Haumea

That was my point. It's not conscious, it's implicit. There is still the "I am" experience. In the Absolute there is no "I am" experience. It's the I that doesn't know itself.

This sounds like the Cosmic Consciousness stage, i.e. "I am everything." There is still the "I am" arising, the I-thought is still there, so there are issues with The Other, the object. This is fully resolved in the Absolute, when the "I am" no longer arises. There's only The Self, the I-I. No other, no object.

I don't think you made any "stupid mistakes", Elisabeth. You're trying to control the process...and you can't. There isn't a PG-13 version of this, this is hardcore, XXX stuff. Real change, I mean. I went abroad and did shamanic plants. And once you take it, you gotta face all your demons. Can't walk out in the middle of a trip. But you feel a hell of a lot better afterwards. Short-term pain for long-term gain.

To quote Emperor Palpatine, "let the hate flow through you." The hate isn't the problem. The problem is that you feel the hate, and then feel bad about feeling the hate. Seems like you want to be a "nice" person. You don't want to have intense, messy emotions. I hate to break it to you, but as long as you don't act on your hate, the world doesn't really care what you feel or think. You can execute a million feminazis in your imagination, and it's fine. There's no such thing as a thoughtcrime. Shadow work is tricky business. You can only access so much repressed material until you reach full enlightenment, so it's really, in my experience, a Sysyphean task. I did quite a bit of shadow work a few years ago...and then I hit the wall with it. Until I went higher in consciousness, which automatically dissolved some blocks, it was like pounding my head against the concrete. So...back to your situation. Here's one way to think about it: the feminazis are doing the best they can, the cock carousel riders are doing the best they can, and you're doing the best you can. So give everybody involved, including yourself, a break. It is what it is.

Appreciating them, feeling lucky they're in your life, etc. I guess one way to get there is experience and a lot of scars from people not worth your time. Then it's possible to appreciate the truly special people out there.

The cure for a lack of experience is having the experience. The problem isn't lack of experience - it's expectations, fear of failure (for any given definition of such), etc. You're 20, you're inexperienced...and that's fine. Don't put pressure on yourself, just experience and learn. You'll make mistakes and learn...and that's fine. You're only 20, so you're still learning about yourself.

Yeah, I can't really disagree with anything in your post. That's the simplest way of formulating it: (full) enlightenment is the lack of resistance to what is.

Who knows? Social programming isn't the only possibility. There's genetics (many American blacks, if that's what you are, are part white), and who knows who you were in past lives?

I had serious blocks that a shamanic plant dissolved several years ago - prior to them I did TM and later Vipassana for at least 10 years, and the impact was relatively minor.

Think about it this way, Leo - if Socrates wasn't fully enlightened, he would have likely left philosophical work given his first-rate mind. But he didn't. Because fully enlightened masters rarely leave systematic intellectual, philosophical or religious work. This is a product of lower stages of enlightenment. There's nothing to be said. They may leave some pointers on how to achieve enlightenment, but they aren't system-builders. They don't create theories, schools of thought, etc. This is usually left to their disciples. Jesus didn't write the Bible. His disciples did. Just having an experience usually isn't enough, certainly not enough to leave the kind of body of work that some of these people have. That is perhaps the strongest evidence you can have - the sustained output. BTW, Nietzsche was in the same stage as Plato. "Beyond Good and Evil"? Virtually a motto for that no-self stage. No self, no doer, no good, no evil. I'm not aware of him having access to mushrooms or any of the typical psychedelics, but he did supposedly use opium in his later years. Was that enough? I don't know, but regardless, not everyone who is in that stage is going to broadcast it to the world. Some just become world-historical innovators. So evidence is hard to come by.

A zen devil in my understanding is someone in the lower purification stages of enlightenment (lower and upper subtle in Ken Wilber's hierarchy) - once you hit the lower causal stage any bad behavior is highly unlikely. Not everyone stabilized in these stages misbehaves, but some people do. You would be shocked if I named some people who were in these lower stages - I'm talking real assholes here. Speaking of Greek philosophers - Plato was enlightened, but Socrates was fully enlightened. Think about their works: The Republic is totally a product of someone in the lowest stage of enlightenment, while Socrates left no work: "only don't know." (“The only thing I know is that I know nothing, and I am not quite sure that i know that.”)

One's you realize no-self (and by that I mean stabilize in no-self, not merely have one or a few experiences of it), you keep going and don't stop. Yes, you are already THAT. Fully enlightened. All the camouflage has to be removed though. There is a hierarchy of stages you go through. This is confirmed by multiple sources from various traditions. Don't stop until all the pointers of the Absolute are met. The I-thought is dead. There is no trace of Other.

Ramana Maharshi, paraphrased: There is No World. There Is Only The Self.

I generalized a bit, but yeah. In my experience taking a plant with a group of people, pretty much everyone saw the same thing when we first did it. It was almost like watching the same movie. We compared notes and yeah, same images came up. This was a group of people raised in different cultures. Now, the third and fourth time I did it, it was pretty personalized to my psyche (not even my culture, but my individual interests, etc.) E.g. I have an interest in astrology, I was into it for years before doing the plant and it was explaining my psyche to me in terms of planetary symbols and aspects. Incredible. But yeah, I would guess if you give something indigenous to a certain country or continent to someone foreign, they would see the same imagery at least in the beginning. With DMT it's weird. I've read the trip reports, and a lot of people do get the aliens, but some get clowns and other imagery. In any case, it seems like certain representations are attached to certain psychedelics.

I wouldn't take caffeine. I have the same problem while meditating a lot of the time. What I've figured out is that if I take a 20 minute nap prior to meditation, I do not fall asleep during the meditation. I set my phone alarm app for 20 minutes, then it wakes me and I meditate for half an hour.

Yeah, I'm not surprised by that. You talk to indigenous shamen, they think of these plants as intelligent beings with a unique character there to impart wisdom to you.

What influences the (let's call them) visions is the type of psychedelic you ingest. You give lichens to someone from another part of the world, they'll see trolls. You give an African psychoactive to someone from the US, they'll see African warriors, etc. I've experienced this first-hand. It doesn't happen that way 100% of the time, but I think it's pretty consistent when you first take some given psychoactive. The cultural memes are created because the locals invariably come across and ingest these substances.

It's sounds like a specific type of "spirit guide" experience from the cosmic self/higher subtle stage, as I referenced in another post. This is the stage of high archetypes that appear in some specific visual or aural form. It's cool that you get to see trolls on lichens, but it's ultimately the message/advice they impart, not the form the messenger takes that matters.

There's nothing to solve, I think. I agree with you that the 5eo-dmt experience was a Stage 3 "God Consciousness" experience. The only peril here is that he stabilizes in that stage and believes that's full enlightenment. Otherwise it wasn't a bad experience to have, it likely accelerated his progress. I've had experience with spirit guides on psychedelics (that's of a stage prior to Leo's experience) and it was definitely helpful. As far as striving, this is natural until you stabilize in the last pre-nonduality stage. Eventually, you realize it can't be done and let go. He knows it intellectually already but accepting it takes time. Yes, no other, no world, no enlightened being, everything is perfect exactly as it is.

Loreena, His whole metaframe is default blind trust of all kinds of authority. It's as if he lacks the imagination that it could be corrupt, let alone that it is likely corrupt. Very naive, especially politically. E.g. see here. (I went looking for specific examples of this after posting the previous paragraph, but I think it illustrates my general observations well.)

Haha,

Pretty much what Leo said. It's about where the rubber meets the road. People seek out and abuse power. Every system is corruptible, either in terms of financial gain or just the power to commit depravity.

I don't think there's that much disagreement actually, just varying descriptions of the same stages of enlightenment. There's entry into non-duality: "localized" no-self, characterized by non-doership/spontaneous action; then cosmic self, i.e. "I am the universe" feeling; then God Consciousness, i.e. the pure "I am" feeling, the seed of manifestation; then nirvikalpa samadhi, i.e. "the Buddha has been met on the road and killed", i.e. "I am the truth", and then the Ultimate or Absolute, where the I-thought has been terminated and no longer arises: sahaja. "No Other, No World, No Enlightened Being, Nothing Ever Happened, etc." The entire process after ego death is eliminating the subtle aspects of mind that cause The Other to arise.

I've listened to his podcasts and have found him to be conventionally intelligent but severely - severely - lacking in self-awareness. He blindly takes his metaframe (set of implicit beliefs and assumptions) for granted; there's little self-reflection as to whether it is even valid for examining certain issues. This produces a GIGO effect: you can have the most sound logic, but if your premises are naive or foolish, it's worthless. I don't think he's even close to non-duality.

Not to sound flip or anything, but if you're enlightened and have to smoke somebody, it's God's will. I would guess the chances of what you're describing happening are maybe one in a thousand, if not even rarer.