Space

The vast majority of relationships end pretty quickly at some point and rarely last until one or both people die, particularly these days. If you consider all of the relationships ever throughout history, most don't last long. This isn't a bad thing. Leo is really telling the truth about how most relationships are formed out of selfishness. In fact all relationships are, because everything is done for self-survival. Most, if not all relationships, even the cute elderly couple who have been married for 60 years, are all done out of raw self-survival. Falling in love, in the conventional sense, however deep and authentic it may be, is still self-survival. Why do you fall in love with only a very specific type of person? Self-survival! Saying that, you can of course still have deep loving, long lasting relationship. Don't assume Leo has had shallow relationship experiences simply because he is stating the truth. If anything, recognising the actual self-survival mechanisms behind relationships is more conducive to a significantly more intimate and deep bond with your partner.

@JonasVE12 Atleast what you're eating is low in processed sugar, which is the really the number one thing when it comes to good diet. If you really want to optimise your diet, take out the white bread and pasta or atleast swap them for wholegrain versions. I would not be surprised if you were deficient in a lot of essential nutrients if you have been eating just those foods for a long time. Get a blood test to check. A variety of foods is essential for healthy living. If you eat the same thing all the time you're more likely to develop intolerances (particularly with things like peanut butter) I would say you need to get in a wider variety of foods, particularly vegetables. There are literally so many vegetables you can eat, and just with a little seasoning the majority of them are delicious. You need to develop a palette for vegetables. So just slowly incorporate them into your diet. It literally takes 5 minutes to cut and steam some broccoli, or 10 minutes to boil some potatoes. Bad gut bacteria thrive of junk food and crappy foods, particularly sugars of all kind (white sugar and as refined carbs). Occasional treats are allowed of course, but anything over the top and your asking for gut problems. Vitamins can help but should never be a substitute for real whole foods. Just eat your vegetables and fruits.

She's speaking for ALL young people. Someone has to speak up and be the face of the youth, and it just so happens to be her. Rising sea levels are not going to be the biggest problem from climate change. Drought, massive migration, food shortages etc are all things that will impact everyone around the world.

@ethanb121 just buy a drug test kit online.

A few ideas: Set specific chunks of time to study and put away ALL distractions. Do this either by being disciplined about it (e.g. put phones and computers away, or close windows/tabs on computer etc) or by forcing it (e.g. studying in a cafe, giving your phone/computer to someone else, putting app blocking software on your devices). With these chunks of time, usually atleast 1 hour, set a timer and do not stop working until the timer goes off. Tell yourself that when you finish the session you can have a break and relax for a bit. Then do another chunk of work, and repeat. Write a 'Done list', rather than a 'To Do list'. Every time you do a chunk of work or whatever you need to do, write it on the list. This keeps you motivated and often makes you want to do more so you can write more on the Done list. Much better than having a long list of stuff To Do, although To Do lists can be excellent as well. Leading on from this, you can write a clear plan or list of everything you need to do. Make it absolutely crystal clear what needs to be done. Having just a bunch of work to do but not knowing exactly what that will be makes you procrastinate. It's kinda like a fear of the unknown. Having a good schedule and routine is also helpful. Aim to do a certain amount of work each night and give yourself fully to the work, knowing that when you've finished working hard you can relax and watch Youtube etc. Last piece of advice is JUST DO IT. There is no cure for laziness other than just sitting down and doing the work. Stop expecting it to be easy and pain free. Stop avoiding the suffering. Successfull people learn to work and get stuff done particularly during those times when you don't want to do it.

Awakening isn't simply a black and white thing. It's multi-faceted and one can experience many degrees of awakening into each facet. Each person's realization and embodiment of Truth is quite different. You need to be more specific in your question e.g. What is stream entry like? Or, what does No-self feel like? Furthermore, awakening at the deepest levels simply cannot be put into words because it requires a shift in consciousness. It's not like describing a dream or a drug high.

I plugged it but I don't mind that roa. I would smoke it but I have HCl so i'm not sure it can be smoked. I'll definitely keep it in mind though, thanks

Thanks for asking I did mushrooms on one day, and then did a 5-MeO trip the next day. It was definitely very fruitfull but I didn't get that breakthrough experience that I was looking for. I have a feeling the mushrooms I used had dropped their potency quite a lot as I took around 2-3 grams and didn't have a particularly deep experience. Although I did spend around 3 hours contemplating all sorts of aspects of my life and had some really interesting insights. I also feel like mushrooms have a positive 're-wiring' effect on the brain, even on relatively small doses. You can almost physically feel the brain making new connections. The 5-MeO was similarly not as powerfull as previous trips, even though it was the biggest dose so far (28mg). Saying that, the ego dissolved and I had some quite profound insights. Overall it was a good experience, I learned a lot. I will definitely be doing it again, if I can find somewhere cheaper. I also intend on trying to find some better quality 5-MeO as i'm still dealing with a lot of nausea from this batch, and i'm pretty sure thats not normal.

@happysad You lack motivation because you don't really want to know. Being honest with yourself is important here. Wanting to know in part comes from having mystical experiences because they break you out of your normal day to day consciousness. Without this you're stuck in survival mode. You've also got to have a certain inherent desire to understand reality, beyond merely being interested in spirituality and occasionally thinking about it now and then. And this is difficult to develop. As I said, some people are just inherently deeply curious about all of this. You need to have some deep mystical experiences (a.k.a psychedelics) so you have an actual vision of whats possible. Not so that you end up chasing or craving for those experiences, but so that you have a sense of where the practises can lead. Otherwise your really just shooting in the dark.

@DaneV Clearly this business isn't what you want to do, so why waste any more of your life on it? What do you really actually want? Or what do you not want? It seems what you really don't want is to keep going with this business, even though it sounds quite substantial and other people are reliant on it. The fact that you have 35 employees is definitely a major consideration. I'm not sure you can just let them off because you want to go do something else. I would suggest handing the business over to someone else, but then you wouldn't have the building to rent. Is there any way of taking up a much smaller role within the company, so your still getting some sort of income (unless your savings can cover it) but you're not managing loads of people and maybe you only work a few days a week and/or work from home most of the time? I feel like something like this would be more appropriate, rather than just dropping and closing the whole thing. You gotta survive after all. It would also mean you could test a more spiritually focused and more humble life, without having to drop everything. Don't underestimate homeostasis. Most people can simply not just go full monk mode in a short space of time. You also gotta think more seriously about what 'full time truth seeking' would actually entail. Are you actually deadly serious about? Imagining yourself doing meditation full-time is vastly different than the actual day to day experience of it. Then again, you may be quite spiritually inclined and not have any trouble with it, I don't know. My intuition says, keep the business for now. Re-arrange your position to give yourself more free time to self-actualize, but likely also a much lower income. Test the waters.

Yes I watched this video the other week. An amazing talk, isn't it? Do you think what he talks about is actually going on here, with Leo and Actualized.org? I feel like Leo's growth, and the growth of everyone on the forum is having a sort of collective resonance. Just a thought.

@okulele Very impressive! These solo retreats are so much harder than they sound. I recently did a 3 day psychedelic retreat on my own in a small cottage. Even that was a challenge. My addictions are strong. It's also so expensive to rent a place on your own here in the UK, even a crappy hotel room. Particularly when you add on food and supplies etc. Did you use Airbnb? How did you find the cabin?

@Tistepiste That's hardly anything! You should be ok, don't worry. Looks like the article is describing what you have. Good find! Eat healthy and try to take it easy for a while.

@Tistepiste I've never heard of anyone having these sorts of side effects. What is a dip? How many grams in each 'dip'? Seeing as it has only been a few days I would not worry about it too much. See how it goes over the coming days. Sometimes the MDMA stays in your system for quite a few days afterwards, particularly if you've taken a lot. If it is still a problem a week from now, I would definitely recommend going to see your doctor.

@Robobotas Skip the Kriya Bow and go straight for the most powerful techniques. Don't worry about the minutia of each technique, like holding your breath for atleast 1 min 30. Just do the best you can and work you way up to it. Same with the visualisations. Your stack is basically what Leo and other's recommend, so you're on the right track with that. Although its generally reccommended that you do the spinal breathing pranayama from the Kriya Secrets Revealed book, rather than the pranayama taught in The Secret Power. I actually do a sort of mixed between the two, where I spinal breath up to the 3rd eye and then every 5 breaths chant Ohm in the 3rd eye for as long as possible. For me, it makes it even more powerful and effective. Now days I only do Mahamudra and then as many Pranayama's as poss (24+), and sometimes Supreme Fire. But I find Supreme Fire to increase monkey mind and its quite a strain to do, so I usually don't bother. Also, you must have atleast 10 or 15 minutes at the end for meditation and to sit in stillness and silence.

As far as I understand they do work for a small minority of people. I had around a dozen RASA transmissions last year, including a direct shakti transmission, and I didn't really see any results. I think spiritual attunement and development is v important. Regular guy off the street isn't going to benefit from it.

Self -survival of course. Realising you are not just the body, or realising that there is no body at all, is not conducive towards self-survival. We have been telling ourselves we are our bodies for years, decades. It's not something that can just be realised in 10 minutes. It really requires a radical shift in consciousness. For most people its next to impossible without psychedelics.

You need to recognise that you created the idea of 'I am the body'. Is IS literally a thought. Your identification with the body is a thought, or a collection of thoughts. You might come up with 10 reasons why you think you are the body like "I can control my arms and legs", or "I can't control other bodies", or "I can feel this body and not other bodies" etc. But ask yourself, who says that just because those things may seem to be true, that they automatically mean you are the body? YOU Say! You made that up! You're making up the logic that says all those reasons are why you are the body! Just because you can feel your body and not other bodies doesn't mean you are your body. You're making that logic up. There's actually nothing in your direct experience which says you are the body. It's just your made up logic and reason and beliefs that make it seem like it is.

Yang proposing some similar ideas: https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/26/20833928/andrew-yang-climate-change-nuclear-carbon-capture-geoengineering-2020-elections

https://evolvingearthpodcast.com/2019/08/20/e8-rick-doblin-on-the-frontiers-of-culture-and-the-future-of-the-psychedelic-renaissance/ A recent discussion with Rick Doblin (founder of MAPS) about the latest psychedelic therapy and his vision for the future. Whilst most of their current research is being done with MDMA, they have plans for other psychedelics in the near future. Much of the talk is about Ricks's personal journey, but during the last 30 mins or so they talk about Rick's/MAPS future vision, how he sees things playing out in the coming years, his short term plans for psychedelic clinics, and his long term plans for publicly open clinics where anyone can go and get psychedelics.

Here is a high level discussion about the potentially disastrous changes that we are going to face over the coming century from climate change. The talk is led by an environmental philosopher called Rupert Read who is campaigner and spokesperson for Extinction Rebellion. His general view is that the world is going to shit, basically, and we need a much deeper transformation of society, politics and ultimately our consciousness in order to prevent complete collapse of human civilisation. I suspect he is right. The discussion is quite morbid and terrifying in many ways. I thought the questions from the audience and the general discussion were very intelligent and thoughtfull, so I highly recommend watching the full video.

@Leo Gura Listened to the podcast last night actually as I was curious to see what she had to say. Turns out there was a whole lot of beating around the bush. No clear answer as to what she thinks consciousness is. She is promoting a book on consciousness so maybe theres more details in there. Here are my brief notes from the video: she says the word consciousness means experience. we can be sure that consciousness is the only thing that exists whatever experience you’re having is what consciousness is everything I am experiencing is due to a process in the brain intuition says that the self is the thing that is making all the choices but neuroscience says that this is nearly a complete illusion, and many people have experienced this with meditation and psychedelics. free will is essentially an illusion because our decisions have already been made by the brain before we consciously recognise it. she says the Default Mode Network, a part of the brain, is the root of the sense of self or separateness. Psychedelics and meditation turn this off, resulting in ego transcendent experiences. many scientists are very open to panpsychism but the majority won’t or can’t speak publicly about it. ‘experience’ is the best or cleanest word for explaining what consciousness is. a few vague comments about whether plants are conscious and the kind of behaviours they exhibit that might suggest they are conscious. some discussion on split brain research some discussion about parasites and how parasites can influence your consciousness? Discussion about time, but doesn’t clearly say what is has to do with consciousness. Our experience of the present moment is confusing, we have a lot of difficulty understanding what it is. She’s open to the idea of consciousness being fundamental and material universe being a product of consciousness rather than the other way round.

What Psyche_92 said is definitely the way to go. But this is only half of it. You need to stop resisting the thoughts and feelings. But you must also learn to wholly, fully and totally accept and love the situation that you feel shame about. This may be the only way to overcome feelings of shame. Even if there is no particular situation you're feeling shame about, love and accept that. This has to be done really honestly and genuinely. It is completely possible to cultivate a deep sense of acceptance and love for it. You must not fake this acceptance and love, or imagine your shame in some new light or in some idealistic way. Rather accept and love it for how it is, completely non-judgmentally. Literally smile and laugh at your shame feelings in a loving, caring way. I would also say that because you seem a little unclear about what this shame links to, you really need to sit down and seriously contemplate it. Like, actually sit down with a pad and pen and write down all your thoughts to 'why am I creating these feelings of shame?', 'what do I really, honestly feel ashamed about?'. Do this for a good 45 minutes, maybe every day for a week. It's really worth it.

@Cocolove Yea Frank has a lot of good stuff to say. As far as I understand he just had a big Kundalini awakening.

@okulele I'm not usually a fan of Elliot Hulse but that was a really great video! Thanks for sharing I'm quite envious of his lovely sunny home as well!