Colin Williams

Hey everyone! This post is specifically for @Leo Gura, but I would love to hear everyone's thoughts. I feel like this could be a really important conversation for the Actualized.org community and I want to know if other people feel the same! Firstly, I have endless respect for you @Leo Gura. Nearly every area of my life has been drastically improved over the nearly 10 years of following your content. Your work is undoubtedly the highest quality that I have ever come across, and following your videos was pivotal in my own awakening experiences. It's hard to even imagine what my life would have turned out like if I hadn't come across your channel when I did. You have my endless support. I am, however, increasingly confused and concerned about the overall tone of this channel. The wisdom in Leo's videos is AMAZING, but there's only so much of his delivery that I can stomach at one time. I feel incredibly depressed by the dark, confrontational, and frustrated feeling that has been expressed in nearly all of the videos since 2019. In Leo's blog, he described a hatred towards humanity that he's felt from looking at the unconsciousness in the world, but I don't understand how that can coexist with the unparalleled depth of love and God-realization that he has very clearly attained. There seems to be a very personal, human kind of anger in Leo's videos that I don't see even in much less awakened teachers. I don't doubt that Leo is one of the most awakened humans to have ever walked the Earth. I love the videos he took on the floor right after an awakening in 2018 - his joy, love, and humor are all so clear right after the experience. However, while the same wisdom is in all his other videos, the energy feels entirely different. Leo could be talking about radical acceptance or divine love, but it still has an eerie feeling to it that I don't get when I experience it for myself or learn from other teachers. I truly want to understand what I am missing from this picture, everyone. Everything about Leo's channel feels so intentional, but the feeling I get in his delivery and even in messages on this forum seems a bit contradictory to the words themselves. I know we haven't actually met, but I fucking love you, @Leo Gura. I have so much respect for you and I hope no offense was taken here. I know that this work is all about higher levels of consciousness beyond human likes and dislikes, but still, I care about your well-being and I just hope you're okay. I also don't want to invade your privacy in any way at all - I just want to understand what I could be missing here. Welcoming everyone's thoughts! Thanks

I would love to get everyone's opinions on the realities of finding a highly conscious partner as a young person. I'm 23 yrs old but I've been doing this work earnestly for many years, and I've gotten decently far for my age. However, of course, it's rare to find anyone in their 20's who takes this stuff seriously. I seem to run into two situations when I'm talking to a girl I'm really interested in: I meet some girls who are into spirituality, but it's more of a new-age pop spirituality. Moreover, I find that most women I meet in this group often have a lot of trouble with really basic maturity, like managing their finances, developing emotional intelligence, and communicating well. I meet some girls who are super mature on a character level and I have great chemistry with, but they have absolutely no interest in spirituality... and my dedication to spirituality is confusing/frightening to them. I know that the deeper I get into this work, the bigger the rift is going to be between me and the people in my age group when it comes to spirituality. I've done the pickup thing and I've also gone to tons of spiritual events in Austin, TX where I live... and the only dates I go on end up in one of those two groups. I generally have no problems attracting a partner, but it would be so much easier to get along in a long-term relationship or marriage if we both have those same values. I really genuinely would like to get married and have kids someday, but this is leaving me wondering - should I just settle for someone who I get along with on a personal level even if they don't care too much about spirituality or just practice new-age pop spirituality? It seems to me that I could spend years pounding nightclubs and hippie events and still never find someone in my age group who is going to take this stuff seriously. Not just as a hobby or a couple of yoga classes - but genuine spirituality and awakening... aka cares about and experiences the shit our boy Leo talks about. I would love to hear everyone's thoughts on this! Super grateful for this community and for Actualized.org!

Hey @Ninja_pig! I hope you're holding in there okay! I know this stuff can be really challenging - I experienced something very similar over the past year and I'd love to share what it was like for me and how I've been finding my way out. I hope it's helpful to hear my story! I'll try to keep it as short as possible, but I know this is gonna be a bit of a long one Leading up to June 2022, I had done a substantial amount of spiritual work and I felt like I was on the cusp of something. I had some intense psychedelic experiences, meditated rigorously, and even popped into short non-dual states. But in all those years of spiritual work, I was still under the materialist paradigm and the illusion of a material universe. Sometime in June 2022, I took around 300 ug of LSD on a lazy Saturday. I had already tried 4.5 g of mushrooms and some NN DMT, so it's safe to say that I wasn't expecting that LSD trip to rock my world. But at some point during the trip, I fell into divine love and unity. I was writhing around in tears of pure bliss and had the realization that there is no physical world... there is only beautiful, loving consciousness made of nothing dancing in nothingness The realization had been building over years, but it snapped during that trip and cracked me wide open. It was the most beautiful experience of my life up until that point. ...and then I started to come down lmfao. There was a HUGE discrepancy between the love and truth that I experienced during that trip and what I experienced on a day-to-day basis during that time, and because of that, it threatened my ego BIG TIME when it came back online. It was essentially a massive episode of ego backlash immediately after my most ego-less experience! Leo has a great video about ego backlash. The way I understand it is that following an experience of love and truth, my ego was so threatened that it had to lash out with fear and delusion in order to stay alive... so it threw my worst fear in my face: Nihilism! All of a sudden, I started experiencing violent intrusive thoughts. I was so caught off guard because of what a beautiful experience I had just had on the LSD that I didn't even see it coming! But I was pummelled night and day with questions like "If God is whole and complete and you don't exist as a separate self, why stay alive?". Ultimately, these were fearful questions that had been in the back of my mind during my whole spiritual journey, and I believe that my ego used these as a last stand to fight against the experience of God realization that I was having. I felt existential dread every day for months, but I had this intuitive sense that the only way out was through. So I continued meditating intensely, reading, and of course, watching some lovely Leo videos to figure out what was going on. And the last time I tripped, I had a breakthrough! I realized that this fear, nihilism, existential dread, and even loneliness only happen in the human mind through ego-centric thoughts. In my most loving and truthful states after a deep meditation, there are no thoughts about that kind of shit... in fact, there aren't many thoughts at all. My mistake in dealing with my ego backlash was that I tried to fight my fearful thoughts with more thoughts! I thought there was a LOGICAL way out of it. But God isn't lonely, depressed, or nihilistic. God is love. And God doesn't need some external reason to exist. The point is itself! So anyway! Instead of engaging these ego backlash thoughts, I just do my best to love them and drop them. I get present and relax into the nonduality instead of going through thought loops about it! Because without the petty shit that my ego mind throws, there is no nihilism. There's just God! And nothing else. And now I'm back to crying my eyes out on the floor over the beauty of God! Full circle lol. Some helpful techniques include Vipassana meditation (or any meditation really), Leo's Satisfaction meditation, Metta meditation, and lighter, silly things that help me out of my head and into presence/love (watching standup comedy, appreciating some nature, laughing with friends). I hope you can gain something from hearing about my pitfalls and successes here @Ninja_pig! I apologize for the long post - this is just a topic near and dear to my heart and I wish you the best of luck working through it. It's been a beautiful milestone on my journey and I know it is for you too Also shoutout to my boi @Leo Gura the spiritual goat - thanks for helping me to realize nothing heheheee