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This is related to Leo's blog post on Understanding Psychosis- https://www.actualized.org/insights/understanding-psychosis I had 3 psychotic episodes. I am mentally ill. It started after I started doing meditation. The first episode was after 3 months of 20 minutes of meditation daily. The second episode was after 5 months of the first episode. The third episode was 5 months after the third episode. I had no hallucinations but I was misinterpreting things radically. I thought everybody wanted to kill me. ( Maybe thats because I have a history of being bullied in childhood.) In the first episode I was thinking that God wanted to kill me for all my sins. And I felt a constant terror in my body to the point that I couldn't sleep even holding my parents' hands. I was taken to a psychic who helped me. In the second episode I thought that I was trasported to an alternate reality(I was wrong), I jumped in to a pond to commit suicide, I was unable to sleep for over a week, and I felt like my higher self was being expressed through me. I was taken to the psychiatric hospital but they did not medicate me thinking that I was just pretending because I was in the higher self mode. In the third episode I could not sleep(insomnia which may be caused by my 20 minutes of meditation), I again felt like my higher self was being expressed through me. This time too I was taken to a psychiatric hospital and they medicated me and diagnosed me BPAD with Psychosis and gave me medication. But now whenever I try to meditate now I am unable to do it. I also feel depressed most of the times inspite of 3 anti-psychotics and 2 anti-depressants. I feel headache on the top of my head. Life feels hopeless. As Leo said- "Doctors will often just think of you as crazy and load you up on drugs, making the situation much worse.", Doctors infact think me as crazy and have loaded me up with medicines. When I suggested to the psychologist that they need to fix the root problem which is my childhood trauma of being bullied ,they said I am just depressed and I need to do more activities to overcome my depression. I mean they give no importance to emotional healing. I feel lost when I can't even rely on the professionals. please give your opinions and advice. Thank you!!

Yeah you're right. Sometimes I have some "normal" moments, but it's very rare. I usually think it's an awakening, when in fact it's just simple lack of anxiety, or normal state of being. I didn't have time to read your book recommendation, but I skipped through the pages and I got the essence. I tried the method where you ask your body "yes" or "no", it said I have no problems and trapped emotions. Then I asked about the Heart Wall and it said yes. It's not a hidden Heart Wall though, so I think my subconscious is ready to let go of some things? I asked if it's ready then it would say no then yes and no and yes again. And so forth. What does that mean? I think it goes like this: I show too much love, even if it's just friendly admiration and respect towards him. I'm a very passionate being so I might go over the top. He has some wounds, perceives it as me being dependent on him. I sense his anger, I have some wounds regarding males being angry so I try to overcompensate, thus being even more pushy and suffocating, but this time also fearful and maybe desperate for forgiveness and an answer. He gets distant, doesn't want to talk. Says he only talks when it's necessary and that he has nothing to say. It goes like this for a few days, he's getting more nervous, I get more anxious, the pressure between us grows. I keep pursuing him and asking what's wrong. He says nothing, he's hard to contact via social media and all, responds in 2 word sentences, usually in an irritated tone. He doesn't want to hurt me because he cares for me, but his fear of commitment (even for a loyal friendship, not necessarily relationship) eats him inside - notice the inner conflict between his love for me and his desire for freedom. Then that is a period when he tends to forget the real me, and sees me as desperate and kinda retarded. The tension in me grows, I get angry, I break off all ties and stop talking to him. But after a few hours I talk to him again to calm him down that everything is ok and I need space (again, some deep unconscious fear of losing people if they commit suicide because of me - source of fear yet unknown, but maybe the emotional abuse of a masochistic relative in childhood). I make sure he will be safe, even though I know he's probably ok. I tell him to give me space, to leave me alone for a few months but I tell him that he can write if he has important problems that I can help with. Then I'm calm but sad, feel some grief, especially in my lungs and I breathe very badly for a few days, very bad chest pain. Then everything in my life goes well, I'm happy. Then after some time I miss him and I wonder if he misses me too. I get depressed. Then he writes to me because he was feeling the same grief. We return to each other, have fun, feel good, share experiences of things that happened when we both were away, feel strong connection and he shows tons of love and admiration for me. Then cycle repeats. It has repeated like 10 times now, and I've only known him for about 3 years. That's some things based on my observation. It was really liberating to see things from perspective and write it down like this. It's true. Thanks. Yeah you're right. I do think Shin is amazingly helpful, but things are far more complicated than that. I just didn't share more info about my friendship because I didn't want to argue and complicate. But notice the dynamic I illustrated for Mu. It's written in a very objective manner. You cannot say one friend is bad or another is good. It just sort of happens out of fears, wounds, bad habits, complex dynamics, pressures. Strangely enough, even the most toxic people can have very good caring hearts. That's why it's hard to let go of him. I think the ultimate solution is to detach from the situation, even if it keeps happening in the background. I think of it as admiring a person from distance. The simple feeling of it is blissful. Especially cause Shin and others didn't consider one thing: that the love between me and my friend isn't necessarily egoic stage orange trading system type of love, but a holistic love that takes on many forms. One based on being. None of us is attached to "owning" or "keeping" the other person. It's almost like an very unhealthy manifestation of turquoise love, while the two persons involved are stuck in orange-green mentality and lifestyle because of the circumstances (society expectations) and ego-desires. Or maybe there's no circumstance yet to express it? But it's there. There can be any label on our relation to each other, yet we feel and express the same things. We were both trying to describe to each other the feelings we hold for the other many times, but it's really hard to explain. It's like the other person is the most fragile and important thing for one person, yet no one has the intention to keep the other person caged. We've been trying to find all kinds of solutions to express these strange emotions in the safest environment possible, so we tried dating (it seemed like being loyal would provide safety), then dating seemed very orange and possessive so we moved to friendship, but friendship is a label that doesn't let the people involved explore the possibilities of love-expression fully, so we detached completely from each other, but what do we do with other people and society? What do we tell them? People demand a label for everything. I'm wondering it anyone will ever "get" what I'm meaning above. This seems like the only community that would understand, yet I don't expect much, especially because my way of describing things isn't the clearest thing in the universe. sorryy. But I'm curious if anyone will truly get it. Also if there's an explanation of how two seemingly unconscious humans developed high consciousness emotions next to each other. That's the weirdest. (p.s.: this doesn't mean the relationship dynamic is healthy nor that I'm defending it in any way. + high conscious emotions are present in higher percentages in the friendship when other needs are met - like Maslow's hierarchy - so I didn't contradict myself anywhere on the thread)

I had a similar thought. Mine is that if you want to become enlightened, there is a way more efficient way to make that happen than years of meditation. To be concrete: suicide. So, if someone wants to be enlightened to end suffering; you can end suffering right now by killing the ego. If someone wants to be enlightened to find truth; you can kill what's preventing you from finding truth by killing the ego. Leo often says that the point of life is to awake; to die before death. I never understood why he believes that. Seems inconsistent. If you want to awake to the absolute truth, there are way more efficient ways than meditation or psychedelics. I get why one would want to become enlightened, but claiming that survival of the body while absence of ego is the number one priority of life does not make sense to me. At least I haven't heard or experienced anything convincing to back up that claim. Long story short; if enlightenment is the most important thing for you, there is nothing preventing you from killing your ego permanently at any moment. And as you say; enlightenment will happen one day anyway. There seems no reason to awake before you die, other than that it is something you want to do. Me: Not an expert on nonduality and never had an experience I would count as such. Just someone who tries to make sense of what he hears.

I feel like the stuff that happens to me keeps me from awakening. It's hard on my self esteem and I'm trying to fix my ego for a decade now because I know its necessary to go further in awakening. But for some reason unfortunate coincidences keep piling up and up and its just takes away all my energy. Sometimes I feel like my life is engineered perfectly to drive me slowly into suicide.

The Deep Problem Of Marketing Society and culture is very resistant to new ideas Modern society is very materialistic It's not just about providing evidence Marketing is no just about sales, marketing is about influence and eye balls, it's exposing millions of people with certain paradigms, assumptions and ideas and then those ideas become reality, they define what reality is, reality is not just something you find out there, it's something you construct - marketing, society , culture, business are constructing it So the question is what type of ideas are most people exposed to. Status quo is always interested in maintaining it's power and will fight for it It's a construction of beliefs, concepts... and most people will not think of it like it's just a story, they will think it's reality This current reality is mostly constructed by science, academia and business Business is only concerned about maximizing profits, it doesn't care about truth and consciousness Marketing is important anywhere where your trying to get a consensus, for people to agree on anything Those who have control and power, they control access to eyeballs Education is a big propaganda, and after you go trough it, you are indocrinated in a certain box, paradigm and anything that then goes against it you will think of it as insane, non-mainstream stuff People in power want their ideology being spread trough education "I will exert my power to push my self-agenda trough" - this is what ego all about, ego is power hungry.. why? ... because it is no conscious, if it were conscious it would surrender all desire for power, but it doesn't know any better, so it's life is all about acquiring more and more power and than using that power to satisfy and fulfill shallow ego gratifications like buying stuff, taking vacations Notice that nothing high consciousness is ever advertised on TV, or taught in schools Modern marketing is selfish, it's all about maximizing sales (every little word is tweaked to push all your emotional buttons) Marketing is any way to influence any body and getting eye balls and then you can use those eye balls to earn money, to pitch a religion or you can use it to enlighten people.. you can use it for good or evil Word of mouth is another way of marketing Notice that nobody is talking about real solutions to mankind problems What modern marketing is pitching you is fake solutions to very real problems and those solutions are designed not to work so that you can come back and get more (example: pharma that sells you "medicines" that dont' cure anything, jsut so that they can sell you more medicines) 44 min - marketing is directly responsible for causing obesity, disease, mindless consumerism, mind numbing entertainment, dogma, tribalism, misinformation, war, laziness, anti-mastery mindset, suicide, anger, depression, ignorance cancer, every form of addiction known to mankind, materialist paradigm,the growing gap between the higher and lower class, pollution and poison Materialist paradigm is gross by it's very nature, it doesn't recognize anything subtle (creativity, consciousness, beauty, truth, love)... it recognize only the most base forms of human desire (need for sex, need of greasy food, easy stimulation, shortcuts and quick solutions and get rich quick schemes). Modern marketing sets the bar so low that when you hear the truth, the truth sounds like insanity... because you are always judging anything you are hearing by what you heard before, and what you have heard before is what you have heard from every single marketing channel that is popular ... so you are always judging truth against untruth and there is always a giant mountain of untruth with a little tiny grand of truth, so that giant mountain easily outweighs the little tiny grand of truth if you are not vigilant about it (and in a sense this is how it should be because society must evolve trough the spiral dynamics stages. What can be marketed is very much limited by the audiences paradigm, it's very much limited by the limits of human language and by what can be communicated, if a thing cannot be communicated, it's hard to market it. It's also limited by the predominant needs and desires of the population, so it creates this kind of vicious circle where unconscious people will only buy things that are unconsciously marketed to them but then because companies have to carter to that and market unconscious things that makes the people even more unconscious and then those unconscious people are themselves the ones who are running the marketing companies . Even if you think you are not doing marketing, you are doing it by working for a company , so you need to look at what marketing is your business doing. If you are working for Mcdonalds look at what kind of marketing it is doing. Most people are like zombies, cogs in the machine who are contributing to the marketing of Mcdonalds and then what that is ultimately doing is poisoning human beings It's not easy to find conscious work, most work is unconscious. To break out of that unconscious cycle it take vision, ambition, higher consciousness values, takes a lot of work to work towards those , takes work to move trough the spiral dynamics stages Here's what we can do: you can take control of your own life, you can stop using society as the gold standard against which you judge other paradigms and other ideas , you can stop assuming that society will deliver truth and health to you, you can stop sucking on societies tits and take ownership over the kind of media that you consume, over the kind of businesses that you shop with and the kind of companies that you are willing to work for and kind of marketing that you are willing to do and willing to support, that's within your power and that's exactly what a conscious person will need to do. Most people don't exercise this power because, they haven't really thought about it, they are just ignorant about it. They are unconscious. High consciousness stuff is hard to market. It's much easier to create a business which sells poison than it is to create a business which actually elevates people. It's hard to convince people to buy good stuff. Are you gonna appeal to people most base and unhealthy needs and desires or are you gonna have a larger vision for the world? A lot of spiritual masters will never be famous because they don't write books and don't know how to market to the masses. You tend to take marketing that you are exposed to as the entire possibility space of what's out there, of what's possible and that is an enormous distortion of the truth. There is a whole world out there beyond mainstream marketing that most people have no clue about. 1h - Leo wants, that you on some point outgrow actualized.org. So, that you don't need that material for personal development and that you can get all the answers from within What would responsible marketing look like? marketing what elevates the user, taking the users agenda as your number 1 priority rather than money. Is the thing you are selling going to truly, honestly elevate the user? Is your product elevating the user? How can you improve your product so that you would be really proud of the fact that you are elevating your users consciousness? responsible marketing cares about improving peoples lives cares about marketing health and not disfunction. It doesn't want to addict people. It wants to offer permanent solutions to their problems. Key takeaways from this episode: Start to notice how marketing is unhealthy, just how much of it around you there is and start to notice that marketing doesn't just pertain to TV adds but to a lot of other stuff that you normally don't consider as marketing Start to notice a few of healthy marketing out there that exist and try to see what is the ratio of healthy to unhealthy. Ask yourself is that elevating me or is this dragging the humanity down? Stop expecting that truth will trickle down to your from up above. That society will speed feed you with truth - it wont. Go out of your way to find the unmarketed gems (the books, the seminars, the teachers) . This is really how you advance yourself in life. You don't sit back and wait for gems to come to you, you don't wait me for tell them to you

This is the symptom list from the National Institute of Mental Health: Persistent sad, anxious, or “empty” mood Feelings of hopelessness, or pessimism Irritability Feelings of guilt, worthlessness, or helplessness Loss of interest or pleasure in hobbies and activities Decreased energy or fatigue Moving or talking more slowly Feeling restless or having trouble sitting still Difficulty concentrating, remembering, or making decisions Difficulty sleeping, early-morning awakening, or oversleeping Appetite and/or weight changes Thoughts of death or suicide, or suicide attempts Aches or pains, headaches, cramps, or digestive problems without a clear physical cause and/or that do not ease even with treatment It doesn't have to be every symptom, and it could fluctuate in the amount of symptoms and intensity over time. People often misinterpret depression as an extreme sadness, but depression is often a sort of umbrella emotion that contains many other emotions underneath like sadness for instance. And if it's been going on for some time then it's probably because there are some major issues that haven't been addressed like emotional trauma or even the current traumatic situation that is actively going on (think abusive spouse, bullying, etc.). I've been in similar situations/feelings before, and so that might be why what is said resonates with you. Agreed I think him being your ex makes a big difference. There's a plethora of reasons he could be acting this way because of it. I think the most likely is he was only there for the sex and now that you're not providing it he's treating you like what he feels like you are, a nuisance.

I know “I’m only 23” but right now it feels like all the shit in my life is just hitting the fan and I just feel so absolutely demoralized about my future and like I’m not prepared enough internally/psychologically to turn things around. Still living at home with no real friends at this point at a dead end part time job with no support system at all but more importantly, no solid internal development, I just found out yesterday from my car insurance company raised my rates again for an accident that involved me getting t-boned from a guy blowing a stop sign and because the guy didn’t pick up the phone after I filed the claim on him to accept liability they actually dropped the claim, stopped pursuing him, and aren’t going to coverage about $5000 minimum if I’m lucky worth of damages. It just feels like my life is just in this melting pot and culmination mode of endless misery and hopelessness that’s destined for me and all the mistakes I’ve ever made are coming to haunt me and will to me being just another average person that accomplishes nothing. Where there’s no background of sense of self-acceptance, self-esteem, how I was never good enough to my parents and how they coddled me with giving me all the wrong forms of help when I was younger and how stupid I was bullshitting around. I struggle to be concrete on my life purpose through the course after taking it 3+ times because it’s so emotionally hard when you have so much fear about how you can’t subsist which leads to being motivated from this place of aggression and anger which is really more of a reaction from this deep sense of hurt. I just don’t know how I can get myself out of this. I grew up in a emotionally and psychologically unstable family where screaming and yelling and suicide threats by my mom and yelling about money was the norm at my house, I struggled in high school from ADHD and from struggling socially and emotionally from the toxic parenting I got at home so I didn’t get to even get to taste some sort of freedom in what would’ve been “the college experience”. I have a terrible relationship with the family I live with now (my Dad) because I’m treated like I just my mentally unstable mom and how I’m some loser that needs to work 80 hours a week. I have no friends to move out with or anything. I feel resistance to just apply for a job here in San Francisco, because 1. I can’t afford to live here, 2. I hate living here in this claustrophobic neurotic human zoo, 3. Working these jobs, I’m sometimes in the bathroom just in tears because I’m faced with ‘this all I can fucking do and I don’t know what I actually can do.’ Every time I get another job like this (some low end job) I just get used to it and numb to it until I stop being numb to it and then I sabotage it by coming in late in stuff because deep down I’m reacting to how much I resent and despise hate with a very visceral hate how much I’m wasting my life in yet I keep getting caught in this catch 22. It feels like yes, life is a maze, this thing is fucking rigged against me to lose and go for fucking cheese, I don’t want cheese, I know the goal, but I’m not good enough in the achieve that goal and I can’t just ask 99.9999999% of people for help on this issue because they want cheese and I don’t want cheese. In yet, I’m not good enough nor prepared to get out of here.

I'm originally from a deep Red place in Florida that's like 95% white (in the area with the poor/working class whites... aka my background), and the racism that I've noticed comes in mild to more severe forms in about 40% of those people. This is a HUGE number of people. So, because white people are the largest demographic that have the biggest sway on election results, that means that people on the Right know that they have to appeal to this group to get elected. So, they create dog whistles as a wink and nod to that demographic of people. This is called the Southern Strategy, and has been employed since the Voting Rights Act in the 60s when there was a political re-alignment. So, this is an example of institutionalized racism against non-white people that continues on into present day. So, I don't know how bigoted Mexican men and black women generally are, nor is it relevant. It's not relevant because there are no candidates running on the "be racist against white people" platform, as this is political suicide. White people are the majority party. So, you can't only rely on non-white voters to win you an election. You have to appeal to white people as the majority demographic. And proposing bills that disenfranchise white people will simply not work. However, a politician running on the Southern Strategy will win votes and approval by promising to disenfranchise non-white people and making good on those promises. So, the social power here is not conferable in any way. So, even if there are some mean black ladies somewhere out there who give white people the stink eye at the bus stop, it doesn't threaten to have any effect on the lives of white people, at all... except maybe hurting some snowflakes' feelings. And that's true, no matter how bigoted a demographic that's non-white generally is, as that party is still a minority and doesn't wield as much voting power or power to stack to the status quo in their favor. So, I suspect the way you're looking at this is by asking, which demographic do you really think are "better people"? Do you think Mexican men and black women are better than poor white people? And the answer is none of the above and no. I guarantee there are good people and knuckleheads in each group, in conferable proportions. People are all over the place on the spectrum of having it together and not having it together. But this is not an issue of character, and framing it as such obscures the real issues. In reality, it's an issue of social power and the workings of a system that give more power to white individuals at the expense of non-white individuals. And it's important to be aware that this system is being leveraged by powerful people in the Right wing to get votes and approval on the backs of non-white people.

Ah, I think I'm on this same page. Just confused as to why anyone claims to know anything, then, even with respect to enlightenment? Just a note: She does seem largely dualistic and parts of Atlas Shrugged make it clear she didn't really understand philosophies like Advaita Vedanta and erroneously assumed that they are 100% illogical and baseless. You may have read some of her nonfiction - so have I. However, I am not as quick to completely debase her, especially in terms of how to create an economy and behaivoral expectations of individuals (or distinct experiences of the one Self, in terms of nonduality). Basically, her systems thinking is interesting to me. I should note that I am not supporting the unhinged capitalism so many people (incorrectly) think Rand raves about. It would be interesting to talk to you and others who so strongly rebuke her about the actual plots of her novels and their implications, bad and good. Also, Rand died of heart failure. Not suicide. So.... weird that Osho claimed suicide.

Funny when the ignorant call out others ignorant. I've done many camping trips, someone of the best times of my life connecting back with nature and life. Firstly of all I didn't say you have to do it forever, your average person is so fucked up side ways, they would die in a week of camping because they have no living in nature skills, or they would burst into tears from being alone or not having TV/Video games etc. Also it doesn't have to be as a hard as you think, as long as the weather conditions are decent and you have some access to fresh water (rivers) and food (berries + animals) heck you can even go buy your groceries beforehand, you don't need to do it 100% handicapped, you can use tools to aid you. You have no idea what you're talking about you've just made some assumption about how things work, maybe go research some tribes that live in rich environments, you'd realise how much spare time they have in their hands to sit and do nothing in the village because it actually doesn't take 16 hours of your day to meet your survival needs, especially if you've got a foundation. Yes yes we have evolved, thats why depression and suicide is more rampart than ever, most people cant meditate or be alone in silence for 10 mins. Look at how much the entertainment industry soaks up time, look at how many people spend hours upon hours on stupid websites like reddit or twitch where they watch other people play video games because they're so desperate to make that little connection, because they're depressed and lonely. Even for productivity, read "Deep work"? you're much more likely to get shit done if every time you needed to work you can fly out to a cabin in the woods away and from everything with nothing to do but the work. It has been proven by science to that being in nature actually plays a vital role for your health and being. And you get the opposite with concrete roads, builidngs, vehicles, human traffic, noise, pollution, grey landscapes, advertisements and billboards everywhere, all this soaks your life energy and makes you depressed. Please don't chat shit like as if our evolution isn't a double edge sword, 90% of men would be happy to sit in a high end realistic VR and fuck virtual girls all day long, and never get out of their couchs ever again, you think this is good for your soul? Most people choose what's not good for them, but what dopamine wants, hence unhealthy foods and obesity, no one wants to intentionally be fat. Nature and the wilderness helps to regulate dopamine. I hope you learned something. Guess you haven't read enough productivity books, one of the technique that keeps coming up "walk out in nature", the bad thing is most people have to make do with parks which isn't good enough, it's too artificial, too overcrowded, you can still see the buildings and see and hear vehicles, and you barely see any wild life or interesting plants. To get the benefits parks will do little, you really need to walk into real nature environments.

This is a really good example of how models suck at representing reality. Seems to be a double edged sword, based on the context, the individual and however its ripple effects dance around in the universe. Let's not paint schizophrenia as if it is a good disorder for everyone - I am sure it can be embraced by certain individuals - but the overall effect on people seems to be of pain on people. Statistically higher suicide rates, high rates of smoking, etc. That said, I believe there are just shades of schizophrenia like there are shades of everything else - everything is blurry anyway. Three of my siblings have had schizophrenia and I've always intuited that there was a dream-like quality to the world. Perhaps a mild form of schizophrenia(ish) jumpstarted my inquiry into nonduality. I believe there is a connection. Some excellent systems thinking and deep insights about conciousness could potentially be used to tackle this issue (aka we need turquoise people, according to your model).

I also want to add that seeking Ego death is a fool's errand, because the Ego is already an illusion. Suicide can be done only if you believe you are the body and you believe that by ending the body you end yourself. There is a base error there. If the body dies, you do not die. Hence suicide is impossible - it is a fool's errand. Enjoy being, peace.

@Azrael be careful with your theory, man. I appreciate your concern but i had a feeling meditation is for suicide long before Leo said things like death, suicide

Your post in one of the reasons why I dislike @Leo Gura talking about deep topics containing phrases like death, ego suicide, etc. To someone that is as far as Leo or more advanced, this kind of talk can make sense and illustrate ideas or experiences. To someone like @Baotrader, it is confusing and misleading because you don't have the capacity yet to make sense of it. That's why in Zen they only give the knowledge to you, that you can handle. Otherwise, ppl would go crazy.

Did you commit a suicide when you woke up from the last nights dream?

Yes, the ritualistic suicide of the garbage one accumulates.

More like becoming immune to it. Ego death = suicide meditation will only bring you closer to it.

Enough nonsense! Meditation is facing pain head on, has nothing whatsoever to do with suicide.

It has become clear to me for long that meditation is for suicide. But i find it hard to believe/accept (or if you dont like the word believe you can call it whatever you want) that we can feel painless when your body is in pain. The most annoying and gruesome pain is the pain in the stomach ( in my experience). How can one meditate under stomach's pain? How can suicide be painless?

Search how to get rid of your self esteem issues. All stem from this. As a man it doesn't really matter how you look as long as you take care of yourself and are confident/at peace within. Look at how many stars are still not happy with their life even after getting everything they wanted, even if they have godlike bodies. They still commit suicide ... Doesn't matter how good you look, if you have self esteem issue you will still find something to complain, you will always feel as "missing something". Read the six pillars of self esteem by Nathaniel Branden Watch videos about self esteem on youtube and take notes Start a daily meditation habit starting today.

Chapter 61 I have to the conclusion after a lot of insight and contemplation work over the last 2 days that living spiritually is difficult. But there is a meaning to it. Living a spiritual life is to live a sacred life. To treat the body as a sacred temple. To view life as if it were something sacred. To look at life as journey from birth to death to the afterlife, to consider this as a journey of the soul from the physical phase or dimension to the spiritual phase or spirit form or state in the afterlife. This journey being like a stopover in the greater scheme of things. But the journey is valuable to the soul. It has transcend this journey called life to reach the afterlife to experience peace. A soul's journey is never complete without experiencing life. Life is just one of the stages in this eternal journey of the soul. It has to experience peace and joy and stability in this journey called life to make a stable peaceful transition to the afterlife where the soul can continue living in peace and never suffer any harm. Thus experiencing great distress and suffering in life is not ideal for the soul. It's not good for its eternal journey. By living a life of suffering and misery and sadness you are not doing any favor to the soul. You are only hurting it. You are hurting its purpose. You are hurting the soul so much that it will almost cease to exist and try to escape life. It willl try to end the chaos by ending life or suicide. This is not a favorable outcome for the soul. The soul desires to survive and live in peace and happiness. The soul will suffer great distress if it cannot experience peace, harmony and happiness in life. This distress is harmful to the soul and its health. The main goal here is that the soul should rest or remain in peace after death. But for that it should have peace and happiness in life and not restlessness and suffering. Whatever the body and mind experience in life is toxic and it is what the soul has to bear through life and that is sad, its the own unique story of the soul and what it had to go through in life. Every soul close to death has a unique story to tell, a story of hurt, pain, suffering, loss, grief, struggles, endurance, love, poverty, tragedies, abuse, hope, triumphs, etc. All this comprises the journey of that soul. This is its unique footprint through life and the world. It's important to protect the soul. To protect it from any kind of harm or damage, little or big. To keep this journey safe and peaceful. The body is a temple of the soul. So it's important to protect the body as well. To maintain it healthy, functioning and vital. But all this does not mean that we should never have any suffering, sadness and pain. Or struggles. Of course we should, only that makes us more human. Experiencing the entire spectrum of human experiences both good and bad and all kinds of human emotions is a very vital part of growth and empathy otherwise we will turn into sociopaths or very unemotional shallow beings incapable of deep emotions and understanding. It takes pain to know pain. You cannot be living a perfectly happy life and never experienced even a single thought or feeling of sadness and expect to be very empathetic towards others. You could show that you care and be sympathetic but that's not the same as actually feeling someone's pain exactly the way they do. It will come if you have been there in some way. If you have never suffered then you will most likely be just blank or indifferent to someone's pain. So ultimately upon it's death, the soul can leave in peace. If the soul suffers too much in the course of life, then even in the afterlife it will be equally vindictive and restless. Human beings think that they can control the environment. What they don't realize is that they are also a part of the same environment that they are trying to destroy.

@7thLetter You are still misunderstanding a lot of things. You have actually made many assumptions about me, just re-read what you said. You are actually making assumptions about everyone here. You are even making assumption about the „typical“ yellow/green/orange/blue individual. About Leo, he is not all that good or bad. Some people might get him correctly and develop themselves, but there are people, who are terribly depressed, because they have entered the beta stage of Spiral dynamics because of what they heard in his videos. (= stage, where you just cannot understand, what the hell is happening with you, you cannot really transition further, it can even end in a suicide) I even have a person on facebook who told me that he is suicidal and things that Leo is a freak. It really is a matter of attitude, perspective and approach. Orange has 2 ends of the spectrum. It can either be lazy and cocky or driven by negative motivations, most of the time. I was really into video games, orange self-development, I even bought some courses from people like Tai Lopez... I also wanted to impress people by learning difficult languages like Japanese and Chinese, I think this counts as orange as well. I didnt do badly, but it didnt bring me any happiness at all, I was heavily dependent on people flattering my achievements. Yellow person can still make tons of relationships, if he is good at finding people who understand him and support his ideas and work, why would he ever reject these people? Its about finding them, if you havent created a network of people like this before, it probably is hard to find them, but that doesnt apply to me, because with my knowledge of languages, I can immmidiately attract speakers of these languages and people who are also learning and people, who are learning languages like Japanese for some more meaningful purposes (not like mine, when I was learning), they tend to be very intelligent and disciplined people, who are worth talking to, at least from my experience. Dont take this as some sort of hateful debate, I admit that I have a lot of things that I have to work on, but I am definitely not mostly blue/orange. The reason why I started to tell you this was because some people here were giving me advice that didnt really give me almost anything, as I am beyond that. I am also not craving for a relatioship, as some people here are probably thinking. Its just that people have created so many assumptions about me, so I dont want this thread to go to waste completely.

Thank you for sharing your experience. I'm getting ready for my first trip and have been thinking a lot about writing "suicide" notes. For me to be able to fully surrender, I have to be willing to actually die. This means no holding on to the hope of coming back. That hope could prevent me from fully letting go. If I say goodby to my family, they will think I've gone crazy and committing suicide. If I did die during the experience, it would be a shitty thing to do to my family to just die of a drug overdose. So the best option is to write everyone a goodbye letter. This allows me to be ready for full surrender and no holding on to 'my life'. Then if all goes well (which statistically it should), I can just throw them away and tell everyone in person.

Hey fellow actualizers, I would like to share with you my story with 5-MeO-DMT. I made a post previously talking about my experience with low dosages. In this post, I will describe the full encounter. Getting the substance I got this substance semi-legally about a month ago. I got it from a legal research chemical distributor. They will sell it to you provided you don't have the intention of using it on yourself or others. DMT is a scheduled 3 substance in Canada, which is not that high priority (Cannabis was scheduled 2 up until recently). Also, 5-MeO is not very known from the DMT family. RoA I've experimented with both snorting and plugging. Initially, I started with snorting, but I discovered that it wasn't the most effective for me. I didn't like the burning in my nose, I was losing substance, my nose became very dry, and I would have some dry blood in my nose afterward. Plugging, on the other hand, was very clean. The substance dissolves in water and you are able to absorb it much easier and faster with rectal administration. It is my opinion that plugging is the way to go (provided you get a small syringe ). Small Dose I've already made a lengthy post about my experiences on a small dose. To summarize it, at first, I felt a slight discomfort with tension in my head, small buzz, a little bit of shivering and nausea. These were minuscule and not very noticeable. Afterward came a very deep meditative state. This was meditation and contemplation on steroids. As if I took my most contemplative moments and multiplied them by 1000. My mind was firing with cognitive activity all over. Thoughts were cycling. Not just thoughts but more like "Aha" moments, like understanding after understanding and so on. Insights were everywhere and all sensation became very potent. I've experienced moments of deep love and connection, omnipresence, insights about awareness and the present moment. After those peeks I came to a state of bliss and peacefulness. Overall it was great, the experiences went by after about 30 min I was back to baseline. I was still present as my Ego throughout the experiences. Insight: Experience is the key. There is a whole world out there far beyond what mind can image and what we can put into words. Thinking/Language/Communication is also a type of experience, but only one out of an infinite sea of experiences and perceptions - don't give it too much weight. Medium Dose This trip was very very very different - 540 degrees different. I still can't fathom how you can get such a different experience from the same substance. This time it was very physical and can be summarized as hell, torture and slow death. All those discomforts that normally come up before the peak. Well, they got amplified to an unbearable degree. I felt an extreme amount of body discomfort. I wanted to escape to run away, to surrender. It wasn't a pain in a sense of somebody is cutting you with a knife. It wasn't fear either, as you can imagine standing on the edge of a building. It was this nasty nasty feeling of internal discomfort. Like when you're super anxious about something. Maybe loosely like when you wear an uncomfortable t-shirt, or its too hot, or something bothers and you want to jump out of your skin. You feel frustrated/angry/anxious at the same moment. It was a type of Ego-discomfort taken to the extreme of what's possible. I felt nauseous and wanted to puke very badly. My body was shaking like crazy. Not shaking from cold, but shaking from like a wound in a stomach. I felt like dying, like I couldn't take it anymore. I was trying to surrender to it, but I couldn't. I was trying to meta surrender - surrender to the fact that I couldn't surrender, but that didn't work either. I was fucked. Honestly, if you think you're a tough guy? I dare you to go through this. Some of the thoughts going through my head: "Why would you do this to yourself?" "Did I just overdosed and killed myself?" "I want this to pass!" "It's just a feeling, its just a feeling" That was pretty much the whole experience. It lasted for about 30 min but man, it felt like an eternity! I was still present as my Ego throughout the experience though. Insight: This is what dying is like. Ego is everything about you. It's a very physical thing! emotions and thoughts are interlinked. Subconscious thoughts give rise to emotions which give rise to surface thoughts and provoke actions. I heard before that Ego is just a thought, but dammit it goes so deep. It controls everything about our body. It is our whole existence. It is very subtle until your survival is threatened. I have huge respect for people who took 5-MeO-DMT Heavy Dose Preface Well needless to say that my previous trip freaked the shit out of me. I knew I came close, but not close enough to fall into the abyss. So I was musting up the courage. I knew that to go all the way I needed to die. My mind was coming up with excuses of not doing it. Suddenly things I was forcing myself to do became not so difficult just to avoid this experience (nice try mind). From the previous trip, I knew that dying feels very real at that moment. There is no difference between that and "actual" death. It's funny but to actually make passing over easier, I wrote a final letter/suicide note to my loved ones. I typed it up, printed it and left it on my desk before the trip. This might sound too extreme, and I didn't think I was actually going to die. I thought I will come out of it, and the whole thing will look silly. But then again, at the back of my mind, I thought that you never know. Plus I would want somebody to leave me a comforting letter before they go. I got ready, did an hour of meditation, which put me in a very relaxing state. Experience This substance keeps surprising me. It was very unexpected. I can't put it into words. It's just too much. The transition from regular consciousness was super clean. When the discomfort started to show up. I just laid on the bed, closed my eye and it passed away (or my sense of self passed away). I think the preparation and my state of surrender really helped. Either way, what happened cannot be even close to thoughts or words. It was deeper than time, space, ideas or my own self. I was the raw reality itself, it was impossible. It was there, but nobody was looking at it. Perceptions were there but nobody was there to perceive it. It's a f*cking paradox. You would think perceptions need a perceiver. My body was extremely loose. It collapsed and I was far far far gone. The body was doing things by itself. I didn't even know if I was breathing. Some sensations were there, but it was sort of neutral. I can't even say neutral because that's putting it inside criteria. Really language is incapable of describing this. Words are kind of like post signs to experience. But it wasn't even an experience, because there was nobody to experience it. It was incredible. But even to say that is giving it a judgment. It wasn't good or bad. It transcended all limits and criteria because there was nobody there to give any human judgment. Kind of like Earth was prior to humans. My body could die or live it didn't matter. It was waaaaaayyy beyond my existence. The mind would occasionally talk, but it appeared sort of in the background like an echo. All It could say was - thing, no thing. It went on like this "existence, no existence" "love, no love" "life, no life" "enlightenment, no enlightenment" and so on about everything. There was no difference between anything. I was not present as my Ego throughout the experiences. I lied on my bed for 2 hours after this experience in a state of no-self. I could say that it was bliss. But even that is not true, because bliss implies an opposite to be true as a reference. There was no reference in this experience. Then there was a feeling in my belly. I could label it as me getting hungry, but there was no reason to act on it. No reason to act on anything for that matter. Eventually, the intensity was slowly coming down and I convinced myself to get up. Insight: What I was describing is only what the mind can come up with. What actually happened transcended all of that. What happened is what is left when everything goes out the window. Every identification crumbled. There is only this something - It is nothing, everything, energy, dark matter, empty space, Tao, awareness, God, aliens, simulation whatever you say about it. It is so much bigger than you, you are not even on its radar. There is no free will, nor somebody to not have free will. As an Ego, I am a puppet empty inside. When I die ... I will go back to the source.

Yeah mate, all well and good if you are stable enough to experiment with these compounds, some people aren't and it could end in a disaster. One of my best friends experimented with LSD, it fractured his mind completely and ruined him beyond repair. He eventually ended up committing suicide. Yes well you missed something rather significant there, as that's the very root of addiction- distance from unpleasant emotions. This is utter nonsense and quite frankly a dangerous statement. Please be mindful of making such assumptions. Ketamine tolerance builds up very quickly and this is noted among addicts. This is why you find addicts needing to consume 2, 3 even 5+ grams a day.