Haumea

Pretty much this. It's basically The Big Five minus the Neuroticism scale. Develop your tertiary and inferior functions. E.g. I'm an INTJ, so I work a lot on my Se inferior.

Hey Afonso, The 5th level I think is frequently underrated by many. The dirty little secret of enlightenment is that many fully realized teachers got there by being around their fully realized teachers. That's the bullet train, baby. Meditation's the bike.

Get rid of the "I am a separate self" feeling and you get non-doership, i.e. permanent flow. In other words, stabilize in non-duality.

Hmm. "How would you characterize the nature of the self?" Even then, they could fake a higher level answer without directly being at that level. It's more reliable to observe them for a sufficient length of time, and if you are familiar with different levels of consciousness, it isn't hard to guess in the ballpark.

You could have had the best teacher, the most comfortable pace... and it's still your demons that are arising. You can't control the way that manifests. The unconscious mind has a message to send to you, and you can try and understand the message or run from it. That's ultimately what this is about. You even admit that your temporary depression was useful in terms of insight, so you have experience with what I'm saying. The people who developed psychosis were probably already on the edge and seeking a solution, so I'm doubtful that self-development actually directly caused it. Relatively mentally healthy or even just garden variety neurotic people do not develop psychosis as a result of self-development. I know you're not seeking enlightenment, you're seeking relief from anxiety. That's why I did shamanic plants. To end anxiety, you take responsibility for your well-being - stop self-neglecting. That was the gist of the message I got.

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.

What a lot of these beliefs have in common is that the separate self exists. If there's no separate self/ego, then you can't really "think" about it! That's what I'm discovering. The problem aren't the beliefs themselves - they are just thoughts that are generated by the metathought of a separate self.

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?

It's ineffable. I honestly don't understand it, because it reconciles opposites. I mean, lower levels of enlightenment are describable (i.e. I am the Universe, I am one with God, etc.) but there is no "I am" at that level. There's just "I." No object. And that is an inadequate description. Even people who reach it say "I don't know what it is."

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.