Setty

@Nihal217 You should consider building strong theoretical foundation if you want to progress deeper into consciousness work for many reasons. Firstly if you don't you might become a zen devil. Leo has interesting video about that. Secondly many mystical experiences may damage your functionality in everyday world so having some theoretical foundation to help you interpret those is extremely helpful because you don't have to reinvent the wheel. In spirituality there is a danger that you convince yourself that you are more developed than you really are and because of that your way of life might become pathological and you hurt yourself and others in the process. If you build strong theoretical foundation the probability of that happening se lessened. Hope that helps.

@iamnotahumanbeing @Setty Also I should add that the disolution of boundaries happened a few times after that experience without the use of weed. Which was a big problem for me because I didn't know how far it can get and it generated a lot of anxiety within me. I was in fight or flight response those times. I think the biggest obstacle was my inability to handle strong emotional reactions to these kinds of experiences.

@iamnotahumanbeing With weed I had my first, what I would call, sober mystical experience. The rules of my reality radically changed. The boundaries between me and others started to melt and I couldn't control it. There was no me and there was no other. Everything was moving in union. And I realized my life was a lie the whole time. Everything I strived for was a play with no substance and depth. But my identity was still there and I relized I could end everything right there, my whole life, the charade I have been playing on myself the whole time. Or atleast it felt like it. I don't think it is as simple as that to be honest. It felt like I have to go through hell and worse to get to the other side and I wasn't ready for that. I wasn't even planning for this experience it just happened. Then something started to drag me into it without my consent and that is the time I had a big ego backlash. I haven't done anything stupid but I got a lot fragmented afterwards. The next day everything was devoid of meaning. Nothing was important to me. Now it was not important to finnish school, to be a good person, to strive. I was so confused and empty. I didn't know what to do so I just did my routine. I worked hard to get back on track and make sense of what happened to me. And it worked and now I feel better than ever. I think this is the biggest problem with psychedelics. The fact that we are not equipped enough to handle such a strong experience. You get fragmented and you have to put yourself back together. Which can be really useful and beautiful if you can do it.

@Leo Gura @iamnotahumanbeing I have experimented with weed as a tool for some time and maybe the fact that it isn't as direct as other psychedelics is its own advantage. With other stronger psychedelics everything is done for you and you just surrender to the experience. With weed you don't just get blasted away. Thanks to that you can experiment with meditation or self-inquiry and you can observe what works, what it does and how. The fact you have to actually do something before you see any results with it is super usefull because you can than use that knowledge for your everyday meditation. It is quite unique experience and it can get pretty deep too. Some states I had on weed combined with meditation were much stronger than some of my LSD trips. But it is true that I haven't tripped that much (three times) and I don't smoke weed anymore because the side effects were too noticeable and I am trying to finnish school without any hindrances.

@PetarKa Why are you worrying about your free will? If the free will is an illuson your worrying will do nothing to change it. If there is free will then you don't need to be worrying. It is completely unnesesary for you to suffer this conundrum. The trip could help you tremendously or it could harm you. The question is how would you deal with a bad trip afterwards? Where would you go for help if it made things worse? What would be your refuge? Maybe answer that question first. I never had a bad trip (only uncomfortable ones) but I experienced many negative effect of psychedelics after the fact. And I think the worst thing about it was that I had to keep it a secret. I had to suffer in silence. There was no one I could talk to about it and share the pain with. After a while I found a therapist that specializes in psychedelics and it helped me tremendously. Just the fact I could tell someone what I was going through helped me.

@Manjushri Maybe a therapist that specializes in psychedelics would help. You can open up to them about your experiences and they help you translate them into your everyday life. Also why do you call family norms unconsious? If you are lost in the psychedelic experience love and caring from your family and friends is the thing that can ground you to earth. Are you sure it isn't just your spiritual ego that thinks it knows better than it actually does? Maybe the simple and "unconscious" everyday life is the thing you need right now. You know, find beauty in the little and unimportant things and forget about the realm of psychedelic experience fow a while.

JP threads have always so much action and excitement in them. I am fan of his work because he raises great points regarding your individual responsibility in your own life. And this point is critical and it is the reason he is so popular on the internet. He teaches people to stop feeling like a victim of life and instead take responsibility for it. This insight is something that is so important to understand and is hugely missing in the general knowledge of people. Most people here think people like him because of his views on traditional gender roles and tradition in general but I believe that it not the case. People here also like to project A LOT how he thinks and how his supporters think and are not really interested in understanding his views. You just demonize him. Do I see it wrong? I see it this way because when I talk about things he does right people just tell me I am cherrypicking a I should see my own bias. Yes I might be biased and I could do a better job adressing that but if you think you aren't biased on this matter you are just deluding yourself.

@Solace I belive human is a creature that strives for something constantly. That is basically human history in a nutshell. If you get rid of that you get rid of a human spirit as well. It is a great insight to see that the world is already perfect as it is but we can't forget that the pefection includes our striving for better too. We don't need to strive to be in a state where all striving is stopped. Unless it is the part of existence you want to explore of course.

@Joseph Maynor Yeah it is very easy trap to fall into. You get the glimpse of the absolute but your mind immediately makes up something out of it and you start to believe your conception of it is the real deal.

@Ingit Wel it is a unique experience. And most of the time the experience doesn't involve world crushing elements. That happens mostly if you aim for it or if you take too big of a dose. If you are going to do it do it focus on safety. Luckily psychedelics are safe for your psychical healthso you don't have to worry about that. But read some articles about it. To make sure you mental health is safe do them in a good and friendly enviroment with a trip sitter you trust. And read some trip reports so you know what to expect. There is a lot of them on this forum. If you are interested in the spiritual aspect of it then combine those substances with self inquiry or meditation. Leo made a great guide on self inquiry in the link below. If you do these exercises while tripping it is very likely you get the mystical experience everyone here is talking about.

Your mind works in a way that is the most beneficial for your survival. That means it creates a lot of persistent illusions in your life that you live in your whole life and you call that a reality but it is not reality it is very limited form of it. Psychedelics offer you the ability to change theprogramming of the mind and see reality under different point of view. The mistake people that haven't tried psychedelics make is that they think that this different point of view is just some minor thing. Some anecdote you can tell your friends and that's that. But it can be life changing. Actually it is technically impossible to tell how much world crushing it can be. Think something along the lines of combination between Neo taking the red pill in Matrix and Truman from Truman show realizing his whole life was just a charade. And you are right they can be very bad for your psychological health because you can see too many things you are not prepared to face. And if you are not careful you will create a lot of delusions about what you saw.

Yes LSD is enough to give you some insights but it just doesn't give it to you you have to work for it. It is a tool. Try to do self-inquiry when you trip that does the trick for me. If you are not sure how to do it properly try to read Leo's practical guide to enlightenment. Do the exercises when tripping and see how it goes. Higher doses also tend to be more insightful but it is important to focus on safety first when dealing with this substances. The insights with a higher dose could be owerwhelming and at that point you won't get it out of your body.

@Serotoninluv Well he is skeptical of postmodernism because he is thinks the made up structures by humans are useful and if you tear them down you might make a big mess. Here is showing his traditionalism. He thinks that people made a very complex understanding of the universe throuout the years that somewhat works and if you dismantle it too quickly the chance you will make a better system is close to zero. I think his problem is that he fears too much of what would happen if you just get rid of it all at once. He doesn't understand he would find the absolute in that. But who knows that without the prior experience with psychedelics? As for the LGBTQ. He doesn't think it is wrong to be homosexual. He thinks the traditional family works well because the child needs to have a role model of the feminine and masculine at the same time and if you are a homosexual couple you have it harder to teach it to the child. So they have a big responsibility and because it is a new problem no one really knows how to deal with that. As for the pronounce controversy he doesn't like to fact that it should be ilegal for him not to choose to call someone by their prefered pronoun. And as the new made up genders go I think he doesn't like them because again it forces other people to change your speech to suit them.

I would suggest that people on this forum should consider stopping categorizing people with colors of spiral dynamics. It doesn't help you to understand the positions they hold and it just allows you to dismiss them without any consideration of their arguments. People resonate with him because he offers solutions that work for them. Maybe you would want people to learn different values that resonate with you. Well you are free to embody those values but it isn't up to you to decide what other people should want. Now let's go through some Peteron's core positions and I would really like to know why do you think they are outdated or wrong. In everyone's life there is a lot of suffering. You think that it is bad and tragic but you are more than competent to deal with it. You won't find meaning in life if you only seek happiness. Life is about taking responsibility in your life and finding meaning in that. Don't identify yourself as a victim. If you see yourself as a victim you will become bitter and you will hurt people around you. Take responsibility for your life and make the best of it no matter how unjust it is. Emphaty can hurt people's development. If you take responsibility from their life they might never navigate life by themself. When taking action you have to think not only about your present self but you have to think about you in a day, week, year and so on. You therefore have to sacrifice some of the present for the future. Happiness now might not be the most important thing. You have to treat yourself and others as someone valuable. A being with tremendous potential that can be realized. No one ever got away with anything. If you warp reality for your benefit it will eventually snap back and it will not be good for you. You have to have faith in your potential. Even if there is no evidence that your endeavour will accomplish anything it is important to have faith in it. The way you develop yourself is by facing your fears. You put yourself in difficult situations that aren't overwhelming with some reasonable chance to succes and as you get use to it you will increase the challenge.

It can be pretty intense. I used to take it while I was meditating. I mainly focused on body awareness and breath. It gave me a lot of insights about my body and emotions. Now I stopped using it because I could not translate it to my sober state and it created a lot of frustration within me. I also had a mystical experience while using it. Hard to describe but I comunicated with some kind of being that was not of this world. This conversation was leading to destruction of my existence and created a lot of bad trips and confusion for me so now I am hesitant to investigate this matter further. I know you can ask how do I know it wasn't just a delusion and of course I can never be sure but it was the best conversation I ever had with anyone and I have never experienced so much clarity and connection from a conversation with a different human being before. I felt so much love and understanding from it it can not be described with words.

I am also having a problem with thinking in too much english. Now I have a habit that when I hear something interesting in english I immediately try to articulate it in my own language so it would have the same impact it had in english. Thanks to that now when I have a conversation and I think up something in english I can pretty comfortably translate it into my own language without much of a hindrance.

I noticed something similar in my speech too. But I wouldn't say it was because I was losing my ability to speak but I was more conscious of what I was saying and I demanded more from myself to speak better. If you are too concious of what you are saying it will hinder your ability to speak spontaneously. So I would recommend focusing on speaking spontaneously than speaking properly. There is an exersice you can do that will make you confortable to speak spontaneously and Leo suggested something similar in this video. Basically you will define words as accurately as you can without really thinking about it. And you can use any kind of words it doesn't need to be something complicated. I have been doing this for a while and now I am more comfortable to speak without being worried I woudn't be able to get the point across.

It seems to me that most of the JP bashing here is unjustified. People like to use the term stage blue as if it is something degrating to be and you should strive to get out of it and evolve but evolution has no desirable goal and it is not required for an individual to go through all stages of spiral dynamics in his lifetime. Every stage is suppose to be build on top of the previous one because otherwise the society would be unstable and collapse. JP is trying to figure out what it means to be a true christian and people resonate with his teachings because he elevates them from lower parts of blue to the higher parts. Now tell me how else are stage blue people going to transit to the next stage than through people like Peterson? If you find his teachings wrong then maybe it is because your ego is trying to defend your identification with the higher stages and you can't see the bigger picture.

Well the teachings about enlightement can be pretty dangerous. Ego backslashes can make your life pretty miserable and if you haven't made much reseach it is just too foreign to you to see any benefit of that. When I had my first mystical experiences I had to go through a lot of suffering and confusion to deal with it. Of cource now I am glad I went through with it but I don't really blame people that they are so afraid of it. But I agree that Leo is too hung up on his interpretation of the truth and the right way to approach it but so is every human in existence so it doesn't really discredit him in any major way.

I had peculiar experience this night that have never happened to me before. I mean I had a lot of dreams that were like full-blown trips where I was completely concious and it was freaky as hell but this was totally different. At first it was a dream like any other. I was in some community of very close people. It seemed like the wolrd was at war or something because everything around me was in ruins but the people I knew wanted to make the best of it I guess. I remember a lot of us went to a big hall with a very curous device that people sat in. I know I didn't really know what the device does but I wanted to try it. When I sat there and I couldn't back down anymore the instructor started to tell me what it does. He said I won't be able to move a bit and I will be concious in a delirious state. The device started to move up and down like in a bungee trampoline of some sort. I was very tired and wanted to fall asleep. Then it started to get freaky. The falling down caused me the feeling of waking up to the real world and at the boundary between a dream and a wake state when I was supposed to just wake up from a dream the device pulled me back to the dream fully awake and conscious. I remember that I realized it was not a dream in a bit. I could see and hear normally like I was in a awaken state not sleeping at all. my cognitive abillities were at normal and saying it is just a dream would defy common sense in the same way I would say now this reality is just a dream. Then I remember talking about it with my dearest friends what should we do about it. We knew nobody would trust us and people are occupied with their important worlds trying to find their place in a broken world. Who would even consider the idea that their reality is not really real and there is so much more to it. I also remember right before I finally woke up like I normally should my girlfriend shouted at me that I am just leaving them there running to my safe reality. I remember I wanted to make her understand but she was just very hurt by it then I closed my eyes and I just pictured my room and when I opened them I was awake here. It didn't even felt like waking up to be honest. I just opened my eyes and thats it. My memories faded quicly and I don't remember most of what happened I don't even remember anyone I encountered but I remember the device and how it felt being in it. The situation with the device was very similar to my first trip experience where I was with my friends and I din't know what am I getting myself into and we then just talked how is it possible that nobody really knows about this stuff and that there is a whole new reality in this drug. Has any one of you had something similar happened to them? What other crazy stuff happened to you in a dream state?

There is a lot of activity in our mind we don't regard as thinking but it is. So things like "My mind is empty and it doesn't feel like anything" is a thought or "This is just like going to sleep, so what's the point?" is a thought. So maybe the thing you call not thinking is full of judging and labeling of what you experience that slips through your awareness.

I think the problem is excessive thinking. During the day you need to think about where you go and what you want to do, where to eat and so on but our thoughts don't stop there. We think constantly about everything that doesn't need to be thought about and we miss a lot from our day.

Maybe you should put down spiritual pursuit for a little bit. Spirituality often creates a lot of suffering because people take it too seriously and make it success oriented. They experience these amazing states not realizing that every hill has its valley. The higher you go the lower you fall. Just try to enjoy an ordinary state of consciousness for a few weeks without any spiritual goals in mind. It is not a race and you don't need to rush anything. If spiritual practices create suffering that they are supposed to relieve you from then what's the point really?

Aren't all spiritual practices just traps that are keeping you from realizing the truth? I mean if you are meditating or doing self-inquiry to become something it means you believe you are not it. I think your chance of liberating yourself through meditation is the same as when you are watching cartoons since it has nothing to do with what you do.

Are you on a path of enlightement? If so maybe you are stuck somewhere where you don't really want to be. Enlightenment is wery tricky. All the information about it lead to no place at all. It is a dead end without any reward whatsoever. So all the self-development you have done to get it is essentially pointless. Sounds depressing? Well it's not and that is the beauty of it. It sounds depressing to the ego and the body because when all this is over they are gone but the good news is you are not any of those things. But me saying that is quite pointless because you have heard this thousands of times and it will never go to your true nature because your mind catches it and makes something out of it. Your mind is so powerfull it can create absolutely everything about things that are not happening at all. Realize that everything your mind produces is wrong no matter how convincing it is. It is convincing and true only because you lend it the reality it has. I am one of those people that were trying to get to the truth throught psychedelics but again it leads to nowhere. It just strengthens the minds ability to create stories about reality. That's all it does. It can be beneficial to see that because when you are doing it for the first time it catches your mind off guard and you might see that every story you make about reality is false but as you start doing it as a spiritual practice your clever mind finds a way to make it all about itself especially when you are looking for enlightenment. A few days ago I experienced the "absolute infinity aka god" for myself. It was all clear to me how everything I do is important and it all leads to somewhere. But that is all just interpretation. It's fun to see it for yourself but it isn't stable at all. It colapses immediately because you saw it from a point of an ego and it just can't handle it. I was lucky because I was so convinced that I am god I tried to implement it to the real world. I believed I was chosen do to some important work around here. You know finally be myself (god) and collect my reward. And as you can guess it didn't last long. I had feeling that I can make others do exacly what they should be doing. I never tried using it with real people but I did it with movies and videos on youtube. And it really felt like I can make them to anything I want because I could. And I mean that in a way that you mind can create something out of nothing and it is real for you. So even nothing was happening the mind interpreted it as my doing. So yeah, I was watching some movie and I believed I was this character on the screen. I wanted him to survive because I identified myself with him but in the end he died. I did everthing in my power to prevent that but it was impossible task because it wasn't me I dind't even control it. It was just light on the screen but I believed I really fucking died there! When I saw that happening I sat there completely blank and I finally understood. So yeah you are it. And you have never been not it. These is no need to seek what you are. You are living it.