creating the dimension in which it exists and is then willfullingly changed by. It's a lot to take in.

Is it the matrix of societal role, behavior, purpose? Is the the concepts, ideas, science? Is it the idea of god, psyche, identity overall? Is it the surrender of exploration and understanding in and of itself? Is it that of perception, experience, insight? Is it that of existence, relation, duality? Is escaping the matrix part of the matrix? Is any and all form part of the matrix? Is it the duality of observer and observed? Is it the autonomous sense making experience? Is it perception in and of itself? Is it existence in and of itself including the seeking of non-existence which cannot exist as existence exists as long and always when it does which is all and ever? Is it to navigate states of consciousness to see the limitations and know the difference, but everything is a state of consciousness? What matrix is supposed to be escaped and how, to which extent, to all extent? And if so, what is that apparently desirable non-matrix supposedly? Is it absolute contextlessness from which all context arises and which allows for every thing while being no thing? Is that it? Absolute Infinity? Is reality not an infinite fractal with no bottom and top? Well, that is an idea, maybe the absolute does exist but how would one know to have reached it or if the one seeking it dissolved from even being someone at all and just became it, how would that experience tell if it wasn't locked inside invisible walls? Unless its the intuition and experience in and of itself pointing towards the consequence of such existence that links to such experience.

I started psychedelics exactly 5 months ago. I solved lots of neuroses on my first trip which opened me up to go journeying and I had 3 more trips that week doubling the dose each time. I got in tune with my body, then my heart and also reached my limits on the last trip which felt like amnesia but I learned lots there too. I came back weeks later and continued, profoundly questioning the structure of society, my capabilities and the nature of human behavior. The next trips led me to question fear, learn to surrender and epistemology. Weeks later I was more active than ever, became more athletic, present and also interested in the 60s psychedelic generation and aliens. Weeks later yet I tried hyper-heroic doses to dissolve as far as possible and that filled me with amazing ideas and eventually taught me the value of the duality of surrender to that which I can't control and at the same time of growing myself experientially to be capable of carrying ever greater burdens and weights. A week later, I explored metaphysical ideas of material and immaterial reality. And a week later I explored the consistent change of my self as I saw my body consistently materialize and dematerialize while I as the perceiver remained a constant. And now which is weeks later after that, I got into the habit of daily psychedelic use and I feel like it would be more beneficial to integrate and space out the trips to reset tolerance and adjust my baseline to the insights and build myself up naturally. At the same time, psychedelics feel like accelerationism and I feel like I'm sprinting and throwing a ball in front of me and psychedelics are the acceleration that I do to speed up and catch that ball which has additional momentum and I run faster as a result, repeating that motion. If I could be psychedelic all the time and integrate that level of awareness, I could be doing 10 things simultaneously full of passion, my body intuitively carrying out motions and recognizing meta-patterns, handling everything like inverse kinematics. Lately, I've recognized myself repeating the routine, of the first half of the day filling myself up with existential dread and psychic pain that feels like the lowest low and the later half of the day moving like a sinewave to immense energy, presence and appreciation. Each evening, seemingly independent of when I too psychedelics or if I even did, I am overcome with great calmness and an amazing perceptual clarity, seeing my environment in vast detail in the reflection of surfaces, the strength of colors and an amazing overarching focus of all things simultaneously. It's like, when I take psychedelics, I recontextualize all context I have, and any next trip recontextualizes my recontextualization, leading to exponential expanding of my understanding, and because of that, it feels like I'm limiting my potential when not tripping. Though it would teach me much to gather more data and experiences before tripping anew, despite the fact that it appears unnecessary because on psychedelics insights just show themselves to be outside anything I can conceive at the time.

I guess this formulation is rather strange, since nothing survives death, as death itself is literally defined by the disappearance of the very thing that dies. So what I'm really asking then is what reality warps into and what shape consciousness takes after the body disappears. I guess there's infinite potential for illusion and wishful thinking regarding that this cannot be confirmed except by actually dying, unless psychedelics expand the mind enough to somehow reach it. Reality constantly changes, or my experience of it does, the surroundings, what they're made of, the time on the clock shifts. Living things appear to age, the environment reforms. I only really experience motion, though some things seem more static than others. One time, when I was on a solid amount of psychedelics, I looked into the mirror and the shapes and colors on my face seemed to flow outwards while new ones replaced the old ones flowing behind them, like the form of my face was constantly changing and being replaced, yet the overall silhouette stayed the same. Imagine an invisible force field which dematerializes and rematerializes itself with whatever resources are available around it, knowing how to form itself and the material its made of just a means to an end to take on physical form, constantly changing while its essence and awareness remained the same. Like I'm dying and being reborn every millisecond of existence and yet I seem to be continuously present and perceiving and knowing despite constantly dying and being reborn and not being the same as before and every some often huge amount of cells, body cells, brain cells and the structure of my body are replaced, yet my sense of self remains, like a form that is the constant among the change. Like I materialize reality this way while all that I see is constantly morphing and changing, but the essence exists outside of that change. My greatest bias is continuity, knowing, being conscious, having a broad sense of awareness, the ability to perceive and understand my environment or integrate my past experiences into a greater whole which allows me to see and access everything at once and appreciate where I am and the experiences I collected. My greatest fear is not this body dying or eventually changing, but losing awareness and memory and especially the conscious experience of existence. What experiences and insights have you gathered so far regarding death and its relation to conscious experience?

@DefinitelyNotARobot If the diagnosis is that I'm the Matrix, what do I do about it, doc?

Everything is as real as I know it to be, am I shaped by the zeitgeist or the zeitgeist by my experience? Are you only as real as I'm willing to engage with you, ultimately as real as me, and I can probably infinitely subdivide myself further if I wanted to. The pointed to god is a state of contentment that generates out of abundence, the exact abundence that offsets my existence. If everything I ever loved is real but imaginary, true but arbitrary, then that's pretty beautiful because I wouldn't want to miss out on the infinity of material and immaterial experience outside of it either, or just be content for a while or discontent though I'd like to be somewhat content in my discontentment if possible.

@Princess Arabia I died in one of my dreams, I dreamed I was in a room and felt week, I seemed to be very old and my breaths got shallow, I knew I was about to die, I saw a woman and children run towards me, I intuitively knew they were my daughter and grandchildren, I slowly lowered myself onto the floor and I felt a sense of calmness, I knew I was about to die but it felt very peaceful and I didn't experience any pain, my breathing slowed down as I faded from that realm into another, one of darkness, but I was still conscious and I saw a person appear, I don't remember much from after that, it was years ago and I woke up right after. @Razard86 I'm consistently trying to expand my perspective but when I try to understand the way I am in hindsight, it appears as if I discover ever greater meta-patterns that run through my entire life. And it's like: The way I am now is highly influenced by the way I act and the situation I'm in, but that one only arose from the experiences of past years, but it seems that I could have potentially had so many, or have focused on so many of their aspects, but specific ones got highlighted, which have grown me into a specific direction, and when I wonder why, I return into whole areas of 8 years ago, and they were a reflection and antithesis to the way I lived two years before that, and that experience was the most profound experience in my life, from beginning to end, but it was only so because of the way I was when I entered it, and that was caused by the person I was due to the experiences I gathered, and those were in turn caused my on overarching pattern of positive and negative experiences that shaped my personality, and those link to my childhood, and the reason I was the way I was then appears because I had natural inclinations to begin with, but did I? Core experiences from my early years led me to that, but it seems that potential was always within me and I always had a specific focus, preferences and an inclination to filter experiences along specific lines, and that was the reason I behaved as I did. Furthermore it seems that filtering of perception and meaning is something I was born with. And the reason I was is something I try to understand in hindsight and the way I relate to other people and past personas seems to correlate well with reincarnation/karma and psychic continuity models, irregardless of their nature since continuity along psychic lines is as valid dimension as any other when it comes to the continuous morphing of the experienced universe and its properties and that which we most notable are, states and configurations of conscious experience filled with specific tendencies. In a way, I changed quite a bit, in another way, I'm constantly gaining ever greater clarity and appreciation for who I am, in another way, it seems I never changed one bit at all, I'm like a tree, I grew branches but the stem is the same. Sometimes I feel it more strongly than other times, but as I try to expand my sense of self, I intuit that every person inside this world, if I went through the exact circumstances they did and felt the same way they do, had all the exact experiences and was shaped by the same forces, I'd be them and act identically. And when I run through that thought while talking to someone, it feels very profound and almost like I'm switching into their perspective in real time. Yet they don't have my experience and I don't have theirs, I do not know in conscious detail what they feel inside. The sense of continuity is fascinating really, the background knowing awareness, irregardless of specific details or if you can remember anything at all, but just the knowing that you're you and that you are.

Split myself into a conscious and unconscious, so that I could surprise myself and appreciate reality from different angles of self-discovery towards potentially infinite growth and exploration. The unconscious part would shape my experiences without me knowing, creating highs and lows and guide my overall experience. I would split my psyche and become others, yet another layer inaccessible to even my subconscious, on a physical level, they would be simulated by the same overarching godhead that I am and that is absolute consciousness of which every persona is a self-perpetuating experience, so they'd be as real as I am. There would be both a personal and overarching reality and a consensus space that would allow for vivid and real interpersonal experiences in a physical reality while each person after their death would remember the entirety of their experience and have the power to create new reality bubbles completely of themselves or interact with others if a connection was welcome. The immaterial reality before the absolute God would be equally infinite in potential, though each piece of consciousness on its own could determine how far they wanted to subdivide, expand, interact or merge their experience, even into the absolute. There would be an infinite amount of checks and balances involved that would create a greater harmony, yet give each consciousness its own autonomy. It would be a vivid universe of autonomous beings shaping their experience with infinite potential of overlap, creating finite avatars and overarching realities that would emerge their own spirit, turning it into an infinitely vast interconnected universe allowing for each desire and each possibility to evolve, every link to be established and infinite knowledge to be accessed or reduced to shape any kind of experience imaginable to the extent that one desires it. Maybe that's what I created, maybe that's what I will create, maybe I made it so we're all part of it now, maybe I did it beforehand, maybe in hindsight, maybe on the go, but I desire others to exist, and I desire the ability to share and become anything and I desire to exist and to change and for all my past versions and for all the other people and all potential future selves to exist on their own right, for infinite communication and every possibility to occur and fill the universe with life. And I am conscious, so I am God, but if could chose what God to be, that's the god I would be, which is human and alien and sovereign and equally a part of an infinite amount of other gods. I'd do it out of love for that which I am, as much as that which I am not and the unity of both.

There are things happening that are undesirable granted the lens through which one looks at them. God seems to balance everything out for the greatest good. But what is the nature of good and bad? Is it that bad doesn't exist as every intent is good to the ego that has it? Or is it that good and bad are arbitrary? Or is it that bad serves good, so that bad experiences balance the world at large towards greater good? Or even that good can only even exist in contrast to bad? Does bad simply not exist or is it a necessary evil towards greater good? Or is bad the necessary fabric for anything to exist finitely in the first place like any duality. People suffer, you suffer, I suffer, those experiences shape us. There is a difference between pain and suffering. Maybe suffering creates empathy, maybe it teaches us lessons, maybe its the spice of life. But it exists and god created if not the bad itself, then our ability to perceive good and bad and to suffer in and of itself. Is suffering itself bad, in order to guide us to good and a better, more fulfilled, more whole version of ourselves, a path towards godhood that expresses the limitations that bind us from him, the absence of love that drives us to infinity? I can suffer and God "only creates good". So does that mean that suffering in and of itself is good, or is it good because its a necessary means towards a greater good. Like dissatisfaction that drives and shapes us towards a greater and more expansive and understanding version of ourselves?

@Breakingthewall I have biases and it's hard for me to let go completely, though I tripped three times on double-heroic doses of psilocybin that felt like amnesia. The first time, I felt overstimulated, I look at my phone messages, they seemed to disappear and reappear, I would send them and they'd disappear as if time was rewinded, the time as seen on the phone remained the same not matter how long I waited, the minute wouldn't change. It seemed as if I could accelerate time and hours would move by and messages would arrive only to be reset and the time was the same as before. I was restless, felt like my consciousness would disappear forever if I went to sleep and the remaining body would run on autopilot. I was packing my backpack and the next moment, everything was outside again, and I repeated and I kept resetting, my phone disappeared and appeared different places, I made notes because I could only keep two intentions and memories in my mind simultaneously. I learned to let go and ease myself into waiting it out. On the second one I was extremely disoriented and scared, I clinged onto a few concepts like duality, difference, loops, I was immersed in imagined sine waves corresponding and explaining phenomena in reality. I felt like I wanted to dissolve all dualities, I saw a triangle, felt that meant duality and the upper vertex was god, and I became that point and there was nothing. I recollected myself somehow and looked at a random actualized.org post and all the comments looked like hieroglyphs, when I focused very hard on words they were repeating something akin to "there is no self" or "you are not self", I wish I continued to look but I felt so fatigued, I could barely move and could do nothing but to fall asleep and reawaken with the energy to be conscious for a few seconds and fall asleep anew, lasting longer next time. My environment began to look like the surface waves of liquid mercury, grey vibrating surfaces. And when I thought of something, I became it and couldn't identify it since I was too busy being it to make sense of it, like the image of a place or person. I remembered my parents existed and felt like they represented parts of the psyche and that I was not living up to their and my expectations of what I should be doing and capable of since I was basically incapacitated. On the third one, I remembered the second and didn't fear it as much, I remembered sensations that I had on the previous trip. I still felt fatigued and like reality was dissolving into incomprehensible disconnected concepts and feelings and that I could not use the entirety of my psyche as I usually do but I was aware of that and navigated intuitively without needing to think or make sense, I just knew what something was by focusing on it. I felt and visualized an image from my childhood driving with my parents through a dark forest at night looking at pine trees and felt a mysterious emotion from my childhood, when reality was far more vivid, unknown, alive, spirited, mysterious, animated and that fascinated me. Ultimately, it's hard for me to know what to even look for, what sensation to focus on, if I just lie still thinking of nothing, it's like I'm in my base state just feeling a little dizzier than usual, as soon as I do something on high doses, or look at something, then nuanced emotions and ideas come to me. But it's extremely rare that my peripheral changes form and I mostly feel intuitions. Intuition that reality is infinitely interconnected, or that a looped string is god, intuition that I might be a puppet master controlling everything subconsciously, that I'm doing myself a disservice by awakening because I'm unconscious on purpose else why would I be, that god is the superset of all subsets and so forth. What I'd like to ask you about is the distinction between first-hand experience and the usual imagination that includes things outside of the normally constantly occurring stream of senses like sight, hearing, touch, gravity. And what it means to be reality or infinite, how its constructed or willed into experience, whether you have control and can build a bridge between those states of mind to navigate. What it means in relation to this world and how it changes how you live and what you do or the reason behind those. And what I am to you, since I am conscious in my experience absolutely, but then how does that relate to the infinity I infer from you?

Another part of it is the idea Leo mentioned, that the ego constructs fear to maintain a limited identity, which can manifest itself in the feeling of wanting to stop doing psychedelics. So I thought: "Okay, no matter how terrible I feel, and maybe especially when I feel the worst, that's exactly why I should trip, to feel as bad as I can feel, in order to integrate that and as a result also experience the flipside of that". But then, when do I stop? I feel like I've done this enough and I'm not afraid of doing more, but that I should leave some room for non-psychedelic integration, adjustment and reset tolerance, and also max out and break the limits that I have to the extent that I can without psychedelics and push myself towards that as hard as possible.

My consciousness is the only absolute I can know right now at my current state of un/awareness. Leo talks as if there's just one observer and maybe he refers to absolute God, but it seems he says that the currently conscious avatar is the only one in existence and all of reality only exists as a bubble around it simulated in a minimalist fashion only as far as it is psychically convincing. And that nothing exists until the godhead consciously wills it into being in the present, as time is only an idea projection of current awareness. And that others are like a mirage, a reflection of present awareness interpretation of self-projected form. But I wonder, doesn't God have to know and simulate the exact life of everyone else in order to make this a convincing simulation, in which case, is God not simultaneously consciously everyone to the full extent that it's not just the avatar's field being rendered but all entities and "non entities" as well, every blade of grass, every overlap of perception between all observers all equally consciously created by god, in which case, how am I the only conscious entity? Aren't all entities, projected or not equally conscious as experienced by god in order to simulate around the avatar, in which case everything is experienced, in which case every other is as real as me and an equally conscious entity, that is a subset of the god being that creates the whole experience? And then there are other Godheads, as featured in the "Infinity of Gods" video. And Leo says that he might have his godhead and I might have mine and that his godhead made contact with other godheads like mine and those fused into a meta-godhead, while remembering the individuality of sub-godheads, which are sovereign on their own, though somehow the distinction becomes imaginary. And then the godheads are supposed to help each other out if the collective dream turns into hell, as experienced by their avatars which is themselves in finite form. But that gives godheads a unique identity, doesn't it? So then, if Godheads are by themselves sovereign and they can share a collective dream, then how do I know what another godhead's avatar is compared to just an illusion, if there is even such a thing as an illusion as it all seems equally real. Godheads are infinite and unbound, they only bind themselves if they wish and are infinite, and know all that is knowable, I imagine them as reality bubbles. But then, how many Godheads are there, could a blade of grass be the avatar of a godhead, or a squirrel, a human, a DMT entity, could it be that the entire universe is conscious not only because a local godhead has to simulate it for its avatar but also because it is inside a collective dream of which each godhead embodies a different aspect of reality as a conscious entity and each godhead can link other godheads through their avatars, while their local conscious focus maximizes the experience of reality and balance of the meta-structure of the universe. So then when I interact with another human, Leo would say they only exist as a perspective relative to me, but if they're another Godhead's avatar, am I not equally a perspective to them and then are they not just as real as me, or even if it is just a reflection of me, outside of my bubble of awareness (my godhead), might they not exist irregardless as a conscious experience simultaneously only currently unexperienced. And really, aren't all possibilities the case irregardless of whether they're materialized or not, like the Mandelbrot set in mathematics. And then, even if Godheads know everything, isn't there room for more infinity, since they might know every number on the infinite scale, but beyond that there's infinite space to create a psyche that filters patterns around selective lines. So then, maybe my current perspective is a fractal mirror of a localized materialized godhead avatar, but am I not equally arbitrary and doesn't imagining others make them real and can they not exist outside of imagination, in the unknown or unexperienced, as one can invent infinite experiences, along infinite patterns and then infinitive those infinitely. Wouldn't each consciousness, exist equally conscious as it all can exist so it must exist and is all simulated only relative to each other WHICH MEANS THAT EACH EXPERIENCE IS FULLY CONSCIOUSLY EMBODIED BY GOD, irregardless of the current avatar's sovereign consciousness? So then, an avatar could be its own Godhead, as if there's room for more godheads, then as above, so below, so maybe there is a cycle of reincarnation or maybe the NDE experiences are real or maybe there exists a formless psychic universe full of sovereign entities that interact with each other as I interpret from "Seth Speaks". That each consciousness, equally real and valid chooses to materialize itself in a type of play and develops itself more fully in-between lives being a vast multi-personality energy gestalt, of which each individual is a part, and yet conscious in itself simultaneously. It's really fascinating. Anyway, that's the end of my conceptual proliferation for today, tell me what you think and don't give me the Buddhist "stop thinking and become nothing" attitude.

I'm afraid of the responsibility. I've really just been hiding. I've gotten the intuition of god many times on psychedelics but it feels like I'm constantly postproning it. I was about to pray multiple times, but I wasn't sure about the contents because I feel that asking for something to happen is selfish so I keep overthinking and backing away, double guessing if my wishes should really come true, I treat it like an emergency button and all too often feel unworthy of it. Especially since I have the natural path I can walk and I might be asked to be more selfless in return. I feel like I should be spearhedding some kind of movement to do something for humanity or the earth, but there are many passions I have and I feel like with that responsibility there'd be no room for me left. What would you do, how do you see it, what advice would you give me?

@Paradoxed @Davino I feel as if I'm not doing enough. That I should make an effort to change to world to a better place. At the same time, I am aware that it is difficult and every person had a different perspective on what's ideal. I do feel that because I have the capacity to do something to help save the planet, or help the homeless, or do volunteer work or take on a humanitarian profession, that I am morally obligated to do so. At the same time, my actual interests push me towards art and technology, in a light of explorative curiosity. And that's where I can challenge myself, create nuanced expression and dedicate myself at full focus without the regret of wanting to be doing something else. I would pray for health, though I'd feel partially guilty since my health is something within my control, so I'd be offloading responsibility for something I am capable of influencing out of laziness, and that I would feel ashamed to ask for. But my deepest and most intimate desire is not actually something material at all. There are others that I lost contact with and some of which died that I miss deeply and the connections we made drive me forward and give me meaning. What I'd pray for is the ability to visit them in my dreams. And if I could do that, then I feel like I'd be set for life, since those bonds are all I ever wanted. That would fill me with energy, though it not yet being the case, I wonder if that has a reason, whether I'd turn complacent if that which I desire the most was given to me. But I can't stop desiring it.

Hitler did what he did because it was the best he could do granted what he experienced and how he made sense of it. And the same is the case for all of us and every living being. We might get restless and regret having taken some paths over others but we only did because we didn't know any better, else we'd be different. And ultimately, the only thing keeping us from god is our level of consciousness. All suffering is due to our limited sense making and perception/desire filtering aparatus that is our body, environment and the psychic forces that shape our identity and every fiber of our being. We can always do better and wrong behavior does exist, each is responsible for bettering themselves and we can grow in hindsight but the interplay between understanding, consciousness and environment determined the past to be no different than it is and didn't allow for a different possibility to exist than is currently the case. In the end, we all do our best, if it seems we don't, it's because the intensity of the internal psychic turmoil is not easily visible and the circumstances evaluated from an outsider's perspective appear different, simplified, abstracted. Everyone stuggles, everyone's deluded, everyone does their best they know how granted their perspective and everyone deserves happiness.

My experience is locked into the lens of loss and death. Many people I loved disappeared or died, I have become very isolated after a lifelong process of it repating over and over again and I exist in a state of conscious anticipation as a result. I had become unable to do much at all. On psychedelics my lenses expanded, life flowed into me, reality became spirited, mysterious, fascinating. But when it comes to that part of me, the deepest core of my heart, it now stops me from making any significant progress. I've always been one to overthink, reality was always 1000x more intense internally than externally, independent of external circumstances. And now its not even human death and pain that grips my heartstrings anymore, the empathy has expanded, I see a beautiful flower bloom and instead of appreciating it, I am saddened that it will not last and live like that forever but will wither and disappear. I see little creatures like spiders and I feel their lifeforce like it was my own, I see even non-life like a rock at a place and time in a configuration so natural and infinite that it saddens me if that configuration were to change. Life is change but change is death. If I were god, I'd make every life inside of me immortal, I'd give every single part of it the ability to chose its own configuration and fullfil every desire without limitation except for the limitation it would consciously impose upon itself. To be conscious, to live and exist and appreciate, one changes, and life must change and any change is death but to navigate, one needs to forget and remember, to see partially, to intensify certain experience over other past or future experiences held in the subconscious. Time is space. Death feels very real and its painful for me to think about it. It also feels necessary for an experience to exist and progress, to take shape and change it and form anything coherent and meaningful, if I could only see it as a change of form, if I could believe in an afterlife to not despair to the cascade of overlaying every single experience through the context of fearing to lose it, of fearing to make connections, of prematurely grieving the loss of someone and anyone I see. Through this lens, I cannot be angry at anyone and I feel instantly connected to everyone and everything independent of their character and actions, knowing that anything done is ultimately done out of love and that love eventually dies with the one who expressd it, leaving nothing but a trace memory. I feel like everything is already dead infinitely and I'm grieving the greatest love before it even has the chance to reach its peak. If I am god, or if I'm a self-contained god holon, if I am the only thing in existence or the only thing I can know, if everything is a projection of my own self, if I can eventually after the dream unravels unite with all that is inside of my experience and has been "lost" during my life, then that would contextualize my present experience as shaping my psyche and exploring meaning and experience, death would no longer feel sad in that regard. At this point I am mostly sad not for me but for the pain of others, though others might really be a projection of myself, but that does not undo their validity. Even if all of reality was a dream, I would not rest until it got a happy ending. Everyone has a different idea of what is good. I'd want everyone to be autonomous and follow their own desires in their own reality with the ability to enter all other realities simultaneously. Why am I limited? Why is there so much pain? Can god not conceive of a happier reality? Or is having a meaningful experience the ability to bear ever greater capacities of pain and empathy. Is Earth the training ground as NGEs call it? Is this experience as good as it gets? Is there a point to this experience I'm having, or do I create that point in retrospect, or was it always accounted for, or did I make myself forget having accounted for it to experience it authentically. My highs and lows are both growing, I feel like each day I'm reinvented and experienced more than I would previously have in a lifetime. My rigidity is lessening, I feel more attuned, present, after I let it out I feel better, but I keep coming back to this state over and over again.

I thought about the dreams and my past, how I formed my identity, how I navigate reality, how unconsciousness exists and the meaning I found within my past experiences. How many times I was despairing and found significance in my dreams. And how that created ambition and drive within me, shaped me in specific ways, gave me freedoms and opportunities and lessons and on a meta scale evolved me and my understanding from all the lowest lows to all the highest highs. And that I want to learn to consciously create my dreams and explore them since its a dimension far vaster and more malleable than waking experience. And I thought about my past self and his unfulfilled desires. And I want him to experience those, but I changed, "a man cannot step into the same river twice, for he is not the same man and it is not the same river", but if I recreated myself would that even be the original or a copy, that one despite being like my past self would not be me but if I were me I wouldn't remember the current me, so I couldn't fulfill my desire of fulfilling his desire, yet both must exist and be fulfilled and also hold their own integrity. But what I can do and I do not know how yet is to be the unconscious part of my past self that shapes his dreams and unconscious parts of his experience. But now I realize I might already have been that one all along without having even become it yet. I've always wondered where the unconscious is, how I can move without knowing how to move, how I can abstract and forget, how every thought and idea enters my mind seemingly at random, and especially recently on psychedelics and ketamine, how doing anything comes with a sense of inverse kinematics, that I do not consider each muscle strand in my body but perform a desired movement automatically, without being conscious of the details. And I intuit that there is a self aware of everything that has to pull the precise strings to allow all that complexity that I am unaware of. And that doesn't invalidate reality and freedom as I feel it at all. I can do what I can do and my awareness is always present focused on the ever next thing in question. In fact, this makes the experience feel less jarring. I've recently been breaking down at the concept of death and the pain of others and also have been trying to reconcile the idea of solipsism and the idea of suffering and why god would allow it. But now, if the experience is focused on me, then I can see that I am teaching myself that lesson, I am also shaping my experience, others only exist inside of my experience but they are as real to me as I am since they are aspects of myself. Every person is a potential self who walked a different road, every animal is a creature with different inclinations, every country a different lifestyle. It always seemed to me that I was born at the crossroads of time, as we are approaching technological singularity, that I got to experience a far vaster array of experiences than people of the past, that I am in the perfect place to be and experience to become the self that I am, whose viewpoint I can only appreciate by being that self that very self that I am. I picked up so much on actualized.org and I'm reconciling all these ideas and potentials and many more in my mind trying to make sense of it and it seems that the currently conscious self that writes this is a version of a vaster developing self that creates its own experience from the future, from the past and from the present simultaneously and has freedom in all these domains. If this is the case, a huge stone would be lifted of my heart. I could see that it was me all along, that no one had to suffer but myself. That I was creating myself through the negotiation of potentials and that I will not truly die but only change, so I can stop grieving and beating myself up and actually start living now.

@Breakingthewall I will be trying it soon, in the meantime, can you tell me what egolessness means? Reality is vast, psychedelics can distort even the fabric of perception, DMT reports list entities and other realms, regular ones change and expand the way one can feel, perceive, make new distinctions or dissolve old ones. It seems to me that whoever did 5-MeO didn't "stop" existing or the "actuality/reality" didn't. I know that thoughts and beliefs shape reality. I also know that in both the materialist and psychic paradigm, reality is constructed mentally. So then, what exactly does 5-MeO specifically change, does it introduce maximum clarity and knowing without warping the fabric of reality, does it make you fully in tune with the present moment without the need for present and past to take the spotlight, or show that only the present exists and it does perfectly without needing to be altered or escaped, does it intuitively convey reality as being chosen and accepted to be this way, or is it something else. I know I can't know until I do, but I can open myself up more in the meantime.

@Breakingthewall I've been experimenting with psychedelics and dissociatives lately, though I didn't get my hands on 5 meo just yet, but I'm getting there. I kept having "bad trips", it's because the truth is vast and paradoxical, I was wondering "Am I supposed to be this way or that way, neither, both, both and either and neither, a balance, which balance, is balance balanced, this balance or that balance, or a balance of the balance. I also had to go out and get some practical experiences, get my life together, since it was and still is a bottleneck. Can't have open desires and expect to be unbiased. And I'm become aware of "feeling", I used to be very rigid and mechanical, but with feeling its like my subconscious handles all the infinite complexity and I might not know exactly how it does it but reality is infinite so I'd never have enough time to figure it out step by step and in truth steps don't exist really and are really just a simplification and conceptualization of feeling, there is a chain, like the branches of a tree and if thought is a branch, then feeling is the stem, encompassing all the possible branches simultaneously, formless, like infinity encompasses all numbers, you can see numbers and build an intuition, but counting to infinity doesn't end, you just have to abstract, but you can understand all of it simultaneously as the concept itself. After I dealt with some real life problems and I still have many, my trips, mood and motivation skyrocketed, before I felt like everything was futile, massive ego backlashes and fatigue, now I'm making progress, I'm remembering my past trips which somehow escaped my memory despite being profound and invigorating, I'm glad I recorded them. I've had three double-heroic doses up to now and they all resulted in a state of confused amnesia, where I felt I'm failing, incapable of doing anything, not enough energy to even move and can only see a singular frame at a time and only hardly make associations, like it's all condensed to a circle within a frame, and I can imaging two or three circles at once on a black background or them merge into each other or with the frame but not much else than that, or think one concept at a time, or see my surrounding and think like a kid would, I see my computer and think "what is it made of?", I answer metal but it doesn't mean anything, I just "feel" that its hard and rigid and technology but its an instinctive reaction and technology just feels simple, like a singular vibe. Though it seems after hitting extreme lows in my mood, self-esteem and feeling like I'll never be able to deal with life or do anything worthwhile, on the next day, I bounce back to hype motivation and can integrate and progress tenfold, and I'm even adjusting to that pattern itself so when I trip again, I actually have confidence, because I know what is to come and that all these doubts are an arbitrary mind game and I am able to keep that awareness all the way through and not get lost but actually focus and discover how reality feels and changes in the new state of awareness.

@Breakingthewall What you're telling me is equivalent to: But that's actually pretty charitable since I can use tons of different circles to match an owl if I got that reference but the problem is that I'm at step 1 and there is no reference, I don't know what an owl is, yet I'm supposed to draw one and all I know is that circles will get me there. If you tell me to look at a fractal and tell you what it makes me feel, I'd tell you it reminds more of mirrors, it's infinite, the colors or qualia is mind-blowing, it has interesting properties that I can describe like "as above so below", phenomena repeating but in unique ways, that it can warp and change in fascinating ways I haven't experienced in the reality I'm usually accustomed to, that even the idea of a fractal feels so alien, that it gave me an insight about things existing outside my awareness, or remind me of a black swan event, that I am limited by what I know and unimaginable things exist that I didn't experience that I can only know in retrospect after it enters my experience over which I don't appear to have any control except for receptiveness which really just ups my chances of not missing something and so on and so on. That feelings compared to thoughts are extremely complex, that they are like inverse kinematics that forward kinematics (thoughts, science, ideas, philosophies, behaviors) are modelled after. That on psychedelics I feel like inverse kinematics, I don't move each joint at a time, but all of it together subconsciously, that I was always able to do that, to do without thought, that maybe that's infinity, and thought is narrowing it down and getting tied up in the limitation later believed to be real.

@Breakingthewall If it was this easy, I'd already be there. Here: "I let all ideas and beliefs fall for the next 5 minutes". Nothing happened, I wasn't sure if to focus on nothing, stare into the void, be present, see objects, not see objects, I still hear the wind, I still see things, if I close my eyes, I see dark, if I try to unfocus I feel my heart pulsating, ears ringing quietly, if I dissolve all concepts, I still feel phenomena and stuff, distinct something even if without category, I can imagine how everything connects in a million ways, I can change borders of what things are, I can chose not to make distinctions at all. My experience doesn't change though my interpretation does, on psychedelics reality can expand or contract or both, inverse kinematics. But I don't change dimensions, though I do get amnesia at hyper-doses, personality, feelings and context change. But I have absolutely no idea what "letting go of the mind" actually means, it's like telling me to teleport to "Gnarkohh" and neither do I know how to teleport nor do I know what the name or place is supposed to be. I can open myself up to things but what else am I supposed to do to "let my mind fall", nothing? Well, how do I do that, or not do it or experience it or unexperience it?