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First of all, yeah, nonduality tends to upend one's plans and one's life. That's the point. But also.... You fundamentally misunderstand how nonduality connects with psychology. Psychological problems are not fake. They are real and people suffer enormously from them. 99% of people are not ready for awakening or nonduality. Most people need years of remedial psychological work in order to bring them up to a functional level where nonduality might become a possibility for them. People need to be gradually guided up to nonduality. You can serve this important function. Also, psychological problems and nonduality are not mutually exclusive. I know enlightened people who might still go and see a therapist. Enlightenment does not eliminate all of one's psychological problems. Much growth and work remains post-enlightenment. You are cheating yourself if you aren't empathetic towards people's psychological difficulties. Because that's Love. Also, empathy for people's "problems" is an important part of enlightenment as it opens you up to Love. There is nothing fake about helping people at whatever level they are at. There is a huge opportunity to combine nonduality & psychotherapy. Most therapists lack a deep existential foundation, which awakening would give you. You could become an extremely effective therapist, guiding people from the psychological into the mystical. Or you could focus your practice to cater to clients who are pursuing spirituality/nonduality. Making you an exceptional guru with a deep understanding of psychological issues that hold people back from awakening. For most people the biggest obstacle to awakening is sorting through all of their psychological baggage, fear, insecurity, anger, and trauma. And more broadly speaking, the field of psychotherapy needs to be extended and integrated with nonduality for truly effective treatment. You can be a leader in this emerging trend. Stop pitting life purpose against awakening. If anything, awakening should deepen your commitment to a life purpose. Just upgrade your LP. Make it big enough to align with awakening.

I've done the Life Purpose Course in the past, and at the end it was pretty clear that career wise i wanted to help people with psychological problems. I was planning on becoming a Psychologist/Psychotherapist, and i would have gone to uni to get my masters degree. I planned out all the action steps towards reaching this goal, and my life started to have a lot of meaning again. I became very action oriented, and everything was set to this goal. This was until Nonduality realy started to get a grip on me, and basically ruined this dream of mine. Right now i don't feel like i want to pursue it anymore, as i see that fundamentally al psychological problems mostly stem from ego and believing in your "own" thoughts. I feel like i would be cheating on people if i would show them a lot of empathy for their "problems", taking them serious, as they would only make them worse in the end, and not be a permanent solution. Also receiving money and making a living out of this this would feel kinda weird. I think for this to work right now, i would have to put on a huge mask and fake it. It just feels wrong. I'm not sure what to do anymore with this. My life lacks drive and mission right now, and i'm totally clueless again on what to do with life. I hate it. The only small interest i had was Psychology and now i don't really care about anything anymore. It's still there, but it's not nearly as big as wat it used to be. It's even hard for me to get a dayjob because of this, as a 9-5 would totally have been in service of my Life Purpose to earn and saveup money. Now a dayjob would just be in service of feeding myself and getting by, and that's not as exciting to me at all. Where do i go from here?

@James123 "i hit nonduality 3 times with meditation". Lmao. Theres no way a person could tell themselves they were in a nondual state. Mahasamadhi? Again, lmao. The whole thing is predicated upon the fact that you're a soul. @Leo Gura no, actually YOU are not "awake". You wouldnt talk about the shit that you do if you were and srsly do you not know that the stuff you are saying has been said ad nauseum in the 80s and the 90s in books like "law of one"/"ra material"? "We are one, we must align with god's will" blablabla You are parroting nonsense Leo, at least i admit my shit, while you keep peddling it. And not only to yourself... But to others as well!! No different than Osho, that bastard who lived off of delusional hippies giving him money. And to say corona virus is love - again, children make up stories to explain the horror of reality away - which is what you are. And you even said you "could make it go away but you didnt because you realized it was love". Lol. And you blessed fetuses of pregnant women. Ahahah. Absolute DELUSION

Entanglement of Instability and Stability. During my hike yesterday I came upon this stream. The path is above the stream. I put one foot on the planks and new there was no way I was crossing it. The planks were old and unstable - and it was too high up. Then I saw a fallen tree below as a method of crossing the stream. On the bank, I was stable yet when I started walking across the log, I quickly discovered that the log was unstable. Rather than crossing the stream, I decided to sit down on the log and sit with presence. Yet I couldn’t find a comfortable, stable position to sit. After a few minutes of moving my body around, I found a position of stability. If I sat motionless, it was as stable as sitting on my meditation cushion at home (I sat near the bottom right of the photo). . . Yet if I fidgeted around, the log would move, balance and instability arose. So I sat motionless. With right balance, it was effortless. I simply sat still. I then realized there was a ‘place’ of stability within instability. I was sitting completely still and stable within instability. I then noticed the entanglement of instability and stability all around me. Notice the unstable planks that form the ‘bride’. These unstable planks are entangled with the stable earth on which they rest. Now move down to the walls of the ‘bridge’. Notice the instability of the walls eroding away. This is particularly evident with the loose boards protruding outward on the left side. (There is eroding earth that broke the boards. The unstable earth and wooden boards at the walls of the bridge are entangled with the stable earth that lies adjacent and below. As we go further down, the unstable flow of water is entangled with the stable banks. As well, the unstable / stable entanglement is relative to perception. To me, the old planks of wood felt very unstable. Yet to the breeze passing by, those planks were very stable. As well, to the ants crossing over, the planks are very stable. And. . . the unstable / stable entanglement is relative to time. As I sat on the log and observed, the wooden boards and earth were not moving. From this perspective, they appear stable. Yet if we did a 20 year time lapse video and watched it in 2min., there would be a lot of motion appearing as unstable. There wooden planks would be degrading, breaking and falling. The earth would be eroding and falling. Further, we can consider the entanglement of space. In the ultimate big picture, there is One entangled entity. Yet the entanglement dynamics are modified as we get closer together. In this photo, the wooden boards, earth, river, trees, birds and wind have close entanglement dynamics that they don’t with a bridge on the other side of the world. This photo shows an entangled ecosystem within a larger entangled ecosystem. After about a 30min. sit, I continued on my way. I then noticed how I was entangled with space and time. I observed how I was entangled with the environment Here and Now. Both me and the environment influenced each other. Together we were One, influencing each other’s beingness and experience with a dance. . . As well, there was entanglement ‘outside’ of the Here and Now. Memories of hiking in California and Oregon arose. There was an appreciation for the beauty of Here and Now along with a nostalgia within imagery not here and now. And thoughts arose revealing that to which I am most closely entangled. The school semester ended weeks ago and the entanglement dynamics with students, grading, preparing classes etc. has been modified. The subjective experience is detachment, space and freedom from this entanglement. Part of this has come through de-conditioning the entanglement. Rather than being pre-occupied with work, I have been spending time with nature, yoga, contemplation and nonduality talks. These give rise to new forms of close entanglements. For example, I started doing yoga everyday for the past two months. During my hike, I realized how I was doing Yoga while hiking. It was all modified forms of Yoga. A whole new experience with my body arose. As well, each day I’ve been watching a Deepak Chopra series. In the series, he describes infinite creativity, entanglement and synchronicity. I’ve had very strong resonance with his transmission and this modifies my relationship with reality. For example, the experience of entanglement I observed and experienced with the bridge was also entangled with Deepak Chopra. . . This is not merely intellectual construction. Here, intellectual appearances are integrated with imagination, creativity, knowing, sensation, connection, intuition and being. All entangled together.

@Preety_India I don’t what not existing looks like We don’t know if it is just the mind that creates reality, it could be the soul or spirit, god etc... If something doesn’t exist how can it be real? How can anything be independent of consciousness? Youre right this is a strange loop @Member Yep, that’s nonduality I think @Nahm Well looks like where at an impasse then buddy Good luck proving youre not talking shit if no one understands you “No” doesn’t make any sense

I love his waking up app, been using it daily for a year now.. He has a way of explaining things that resonates with me and the meditations have helped me experientally understand what is meant by nonduality. I see a lot off black and white thinking here, why does it have to be either "Sam bad" or "Sam good", we can take the useful stuff and leave the rest out that doesn't resonate. We really only feel the need to defend some teacher if we identify ourselves with them or attack them if we feel they threaten our identity . Just bounce around the ideas loosely, there is a seed of truth in everything

I have had a lot of mystical experiences the last year, mainly through a lot of work on self-love, psychedelics, meditating in float tanks etc... So i´ve come across new people the last year, especially older awakened people.. have gotten one good friend which is 40 and another one which is a woman and she is 50.. i am only 28 which does not matter... And the thing is i did not like to be alone when i was younger, because i did not enjoy my own company and did not like myself very much. At the moment i have a beautiful girlfriend which loves me and i love her,we are currently looking for a house as we live in her mothers basement... So the relationship has been through it´s ups and downs, but i think relationships also can be tough mirrors and acting as catalyst for change for both parts. The thing is a lot of the guys i grew up with, friends from childhood and the dudes i have had in my life does not feel like they resonate as much with me any longer, every time i am with them i kinda get bored and lack connection... so i spend more time alone now than ever. And it feels like a byproduct of my awakening. People can say all they want about self-love and loving the universe, cause if i stay in heart, my awakened self (the original one) with a lot of the people i have had around me since childhood, i feel i don´t get accepted for who i am. So i am wondering as one awakens to truth - consciousness do we attract being who resonates on the same level of consciousness, do friendships fade more away for periods of time? The truth is i don´t want to be so much around especially my older brother (who talks all the time) and screams for attention.. and i don´t enjoy time with my friends the same way any longer.. it´s quite sad but have anyone else went through the same experience? wanting to be more alone? especially in nature, family really annoying cause they trigger your old self like Ram Dass quote: if you think you are enlightened go spend a week with your family.. And it feels like i am experiencing Ego backlash as well, my old self vanishing more and more, and then it comes back again, i make myself small around the people i grew up with.. family and friends. Maybe i am quite not ready yet, and there is a lot more to learn i guess. Especially when i am only 28. But on the other side i think we as humans are going through a very special time on the earth, more and more people waking up to the truth of oneness and nonduality. And i notice my self asking a lot of questions here, i would appreciate similar stories, even though i have all the answers inside..

I felt somewhat trapped and uncomfortable inside my body today. It felt heavy and fatigued. So I decided to do some breathwork to align the body and create some space for the breath. I noticed that my chest was "locked" and my abdominal area was contracted. I was breathing in reverse. Lol. According to google; "The diaphragm is a mushroom-shaped muscle that sits beneath your lower-to-middle rib cage. It separates your abdomen from your thoracic area. Your diaphragm helps you breathe by lowering when you inhale, in that way, allowing your lungs to expand. It then rises to its original position when you exhale." At first it was a bit painful. I don't know if what I was doing is the "proper" way to do this - I was kinda feeling my way through. It was an intuitive thing. I started filling my diaphragm with a lot of air; pushing my belly outwards. I focused on maintaining the connection while crossing the "bridge" to the chest and shoulder area. All the way up to the crown. As the breath was travelling through the body; pockets of tension were being released. My belly, chest, shoulders, neck, head and even face... There was so much tension. And it was all being released now, with each new breath. Lots of cracks. I was slowly making my way into the body. An undisturbed flow was now established. The breath deepened. My belly was no longer contracted. Chest and shoulders were wide open. Neck and head aligned. Face muscles relaxed. I was breathing through my spine. It felt incredible. All this went down with little to no thought about the ongoing process. It was mostly just breath and feeling the whole time. But turns out; all this was only a warm up. As I continued breathing deeper and longer; I noticed my state of consciousness becoming altered; significantly. I opened myself up for something big... Enter Full Nonduality. I would surrender the breath for quite some time, after every inhale and exhale. And during these "pauses", I'd be showered with the most euphoric feeling ever. It was as if I jumped into a pool of liquid Love and Bliss. My vision would turn black for a few moments. It's kinda like when you're about to pass out. Except that you don't. Instead you remain in this blissful, euphoric, endless pool of Love. It's heaven. My vision is full HD at this point. I feel like I'm at least 12 feet tall. Barely any thought enters my mind. I recognize divine alignment and perfection in each moment. I see geometrical patterns of Light. Each beam is a portal to an entire Universe. Infinity. The body is not still for a second. It is dancing along with the waves of the breath. Slowly, gently and incredibly smoothly. Intuitively; on impulse. Without an ounce of effort. It's floating, as if it was weightless. It is now fully activated. Present and on high alert. Immersed. Ready for any command on my behalf. It is almost as if I had a bird's eye view on reality. There is this profound sense of something primal. The body is an animal. But there's also something infinitely intelligent and divine that is present. It's Light. It's Love. It's me. Oh God. There really is no end to this. There is no end to your beauty. Needless to say; I "came down", quite a bit. At this precise moment; I feel good. Centred and relaxed. Whole. I am breathing properly. I don't feel fatigued. I am present. But my frequency has definitely decreased. I am not nearly as conscious as I was. I can only imagine how life would be if I was to breathe consciously; at all times. Whoa.

What happens when category theory is used for nonduality? Then it becomes even simpler! ACIM talks about fear and love. And Bruce Lipton said that fear causes cells to wall themselves off from their environment and going into a state of protection. So more generally fear can be seen as a disconnect, meaning only love is needed in the category and represented by arrows and fear is the absence of arrows. So only love exists in the category which is a nondual perspective. Society is represented as a category with people and material and immaterial things as objects in the category with arrows between them. It will be interesting to examine what happens to love and fear as arrows are added or removed from the category. In classical mythology, the god Cupid represents love and of course, he shoots arrows.

I expect that one day science WILL be able to build something close to that. But this will be a very different science than the materialist science of today. There is nothing in nonduality/spirituality which says that you cannot build a conscious robot. It should be possible, since "nature" builds conscious robots -- i.e., humans -- every day. But we are VERY far away from that. Also keep in mind that there is a big difference between building a thing and understanding how it works. Today, humans are building complex AIs which are able to do amazing things like play chess or Go or driving a car. But humans have no idea how these AI actually perform their amazing feats. The neural network is so vastly complex that no human mind could ever untangle it. But we can build it. A human mind is never going to be able to logically untangle something as complex as a human brain/mind. But I think it should be possible to build artificial minds. But probably not within the materialist paradigm.

This website integrates science, paranormal and nonduality. They offer a variety of blog posts and videos - including a live presentation with QandA each Friday. I watched the most recent presentation on intention and manifestation - which was quite good. They have a variety of experienced contributors and facilitators, led by Dean Radin. https://noetic.org/

Alone/together is a duality. ALL dualities collapse in nonduality.

Ok lets play lets dive into. I Ski at the Colorado Slopes. Sorry have Jed on my ass. There is no duality there is only nonduality.

The points I'll be making here might seem outrageous and another new age vegan propaganda. But I welcome you to look at your waking state (dream A) and dream state (dream B) to come to your conclusions. I am deliberately calling both waking and dreaming as dream states, a footnote about it might be in the end. a) The Waking State (aka Dream A) 1) Time is the dominant container element which creates the 'realness' of waking state reality. Your life, is nothing but the elaborate back story that is formulated in time. It comes up as the 1st nucleus after waking up from sleep and the entire universe and all your knowledge, rationality, personality etc rearrange themselves around this nucleus to make sense of it all. You can visit many places but it is time aka your identity with a back story of who you are defines everything else and what experience you are having in this waking state. 2) Space is the limited container of waking state. No matter how large the waking world seems or how fast you move; you are always stuck 'here' in your 'body' more or less. You can look at the infinite sky or ride a fast airplane; but still you only feel the realness of being here. It is spatially limited. 3) You have a 'time' memory. Look at any memory of you from past or any imagination of future. It never feels alien to you, because you OWN it all as your own life. b) The Dream State (aka Dream B) 1) Space is the dominant container element which creates the dreamscape in which the entirety of dream occurs. In the dream state, that space of dreamscape dominates the entirety of that particular dream. The dream space is the nucleus which defines the rest of dream experience and how you will see them and what your relationship with them will be. 2) Time is the limited container of dream state. There is no 'backstory' in any dream. Dream experience is strictly limited to NOW. It is not the past/future time rationalization but strictly the dream space which dictates the dream experience and who you are in that dream. It is temporally limited. 3) You have a 'space' memory. Have you noticed that no matter which dream space you wake up in, you always sort of own it and adjust with it aka start playing by it's rules? Its as if you have a vast dream library in your 'space' memory and each book/dream you open; you play along with it; it doesn't feel alien to you. In conclusion, both waking and dreaming are dreams. Built with different mechanism and experienced differently; but nevertheless they fall in the same category. Like apple and orange, they look and taste different but both are fruits and experienced through same channel (taste). So there are only 2 states, one of which doesn't exist. Duality and Nonduality Or Dreams and Woke(absence of dreams)

Reading Transpersonal psychology and holotropic breathwork by Dr. Sylvester Walch. This is a new concept for me that I find worth exploring. According to this book, the following are the core principals of Transpersonal Psychology : a) ‘The source of wisdom is to be found inside - Mystics say that the longest way is the way inside. Well, we have to walk it to find out who we really are. The term “esoteric” is to be understood in the same way. It is derived form the Greek word “esoterikos” and means “turning to the inside” or “only accessible through personal experience”.’ b) ‘Consciousness is able to transcends person, space and time.’ c) ‘The Self is characterised by personal, collective and universal structures.’ d) ‘The human being is part of something greater and will develop beyond his ego in the course of his development. Dürckheim suggests that it is important to clarify things like “I am, I have and I can” in the first half of your life. Whereas in the second part of life one should go deeper and explore the spiritual and the religious aspects.’ e) ‘By slowly reducing your ego the spiritual power is accessible to love. A kind of love that is not limited to a person or situations.’ f) ‘Spiritual growth is originated in an ancient esoteric saying: “Let go, die, and be” or “Be, who you are”.’ g) ‘The whole is contained in every part. This adds to the phrase in gestalt- psychology: the whole is more than the sum of its parts.’ h) ‘There is a creating and self -updatingforce of development in all living organisms.’ i) ‘Everything is connected to everything else.’ It's not just the ideas stated above, in which I'm already familiarised with some of them, that have caught my attention, but this book goes on about ideas such as “personal and psychodynamic experiences” where one can access his childhood memories when dealing with issues rooted as far back as he can remember, “perinatal and prenatal experiences” where scenes around your birth and before that can appear and surface powerfully, “experiences beyond usual boundaries of person, time and space” and “spiritual experiences”. There are also guided exercises that I'm eager to try once I've gotten the theory of it down. It says in this book that “holotropic breathwork oscillates between therapeutic and spiritual processes. It heals old wounds, loosens constrictions, expands consciousness and is open to spiritual experiences”, I'm all about opening up to new ‘spiritual’ experiences. It says that one can expect the following from the excercises: 1. Existential feeling of being and sense. Joined with universal love, deep compassion and all-embracing calmness. 2. Light appearances and states of flow. 3. Experiences of nonduality, total unity and wholeness. 4. Initiation experiences 5. Inner insights of life coherences and spiritual rules. 6. Confrontation with the egoic me and egoic me death phenomena such as visions of being dismembered or being burnt. This could feel very dramatic at the time, however, it means that old-fashioned personality patterns are eliminated and instead a new broader inner basis develops. 7. Opening of Chakras 8. Encountering of the transpersonal self and the experience of god. The book also holds somewhat testimonials that I'm yet to go through, basically I've only been scanning through this book and I'm yet to acknowledge its legitimacy if possible. But I'm definitely open to the ideas being communicated here, I think this ‘holotropic breathwork’ thing might be the real deal.

The Path, Living, & The Dreamboard Nonduality & Meditations The Loophole Shake Sing The Emotional Scale ActualityOfBeing.com

@Freakyboo I think the idea is that you build up some sort of momentum across different incarnations, and you would then expect to see evidence of this momentum manifesting itself early in childhood, which is a time where you can rule out cultural impressions as a potential cause. However, the notion of people being born with a certain inclination towards nonduality isn't necessarily indicative of the existence of past lives, but rather the idea that it's instead just not contigent on cultural conditions.

We all are eternal happiness form the start. Then we create beliefs like ‘the dark side’ to “make sense” of things we don’t understand, like who we actually are. Then we realize making sense mean aligning thought with feeling. Then we realize then denial was actually of the light we truly are. As good as it was, Star Wars is just a movie. It’s really about ‘using’ the force, or the, no-you-ness. The “balance” is how much judgement you hold, or let go. There’s no “balance” sans your thoughts about it, reality is unconditional. Evil is not ever created. Existence = goodness = meaningless = creation. One who knows bad self recognizes thought, knows it’s Good. Nonduality is not two simultaneous opposites. Goodness is not an assumption nor opposite nor illusory. There are not two opposite sides which create oneness. Oneness is not-two.

@Keyhole If this is experientially understood, understanding & experience are known as self recognition, and therefore nothing is known. If this is in part conceptually understood, but not realized, a devious god of the gaps would act as a filler, or scapegoat, between relative conditions and unconditional. It’s of course one’s own right and one’s own business to do so. The offset however, could be an unnecessary expansion of void ‘between’ infinite unconditional and infinite unconditional appearing as finite mind. This could account for the feeling appearing to be influenced by dualities, which are unable to be understood relatively or attributed to nonduality. Scrutiny of direct experience reveals to oneself it is not equipped to absolutely understand the suffering of another, only of oneself. This is intrinsic of compassion, and not dualistic to it. Why people suffer can not be rationalized, only the absolute truth will do. There is suffering which could be said to be causal to the veiling of the finite mind, though it is not in any case subject object, or from one entity to a second entity in it’s true nature. There could also be said to be suffering in not realizing this, but that is not the suffering of an albeit innocent approach such as the god of the gap. This could be a great example of apparent misfortune which can be revealed to be the greatest of fortunes, synchronistically hinging on understanding.

I can only speak to my experience. Ive gone similar experiences, so shocked at the gravity of Truth that my sense of purpose and direction felt lost, confused. Even if I felt like I har clarity on purpose, what was the point? Nonduality shows very starkly that life is completely void of meaning. What I noticed though is that this apathy and confusion was still my ego. Because to truly go hard at my purpose requires a level of fearlessness I wasn’t capable of. The resistance, the apathy, the lethargy towards working on my purpose was a manifestation of fear, not a manifestation of authentic understanding. Be very, VERY, careful when examining your resistance to purpose. Is it really because you’re embodying the lack of meaning in life, or is your ego just freaked out and operating from a state of fear? Because Id wager it’s another way for fear to manifest.

There are ‘God powers’ (if you will). They are of love, & can rewire and blissout your body & mind, by which all experience is flipped upside down and inside out. Every very last aspect. The ‘full circle’ can’t be believed or imagined, it’s that good. You will not ever be able to manifest physical out of nothing though, because nonduality (you already are). Can you be more specific, as to what it is about murdering & making others suffer that you want? That doesn’t make sense imo. In what ways do you like / want it? The doing it, the having accomplished it?

What does ACIM mean by "Change is an illusion, taught by those who cannot see themselves as guiltless." (ACIM T-15.I.10:5)? Nonduality teacher Ramesh Balsekar said that reality is like a movie already made. And I think that Roger Castillo said that reality is a single block. As an analogy we can think of reality as a Blu-ray disc with a Hollywood movie on it. The information on that disc is changeless. So from the totality perspective there is no change at all. My model says the same thing except instead of a single block it's an expanding cone of information. It's this expansion of complexity that produces evolution and the arrow of time. Stephen Hawking wrote about quantum mechanics: And physical reality made of only waves is achieved in my model by a Fourier transform turning the timeless information into waves. It's a bit tricky since the Fourier transform is applied to a nonlinear cone instead of a linear space domain. But the effect is that things such as quantum entanglement and locality are a result of the summation of only waves across all the information in the cone.

That statement could mean depending on how you're interpreting it that "any idiot can talk about nonduality" or "no one is doing the talking, there's no effort in it". Dr.Seuss and many kids books are about enlightenment unknowingly, so are many song lyrics and poems. No one intentionally did it. It's a subject-less subject.

Well, assume that Nonduality is True, and that you (God) is all there is. Everything that happens within consciousness (You) is all your imagination. That means 'enlightened teachers' and how they are or are not enlightened is also all imagination. Only one that can become Awakened is you.

Imo, your mind is seeking grounding and is uncomfortable with groundless. It seeks form and is uncomfortable with formless. . . for example, there is no grounded definition I can give you of what a psychedelic is. No definition can capture it all and any definition is a limited partial truth. It is like asking what a mound of clay is. To me, the issue here has to do with dualities. If you have interest here, I would recommend putting some work into nonduality. Leo has made videos on duality and there are lots of great nonduality speakers. Personally, I resonate very strongly with certain psychedelics under certain settings. My mind has expanded beyond what I could have imagined. My relationship to reality has changed. The self has been largely transcended. New spaces of exploration have opened up. Creativity, Intuition, Energetics, Motion, Presence, ISness. My mind is much more fluid and holds thoughts lightly. The mind is not so attached/immersed/identified to any particular thought story. There is a freedom present. . . Yet it wasn’t just psychedelics. I had a substance-free meditation practice for 25 years before my first psychedelic. I’ve also done yoga for years as well as shamanic breathing, lucid dreaming, solo retreats, cultural immersion and sensory deprivation tanks. As well as a lot of integration work. That is my resonance. Others may not do well with psychedelics. They may resonate with other practices. Regarding “knowing”, I would say there are various manifestations of this. I’m not as interested in knowing facts, I’m much more interested in implicit knowing. . . For example, how do you ‘know’ that now is now? Do you ask each day for evidence that now is now? Do you get online and ask physicists to prove to you that now is now? Similarly, how to you know that here is here? Do you wake up each morning asking for evidence that here is here and here is not the moon? Of course not, because that knowing comes prior to the form of ‘evidence’ you are seeking. . . In terms of reality, it can be easily verified through inquiry and observation. If you want to explore what is real and what is dream, I would start by dropping the duality that it is either real or dream. I would start exploring areas that are sorta dream / sorta real hybrids. This comes prior to the intellectual analysis. . .