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Dropping being defined by methods for moment, there definetly is a time to feel into and investigate those thoughts. When that happens and what we call that matters less. Going along with thought stories, getting carried away with them is useful to raise awareness, and gain deeper understanding, but eventually there needs to be a time where also healing happens, where patterns are broken. I don't really have any advice, other than not forcing that "void" to happen, as you say, might be synonymous with suppressing something in the process. It never was forced onto me, it just appeared as part of the process evolving, first in meditation after sitting closer to an hour, later as a deliberately induced state. When it first appeared, I was more-so pulled into it, almost falling into it, and as a relex/knee-jerk reaction was pulled right back out again. Essentially 7 years since I started some form of active work. But have become aware of my meditative-contemplative behavior that I've had ever since I was a child, doing deep contemplation, and developing a sensitivity towards emotional signals, something of a superpower. I wisely used this superpower up to my middle 30's to effectively shatter my self-esteem It's the last 6 years that has been deliberate about this stuff, tipping point was the suicide of my 14 year old niece and some other more-or-less coinciding events that just got too much to handle and short after I saw a therapist for the first time, to deal with emotional exhaustion. Actual sitting meditation though, I've just been doing since 2017. I do think that time isn't as important as what that time entails. Amp up the suffering and you accelerate things, towards breaking free, or simply breaking down.

You have a very negative attitude. Why associate poor cats with misandry? Cats are beautiful creatures I would hate to be with a man who hates cats. I'm a young woman in her 20s, not an old lonely woman. You're imagining an old woman as someone who is sad and miserable. But maybe she is happy, you might never know You act as though men are angels coming to rescue women. Then every married women would be happy on planet Earth. Divorce statistics say otherwise In my country,most women who commit suicide are married women. Girls my age don't even want to marry men. They shudder at the prospect of marriage. They are working, making money, going on vacation with friends, they are young and free. And they are very happy. They don't want men and they don't want marriage.

483. Summary: The Top Dangers Of Using Psychedelics Resources on Psychedelics and Safety: ? Actualized.org on Psychedelics ? PsychonauntWiki is a good resource for researching. Episode: Episode 268: How To Use Psychedelics For Personal Development (49 mins). Summary is here. Blog posts: Top Dangers of Using Psychedelics How to Research Psychedelics The Antidote For PreTrip Anxiety No Trip Sitters Blog Videos: What It's Like To Smoke Salvia Divinorum (43 min) crazy salvia trip, fooor real (6 min) Salvia Trip Report (16 min) DON’T DO SALVIA OR DATURA!! -This is going to be a lopsided episode. Leo’s not covering any of the good stuff about psychedelics here. He’s done other videos on that. He’s also not trying to convince you to do psychedelics. That’s a decision you have to make all by yourself. -This episode is about the necessary precautions and information you need if you're going to be tripping seriously. Leo’s such a huge advocate of psychedelics that he cares about how they’re misused and abused by people. -This episode focuses exclusively on the negatives and the dangers. There are a lot of immature people who don't research or think through potential dangers. The majority of these dangers can be very easily avoided if you are responsible, thoughtful and careful. Keep in mind, you can make anything sound sinister if you emphasize only the negatives. (eg: The Dangers of Dihydrogen Monoxide!?!?!) -Leo has loads of experience with psychedelics, so he has a lot of insight about the dangers and risks. He’s taken over 100 trips, from low dosages to very very high. He’s done everything from mushrooms, LSD, DPT, DMT, 5MeO DMT, 4AcO-DMT, Salvia, and even experimental research chemicals that most people don't know about. He’s also studied this field a lot theoretically. He’s read a lot of trip reports, interacted and watched a lot of people who do psychedelics, dealt with people on the forum who report trips and the various problem that arise for them. He’s also had bad trips himself. -This list of 32 dangers is quite comprehensive. 1) Overdosing (3:20) The extreme version: taking so much that you kill yourself. The lethal dose for MDMA is pretty low, so that’s a serious danger. Same goes for certain research chemicals. However, od'ing on LSD or shrooms is pretty difficult. Find out what the lethal dosage is for the psychedelic you’re taking and stay far away from that dose. Also make sure you’re accurately measuring the dose you’re taking. The mild version: simply taking a dose that's too high. This is more common. The reason this happens is people are not carefully weighing their doses with a milligram scale. They're just popping stuff hoping they get it right. This is extremely reckless and will lead to dangerous situations. You might lose bodily function or pass out. You could fall over and crack your skull open. You could be seriously disoriented for a few hours, leading to all sorts of psychological problems and an existential crisis. The solution: stay within a low to moderate dose range. People can get cocky. They overestimate how much they can handle and underestimate how powerful psychedelics are. No mater how “tough” you are, there’s a dose that you won’t be able to handle. It will freak you out and be a net negative for your development, personally and spiritually. There’s no need to do crazy high dosages. Keep them in the moderate to low range. People try to outdo themselves, thinking that the more they do the sooner they'll deconstruct their ego or reach enlightenment. Some just want bragging rights on online forums. In practice, this will only set you back and you'll regret it. Nothing is gained. There’s nobody you need to one-up, not even yourself. Progress isn’t about taking high dosages. It's about increasing consciousness, which is easier to accomplish with low to moderate doses. High dose trips can get too crazy to be productive. Your mind can’t make sense of the trip or even integrate and remember it. What really matters is letting the psychedelic transform your everyday life, not bragging on some forum. Check your ego at the door. 2) Physical Harm (7:10) All sorts of physical harm is possible, especially if you're taking high doses. You could become disoriented and lose control of your body. You could run around in a reckless manner. There are trip reports of people jumping around naked through the streets. Falling over, hurting their arms and legs. Discipline yourself to sit still and contemplate when you're tripping. 3) Tripping in Dangerous Locations (7:30) Location, location, location. Generally, you want to do psychedelics in an indoor environment where it's safe. A comfortable room with no one to interfere is great. Stay indoors. No balconies, no ledges, no rooftops, no sharp objects, no sharp corners where you can fall from a dangerous height or crack your skull open. Stay away from loud, crowded recreational areas, like parties, raves, nightclubs, music festivals, bars. They’ll create problems. Same with tripping outdoors in the woods where there are wild animals. If it’s nighttime outdoors, your vision will be compromised too. 4) Vomiting (8:40) People commonly report vomiting while on psychedelics. They do psychedelics after eating, which is why they vomit, especially if they take a high dose. Vomiting and passing out at the same time creates a potentially lethal situation. Leo's done more than 100 trips and he’s never vomited once, so it’s a matter of being careful with your protocol. So, don't take psychedelics within four hours of eating anything. Make it a rule. It ensures you have an empty stomach and then there's nothing to vomit even if you feel like vomiting. 5) Really, Really, Really Bad Trips (9:48) There are different degrees of bad trips. There's bad trips and there's really really really bad trips, which you especially want to avoid. People underestimate how bad a trip can get because they underestimate the power of consciousness. Consciousness is all powerful and infinite. Consciousness is rendering your entire sense of reality and everything you've ever seen or known. Consciousness can conjure up anything, including the worst nightmares ever. So imagine that nightmare being manifested as real or even realer than this physical reality that you're in right now. Also, when you're in these psychedelic peaks, there's no notion of time, so they can last for eternity. A really, really, really bad trip is like being stuck in the worst possible hellish nightmare you can imagine, where you're being tortured and devils are coming at you and you're in total madness and it seems like you'll never return to normal life. It's not like a usual bad trip where you can just convince yourself you’ll be okay, that you’ll be back to normal in a few hours. In a really, really bad trip there won't be any reassurance. You’ll actually believe that this nightmare is your new reality. You can completely lose memory of your old reality. You can forget all about material existence. You’re going to be in this new, hellish reality with no control. Your ego won’t be able to manipulate it. You're going to be stuck in this downward, infinite spiral into hell. That is possible. (Don’t do salvia or datura!) Solution: You can avoid that by keeping your doses low to medium. Those kind of bad trips usually happen when your dosage is too high. You also need to ground yourself and be psychologically healthy so that you don't have a paranoid mind. The more paranoid, depressive and negative your mind is, the more likely you are to lose control, spiral into negativity and even into states of madness. If you have trouble dwelling on negativity and cutting off negative thoughts in general, then your doses need to be low. 6) Facing Repressed Fear and Trauma (13:10) If you have a lot of trauma and shadow material that you've been repressing, it's gonna come out. Psychedelics will get you to confront traumas, the shadow side of your psyche that you've been repressing and hiding. Most people who get involved with psychedelics are fairly immature and also tend to have quite a bit of trauma in their life from childhood and adolescence. They also tend to be fairly fearful. Since psychedelics deconstructs your mind and your reality, they will screw with your sense of what you think is real and unreal. Forcing that to come out is actually a good thing. It’s necessary for your personal and spiritual growth, but that doesn't mean it's going to feel good. Your ego might not be prepared to handle it. It depends on how much pain is brought up and how quickly. Keeping your dosages low to moderate means you can face your fears and traumas gradually, at a rate you can handle. If you just jack up the dose, it's going to be more than you can handle and this is going to set you back. It’s like going to the gym. If you try to bench press 200 pounds on your first day, like you see other people doing, because you don't want to look like a wimp, you’re going to seriously injure yourself. This will force you to stay out of the gym for the next few months, or even years. Counterintuitively this will slow your progress. One of the biggest problems you see is people taking “heroic doses,” because they want to prove their “machoness.”[/b] They freak themselves out, too much trauma comes up and this scares them away for years. The proper approach is to go slow and steady and gradually build yourself up, and deconstruct your ego, over a period of months and years. It does very little good to go to the gym once. That doesn't really change you. What works is doing a little bit consistently, over months and years. It’s the same thing with psychedelics. As you're doing psychedelics, make sure you don't freak yourself out so much that you get PTSD, anxiety, nightmares, depression or fall into solipsism or have an existential crisis that stops you from doing regular personal development work and consciousness practices. 7) The Potential for Psychological Instability (17:30) All of these can happen: deconstructing your mind, nihilism, a loss of your sense of reality, a loss of your illusions, depersonalization, ungrounding and losing your mind, even going insane. Although, we’re trying to deconstruct the mind, the rate at which you do it matters a lot. If it happens bit by bit, you can handle it. If you get too much all at once your life can spiral out of control. You could even have a psychotic break that leads you to making rash, life decisions you will later regret. You can end up in a mental institution. You can spiral into depression or nihilism where nothing matters and you lose joy for life and all sense of meaning. This can cascade throughout your life, into your family and career. So, try to deconstruct your psyche at a slow, healthy rate. 8) Confusion (19:25) Psychedelics can make you very confused about reality and what's really going on in life. This confusion can be emotionally stressful and difficult to cope with. It can last for months or years depending on how much tripping you're doing and what kind of confusion you have. Generally, confusion is actually a good thing. Confusion is not bad per se, as long as it doesn't make you do stupid, rash things. (ep: How to deal with Confusion) 9) Can Exacerbate Mental illness (20:23) If you have mental illnesses, you need to be very careful because psychedelics can crank those up to 11. Stuff like bipolar disorder, schizophrenic tendencies, depression, PTSD, anxiety and so forth. You could end up at a mental institution where they'll over medicate you and imbalance your body and mind even more. You could even get addicted to those medications and it'll take months or years to wean yourself off them. If you have a mild one, you can still take psychedelics. They can actually help, but you have to be extra extra careful and keep your doses low to moderate. If you have some severe mental illnesses, then perhaps stay away from psychedelics altogether. Research your mental illness very deeply (blog post: How to Research Psychedelics). Read reports from people with the same mental illness who have been taking psychedelics. Learn how they’ve been handling it. What’s worked and what hasn’t. You can see their dosages, effects they've been experiencing, whether it was positive or negative. eg: Do a google search on: reddit.com bipolar disorder LSD (or whatever psychedelic you're planning on taking) That gives you an idea of what to expect. Even then there's no guarantees and the more severe your mental illness is the more things can go wrong. Also, if you're stuck in a profound mental illness and there's no cure and you've tried everything and nothing’s helped you, consider the possibility that psychedelics can help. Now it depends on what kind of illness you have. What kind of psychedelic you use. How you use it and so forth, but you can also do research into various academic studies, programs and clinical treatments around the world that do help with depression, PTSD and anxiety. There's some really good science behind that. Very soon we're going to have the first FDA approved use of psychedelics for treatment of depression, PTSD and other things. There's going to be legit treatments available through various clinics and licensed doctors. So it's real science. It works. It's not just hippie mumbo jumbo. 10) Can Interfere With Pursuing Success (23:25) If you're really into selfhelp, if you're in that spiral dynamics stage orange phase where you’re working really hard on your business or your dating life and you've built up a lot of momentum, be careful with psychedelics because they can derail that. It’s both a downside and an upside. Psychedelics take you beyond the material existence, so they're going to make all that material stuff seem very petty and meaningless. That’s sort of the point. It’s what transcendence is about. But for a lot of people, they're so immature and underdeveloped that they’re not ready to transcend the material domain. They need maybe ten years focused on meeting their survival needs in a conscious, effective way. So, if you have all these goals, but then start doing shrooms, you might rethink those goals. On one hand, that might be a good thing if your life’s miserable and you need to reevaluate. On the other hand, maybe your goals are spot on and it’s in your best interest to keep working towards them. Psychedelics can make you second guess yourself and make you less productive because productivity loses its meaning. You realize you're in a rat race and you're never going to be satisfied. It might be a good idea to start doing psychedelics when you can afford to coast in your business or life goals. When you have the luxury of shifting priorities from productivity to spirituality. Understand that they’ll be a financial cost to prioritizing consciousness work over productivity. You could also say that less money but more spirituality is better for you in the long run. Your priorities will be different if you have a spouse and kids that you’re responsible for. You don’t necessarily know how psychedelics will affect that. 11) Using Psychedelics to Avoid Building a Good Life (28:38) You could potentially use psychedelics to escape tackling the problem of survival and building a good life. Most people who watch Leo’s videos have a more immediate problem of trying to master survival in an excellent way. So, their main problem isn’t a lack of enlightenment. If you're struggling to build a career, or get laid, or manage your emotions (loneliness, anger, depression, anxiety), those are very basic problems. Jumping deep into psychedelic territory might compel you to not worry about any of that material stuff. “But Leo, who cares about building a good life? That's just dreams and the illusion of Maya, bro. I'm gonna go into the mystical realms, because that's where the good stuff's at, right?” That can be a very big trap, because no matter how high you go into the mystical realms, no matter how deep of a God realization you get or what insights DMT alien entities download into you, you’re eventually going to come back down into mundane, material reality where you have bills to pay, children to feed, a house to clean, a physical body to take care and all those other obligations. Survival and building a good life is not something you want to do poorly. That is something you want to face head on and master ?. No matter what nondual experiences you have, you’ll still need some degree of success in physical, material reality. Otherwise, you’ll live miserably on the material plane. That’s not something you want and it will negatively impact your spiritual pursuits. So, you want to keep one eye on the mystical domain and the other eye on building a good life. Become financially secure, get a good job so you’re not anxious about basic physical survival or homeless. 12) Becoming Too Isolated (32:30) Psychedelics can make you go deeper and deeper into yourself, withdrawing into your mind and psyche, especially if you do them chronically. You could stop talking to your friends and family and trap yourself in this solipsistic echo chamber. That can spiral out of control, then nobody is there to help you or keep you grounded. You can even start to hate the world, especially if you misinterpret your psychedelic visions. So, balance out psychedelics with some sort of social life so you don’t become a total recluse. 13) Making Rash Decisions (33:25) After a profound, breakthrough trip, you might decide to divorce your wife, leave your children, quit your job, tell your boss to go screw himself, walk away from your business partners, go travel the world, sell your house, give away all your money to charity and this can really end up biting you in the ass. Even though a psychedelic trip only lasts at most 12 hours and the next day you're going to be completely down from the trip, the lingering after effects of the chemicals will still remain in your psyche for at least a week, especially after a deep trip. So for the rest of that week you can be having thoughts that are not typically the kind of thoughts you would be having, which can cause you to make rash decisions. The best safety measure against this is to have a rule that after you trip you're not going to make any rash or bold decisions for the next week. Make sure that your mind comes back down all the way and you're sober. You're totally stabilized and then you can make your decisions. Until then, you’re probably not thinking straight. 14) Feeling Demotivated about Meditation (35:35) Psychedelics can take you into levels of consciousness that are really high, that meditation clearly cannot. This can be demotivating for your meditation or yoga practice, because “what's the point?” In a sense, it's easier to fool yourself into meditating when you don't know about the peaks that psychedelics are capable of producing. (This is one of the secret reasons why a lot of Buddhist and yoga practitioners instinctively stay away from psychedelics.) The thing is, meditation, yoga and self inquiry are important for raising your baseline level of consciousness. Psychedelics are not gonna raise your baseline level of consciousness that much. You're gonna come back down at the end of the day, so that kind of leaves you nowhere. Even if you do psychedelics, you still need daily manual practices to raise your baseline state of consciousness over a period of years and decades (yoga, meditation, self inquiry). Then on top of that, you’ll be getting these spikes with psychedelics that take you to crazy peaks. 15) Chronic Usage (39:25) Yes, Leo’s broken that rule. He did 30 days straight of 5MeODMT (ep: 30 Awakenings In 30 Days.) But, that was done in a very deliberate almost scientific way, and now he can teach from that wisdom. Using psychedelics chronically will erode your mind and sense of reality. It will turn your life upside down and you’ll stop being able to think straight. That’s what happened to Leo during his 30day trial of using 5MeODMT. He was constantly high and it was really really interfering with his mind and sense of reality. If it had continued any further it would have been a disaster. Leo recommends taking long periods between trips to integrate insights. Even doing psychedelics twice a month is too much if you do that consistently. You’re still not going to be able to integrate everything, so be careful about that. Chronic use will turn psychedelics into a crutch, an addiction, an escape from doing the real, manual labor to develop yourself. So, don’t use psychedelics more than once every two weeks. 16) Misinterpreting Mystical Visions (42:05) You're going to have all sorts of visions and insights, but when you come back down the ego is still going to be there. The ego is going to try to make sense of all these crazy experiences you've had. It's going to corrupt them. It's going to try to co-opt them and use them towards it's own selfish purposes. Here is where you run into the problem of Zen devilry, or false notions of enlightenment and a messiah complex (ep: Becoming a Zen Devil. Summary here.) You start to proclaim yourself to be God and telling everyone how great and powerful you are. You think you have abilities to heal people, to change the world, to awaken everybody. This can get very dangerous. You might get the idea to build a cult. You might think you're qualified to teach people, and if you do, you’ll be teaching them some corrupt version of the truth. So just be very careful because your mind is very self-deceptive, especially when you come down from a high mystical experience. These mystical visions don't necessarily mean what you think they mean at face value. Your mind can easily imagine and hallucinate all sorts of stuff. Maybe because you’re Christian, you experience Jesus delivering a personal message to you. So you start to believe you are Jesus’ messenger here on Earth. Then you come back down from the trip and actually believe that you have been ordained to convert all the heathens to Christianity or something like that. Psychedelics will exacerbate any biases and self-deceptions you have in your mind. For you to gain the most out of psychedelics, it's very important that you have a pure mind, a mind that has inquired into itself outside of the psychedelic trip. Clear out your mind, purge your selfishness, your various biases, egotisms and shadow sides. If you have a dirty, corrupt mind your mystical visions will be corrupted and misinterpreted by the impurities in your mind. You won't be able to separate the truth of the mystical vision from the selfish, personal needs you have. All of your egotism and shadow side will turn your non-dual experience into a toxic, fake-mystical stew. Then you'll run around trying to infect everybody else with it. This is Zen devilry. It’s also possible that having awakenings cause you to think you fully understand reality when you don’t. You only saw a small facet of the truth, not the whole truth (ep: The Many Facets of Awakening.) It usually takes you multiple trips over a period of months and years to assemble a big picture of the truth. Be aware that you can deceive yourself about awakenings and mystical visions. You can misinterpret them badly and infect others with those misunderstandings, so be very careful. 17) The Pain of Being Disconnected From God (46:55) If you're doing psychedelics properly, you’ll eventually become conscious of God. This will be one of the most important, beautiful and profound experiences you've ever had. Then you'll fall back down to earth the next day. You’ll want to get back to God. It’ll become the thing you chase. You’ll be intoxicated with God, with becoming God or being one with God or feeling God's love. Infinite love is so intoxicating that it's going to pain you to go through everyday life disconnected from God and from infinite love. This could potentially get so bad you become suicidal. “What’s the point of this material existence? My crappy job, my crafty family, my crappy life. I should be up there in heaven with God.” You might also spend your days dreaming about the next time you can do psychedelics. Then it becomes an addiction, an escape from material existence, obligations and survival. Counterintuitively, the most profound, beautiful mystical experiences can actually lower the quality of your life. Because before psychedelics your mundane, boring life was all you knew. You were blissful ignorant about the beauty of infinite love. You can’t inhabit that 24/7, so your ordinary life seems very pale by comparison. Basically, you have to relearn to appreciate the paleness of mundane existence. That’s challenging to cope with. Although you can't really get physically addicted to psychedelics, you can become psychologically addicted, especially if your ordinary life kind of sucks. If you’ve got nothing going on for you in ordinary life, then you can definitely see how these psychedelic peaks can become an escape and your sole purpose for living. That’s not healthy or sustainable in the long term. 18) Suicide (50:35) If you're taking psychedelics and you notice yourself having suicidal thoughts, then the first thing you should do is completely discontinue psychedelics for at least three to six months. Don't do them. Reground yourself in ordinary life. Remember, suicide is just a temporary trick of your ego-mind. Don’t harm your body. Make a commitment to yourself to not harm your body. Don't even consider suicide as a possibility. If you maintain at least one avenue of hope in life, you can keep going. (clip: A Spiritual Perspective On Suicide [11 min]) Psychedelics can make some people suicidal for various reasons. You can feel like you're losing your mind, or plunge you into a nihilistic, solipsistic funk. You could misinterpret a vision or insight. You could experienced derealization and get stuck. Basically, you don't want to work on the material plane and you think suicide will give you a shortcut to God. Psychedelics done properly can actually be the cure. They can show you something beyond the material domain, beyond depression and pain. If you're dissatisfied with the material domain, which a lot of suicidal people are, then what you're really looking for is the spiritual domain, but you don't know how to access it. If you can't meditate, do yoga, self inquiry, if you don't have those skills built up, psychedelics can help you deal with trauma. A lot of suicide is rooted in trauma. Psychedelics can show you the miracle of life, of love, of consciousness of God. In this sense psychedelics can prevent suicide, but they can also cause it. It depends on how you them. 19) The Illegal Side of Things (53:00) Familiarize yourself with the legal nuances of these substances. What are the legal ramifications for getting caught with them? Which substances are legal in your area and which are not? eg: Think very, very, very, carefully before doing drugs in Singapore. Maid sentenced to 25 years in prison for trafficking marijuana. This requires research depends on where you live. These substances are illegal in many parts of the world, but not all parts. How you're handling these substances. How are you driving around with them? How you're carrying them? What the policing situation is like? Be very careful about supplying psychedelics to your friends. There’s a big difference between getting caught as a user versus as a dealer. When you start using psychedelics you might want to share them with all your friends and your family. You might start inviting them over for psychedelics or sending them gifts. Eventually, what happens is people start talking and you get caught. In that situation they're to going to try you as a dealer, not as a user who has a little bit of psychedelics for personal use. It's very very important to take precautions so that there’s no links between what you're doing and dealing to others. Make sure that you take responsibility for the legal consequences. Do you understand how many years in jail you could spend if you get caught? Researching that will sober your mind to the realities of things. There’s a big difference between a few months versus 10 years in jail, but you didn't even consider that because you didn’t do your research. There are also legal ways to do psychedelics. There’s also a variety of quasi-legal grey areas too that you can explore. It all depends on your risk tolerance. eg: Ibogaine clinics that treat drug addiction. Leo’s not your lawyer and he’s not telling you what you should or shouldn't do. He’s just saying you need to study this stuff so you know what you're getting into. Then you can avoid the most serious dangers. 20) Taking the Wrong Substance (56:58) Don’t take unknown substances. Sometimes in trip reports, people just take some unknown drug. Don't take random pills from people you don’t know. You have to know what your substance is! Know the dosage and the source of where you got it from. You have to be reasonably confident about the dosage being accurate. It should come from a quasi-reliable source at the very least, if not a reliable one. 21) Toxicity From Impure Substances (58:00) Toxicity comes from impure substances. This depends on if you're getting your substance from a trusted source then this shouldn't be a problem. Certain substances can contain fairly high impurities, especially things like MDMA or LSD, especially if you get it at a rave or a music festival. Those can be notoriously impure. 22) Physically Damaging Your Body with Chemicals (58:38) There are certain kinds of psychedelics that are chemically damaging to your body, like ketamine, MDMA, DMX, NBOMes, nitrous oxide, and others. (Of course, it depends on how much you take and how often.) These substances aren’t even considered classic psychedelics. Solution: stick to the classic psychedelics that will not physically damage your body, like mushrooms, DMT, mescaline, LSD. They’re not physically damaging in most cases for normal people. They're the safest and most field tested. eg: MDMA permanently rewires your brain if you take it too much. It can lead to neurological damage. Ketamine can lead to bladder or kidney damage. There are some substances that you shouldn't take at all. Leo's taken salvia, but doesn’t recommend it. It screws with your motor control and creates very very chaotic trips. Datura’s even worse. Leo’s not doing reverse psychology here. Don’t take salvia or datura. There’s better stuff that’s way safer. 23) Bad Interactions Between Psychedelics and Medication (1:00:40) If you're on SSRIs don't combine that with psychedelics. SSRIs are frequently used among depressed people. If you're on antipsychotics or any other medication, you have to seriously research potential conflicts, side effects and interactions between your medication and psychedelics. These combinations can be potentially lethal. 24) Mixing Substances (1:01:30) When you mix two or more chemical substances together they can have a synergistic effect either positive or negative. That can lead to side effects and drug interactions you didn't anticipate. There have been reported deaths from people taking 5MeODMT plus a medication they were on. Combining 5MeODMT with MAOIs, like you do with ayahuasca, could also be a lethal combination. Combining various medications and supplements with psychedelics, and/or taking multiple psychedelics together is dangerous territory. Stick to one chemical at a time so you clearly know what effect which substance is having on your mind. 25) Psychedelics Can Be a Gateway to Hard Drugs (1:02:50) They can lead to other recreational, hard drugs like cocaine, heroin, meth, crack and so forth. It doesn't have to be that way, but it can be that way. Psychedelics aren’t ridiculously addictive like meth, so the line can get blurry. You might underestimate how addictive hard drugs are. Also, the sources that are getting you psychedelics might also offer you recreational drugs. Psychedelics will open your mind. You might think, “they're not so bad. They're not hurting my body. Why not try some other stuff too?” Then your heroin turns out to be laced with fentanyl and you kill yourself. You have to draw a real hard line between the recreational stuff and psychedelics. Only stick to the psychedelics for personal and spiritual growth, not partying. 26) Chronic Weed Addiction (1:04:10) According to trip reports, some people like to combine psychedelics with weed. They do it to calm themselves down. This can actually make your trips more paranoid and synergize in a negative way. So keep that in mind. Read Leo’s blog post on pre-trip anxiety. Unlike psychedelics, weed is more addictive and easier to use daily. Even if you’re only using psychedelics once a month, if you get into a habit of using weed frequently, that's not going to be good for your development. Leo recommends avoiding weed altogether. 27) Experimenting with Research Chemicals (1:06:00) There’s dozens of different research chemicals. There’s always new ones being released and you might want to experiment with them. The problem is the newer the chemical, the less it’s been field tested, and the more dangerous it is. You could potentially stumble upon something very harmful, so you got to be careful with research chemicals. Also, you might order some research chemicals they end up sending you the wrong batch, which is potentially quite problematic. 28) Hallucinogen Persistent Perception Disorder (HPPD) (1:07:05) HPPD happens when you do so much psychedelics at such high doses that the psychedelic effects linger on your visual and auditory field. Something gets rewired in your brain long after the trip. They can last for months or years or a lifetime. The most common symptom might be tinnitus, which is a ringing in the ears. You can also get tracers or other kinds of distortions in your visual field. This can last an entire lifetime. It can be quite distressing and interferes with one’s ability to enjoy life. So just be aware of that. This happens to a very small percentage of people, but it does happen and you don't know if that’s going to be you. Especially if you do a lot of psychedelics or high doses. Nobody’s sure what causes it, if it’s genetics, or a side effect of mixing psychedelics with medication. You can research plenty of case studies about HPPD online or in the forums on reddit and so forth. Leo’s never had it, but he’s very careful about dosing and not overusing. 29) Extracting, Synthesizing and Dealing (1:09:09) The more you get into psychedelics, you might want to try growing your own shrooms, or extracting DMT, or trying to synthesize your own LSD. You might get some crazy ideas about growing, extracting and synthesizing. At that point you’re running a drug lab and if the cops catch you they're not going to charge you as a user. They're not even going to charge you as a dealer. They’re going to charge you as a drug lab. Don’t do anything reckless. It's not worth going to prison for twenty years just to extract a few grams of DMT. They will easily charge you heavily if they catch you. So you have been forewarned. 30) Online Scams (1:10:25) Leo's heard stories of people buying stuff from random websites and not getting their product. Their money gets stolen by fake websites and shady dealers. 31) Driving intoxicated (1:10:50) Have a rule that you won’t be driving or getting into a car. There are trip reports of really irresponsible people taking LSD then getting in a car to buy snacks, then the psychedelic hits while they’re in the car and now they can’t even see straight, much less drive. Once you've taken the psychedelic sit down, pay attention, contemplate. Don't think about anything else. Focus on your trip. Don’t run off somewhere. Sit through the trip until it's all gone, and then you can use your car again. 32) Thinking You’re Invincible (1:16:10) You might start to think, “I’m God and God is immortal.” Well, God is immortal and invincible, but your human life isn’t. There are consequences in the relative, material domain, so watch out. -Remember, this list was only focusing on the worst of the worst parts about psychedelics. You might be turned off because of all the dangers and problems. Keep in mind that the majority of these dangers can be very easily avoided if you are responsible, thoughtful and careful. -Leo’s given you very quick solutions to many of these problems, so you can avoid many of them. No, you can't avoid all of them. If you're very very risk averse person then psychedelics are simply not for you. -Don’t forget that all of life is risk. If you did a list of all the risks and problems of driving or sex or business or relationships, you would never do any of that. Dangers in business. You can get sued, your partners can scam you, your products can kill people. Dangers with sex. You could catch an STD. You could get a girl pregnant and pay alimony for the rest of your life. You could be impregnated and the guy could abandon you. Dangers in relationships. Your partner could have a crazy ex. She could cheat on you, infect you with an std, hurt you emotionally and steal all your money. He could abuse you, rape you, brainwash and manipulate you, even kill you. -Life is full of risk. It's about managing the risk. You don't want to be paranoid, but you want to take reasonable precautions. You're not invincible. Top Mistakes in a Nutshell 1) Not taking psychedelics seriously seriously enough. Treating them like toys. 2) Being immature about the whole process. Being immature period. Maturity is one of the most important factors to using psychedelics productively and not destructively. If you're immature don't do them at all. 3) Doing large doses and not measuring them accurately. 4) Frequent and chronic usage. 5) Tripping with friends in dangerous environments, with a lot of noise and distraction around. 6) Not sitting still and contemplating because you’re too immature. If you can't control yourself, don't trip. There are trip reports of people who take shrooms, strip off all their clothes and run down the street screaming. This is very immature. “But Leo, I’m tripping!! I’m supposed to be free. I wanna let myself gooooo.” Well, you shouldn't let yourself go so much that you jump off a balcony. If it’s too much to ask of yourself to not do reckless, dangerous things, then don't trip. 7) When mentally ill, mentally unstable and immature people getting into psychedelics. Their mental illness just gets worse and they spiral out of control, and end up taking more to feel better. 8) Zen Devilry. (ep: Becoming a Zen Devil. Summary is here) 9) Not enough theoretical foundation or consciousness work. Learn the metaphysics, the epistemology, spiritual theory, non-dual theory, and so forth. Actualized.org covers all that stuff. 10) Not doing the manual labor of personally developing yourself. Assuming that psychedelics will handle everything, including your physical health and spiritual growth. Substituting drugs for meditation, contemplation, reading, learning, watching Actualized.org, and other spiritual practices. If you just fly by the seat of your pants and do psychedelics, your life will be a disaster. 11) Doin a few trips and thinking you’ve got it all figured out. If you've only done five or ten trips or even 20 trips you have no clue what psychedelics are really like. You're just a widdle baby. It requires about a hundred trips just to start to get your bearings on what psychedelics are, how they work and their potential for spiritual growth. You have to spread your trips out. Treat this as a longterm, multiyear process. Don’t do a bunch of trips back to back. Because you're spreading it out, a lot of work is involved. Follow safe protocols. The more you do something dangerous, the more risk is incurred, so the more you do it, the more careful and methodical you have to be.. Actualized.org and Psychedelics Moving Forward -Leo’s not trying to convince you to do psychedelics. Contemplate these dangers. Take them seriously. Taking psychedelics is a decision you need to make for yourself, not because you think Leo told you to. In the past he’s talked about the benefits, so now he’s providing a balanced perspective. -In the future, Leo wants to emphasize the importance of psychedelics in this work. Emphasizing psychedelics is controversial and people will criticize him for that, which is why he released this episode. So that you’re doing psychedelics in a responsible way. -He finds that psychedelics are the most direct path. They can give you the deepest, clearest understanding of what reality is. So, forget about permanent enlightenment. It’s enormously beneficial to directly experience truth, God, Love, reality and consciousness for yourself. For a lot of people, psychedelics are the only way they will ever experience that. A lot of people get lost in mental masturbation, theorizing about metaphysics and solipsism. It's very important that you actually do the work or you'll get nowhere. (Yoga, meditation, self inquiry, psychedelics, etc) Again, Leo’s not pushing psychedelics on anyone. You don't have to do them. You can still access God, love, consciousness, truth and epistemology independent of psychedelics. But if there’s a direct, easy way to access it, why not use it? Most people aren't devoted enough to meditate for ten years, or do intense ten day retreats. Or they're not spiritually gifted enough. So how do we deliver these understandings to them? -Leo says the depth of his understanding and the quality of his work would be impossible without psychedelics. These tools can reveal non-duality to you quickly, effortlessly, directly and yet they're misused and demonized. As a society we cannot afford to have these amazing tools get so abused. We need to build a responsible path towards psychedelic use, not just a clinical path to only use them for PTSD, depression and addiction. -A lot of people who teach psychedelics don't connect it to the highest, purest metaphysical understanding of reality, or to epistemology or developmental psychology. Actualized.org is in a position to do that or at least play a role in that. There’s a non-dual path through psychedelics. This path doesn't exclude other practices. It just adds an extra dimension of psychedelics on top of it. That's how Leo sees spirituality being done in the future. He feels it’s his responsibility to help actualize ? it. He also acknowledges that he’s standing on the shoulders of giants in the psychedelic community. (Pioneers like Terence Mckenna, Alexander Shulgin, Martin Ball, James Auroch all deserve credit.) There’s also the challenge of popularizing the responsible use of psychedelics. This is about changing culture, changing how society at large views psychedelics. -It’s very important for you to be ridiculously responsible about how you do psychedelics. If you’re doing this in an irresponsible manner with a bunch of Zen devilry, crazy antics, misuse, abuse, harm to yourself and others, Leo will denounce you and kick you off the forum and the comments section. He’s not gonna tolerate any of that stuff, because there's a larger game here and that Zen devilry is not gonna fly. -So just be responsible. Be conscious and get excited about some amazing discoveries in the future.

I think I have always been depressed. Or maybe I wasn't depressed when I was a kid, but I don't remember much from my childhood. Easy for you to say that it's not important to have any social life whatsoever, since you have a huge social life. It pisses me off a bit when people who have a big social life say "you don't need a social life". We are social animals, I think loneliness is the biggest contributing factor to depression, and loneliness is also bad for the physical health. Studies have been made about this. Anyone who would be in my shoes would be depressed. I can guarantee that. Actually probably most people would've committed suicide.

I don't find Leo's video on death making sense to me. If I commit suicide, or die of old age is the outcome of death any different? Does God judge you by the nature of your Death? When you die do you get to choose what happens next?

This. Really this. This is what I'm looking for. Further demonizing of selfishness will do me no favor because I have already demonized selfishness within me. @dflores321 Yea I understand that asking any question at the end of the day will be considered selfish. But can you please look at this from another helpful perspective rather than a dogmatic one ? Maybe I'm not asking out of selfishness. Maybe I feel trapped. Maybe I'm asking out of the need for liberation. It is just survival. Yes. Survival is selfish But making it look like something wrong is further creating more shadows within me where shadows against selfishness already exist Because of these shadows I'm giving into self abandonment to the point of suicide. Do you realize how dangerous this can be ? So finger pointing at me is no favor. I want to be liberated from my chains of a trapped root chakra like the above user said. Yes there is a huge blockage in the root chakra. I'm largely focused heavily on Spirituality and the crown chakra. This has pushed me away from lower chakras and thrown me off balance. Now I'm looking back at creating this balance so I don't turn into some kind of a suicide poet. Your answer is totally useless. Sorry if that offends you but you do me no favor. Just telling you straight.

Is this some sort of deception, the goosebumps, just sort of swimming around is this cold intoxicating, revitalizing but relaxing lake of inspiration? Am I fooling myself? It takes intelligence to fool someone knowingly, and it takes even greater intelligence to be the one who is fooled. Where does this stuff come from? Intelligence eats itself up. Identification eats itself up, it kills itself. All death is suicide. All birth is... What are you doing? You can't dispel me. You can't misspell be. That was supposed to be me. I misspelled. Something feels off, something feels so deep, so real, and yet I feel bothered by it. It feels indigestible, it seems as if I must avoid it. And the only avoidance of feeling is through though, a thought of what that feeling must be. I don't want Nissargadatta to be right and Osho to be right too. These teachers are eating themselves up like a snake eating its own tail. They're both dead. So am I. Oh you're so fucking dramatic. It's all write.

nothing is wrong with suicide - something is wrong with society.

It's been 1 year since I attempted suicide...my spiritual journey started with you Leo. Most of the things I've learnt is from you. I took you as my teacher...I think you know about me and we share a connection..I think you've also talked about me in your videos.... It's after awakening of my kundalini things started to go bad, I started hearing things.. doctors said I had schizophrenia...I started seeing things like once while meditating seeing a human shape coming out on the wall which seemed like my own consciousness....things went to hell,the negativity,my mental health and my spiritual journey was at its peak....now it's been a year and my right hand is severely injured,I can't hold things...I know I was ignorant and this incident taught me a lot, I'm changed but it still shouldn't have happened...are you aware of it,are you concious of any of it? If you are let me know because I have to figure it out and I have to know...

Nope. What Eckhart Tolle says isn't automatically true. Try to end suffering by accepting being tortured, not gonna work, no matter how fancy "suffering stops when you accept the situation" sounds. In reality it doesn't work. And btw, there's also a 2nd choice left: leave the situation (suicide). Which I nowdays think about quite a lot. But I don't want to kill myself because it would cause immense suffering to my parents.

Holy shit life is too short don't waste it like that. You are worrying about the amount of likes???? Oh man! Get out now that you can, this can lead to depression and suicide.

I live in Helsinki, and a few weeks ago I went on vacation to another country. During my trip, I turned on dating apps and finally got a match. I said to her that I'm staying in their city for just a few days and we can have a one-night-stand. We grabbed a drink and she came to my home. Even though it was my first sex, it went really well! (I'm 24 and migrated here around 6 months ago). The next day, she texted me and said she enjoyed last night. We slept again that night. After that, I had to return. We've been in contact since then. The problem is that the experience of having sex and being emotionally connected to a beautiful girl was so great to me to the point that I can't stop thinking about her. I feel so down now cuz I can't kiss her again. it was an uncommon experience for me. I believe that in the near future I won't have the chance to meet another wonderful girl that we can go along with each other and have sex so quickly. Now I'm in a state of grief. I feel depressed and life seems meaningless. Spending time with my friends, doing sports activities and talking to my therapist didn't help much. Why is life hard? I'm thinking about suicide here and there as a way to avoid all of the difficulties in life. I know the rational thing to do is to move on, talk to other girls, and find a more wonderful girlfriend. But I'm hopeless and don't have enough energy to even get out of my bed in the morning.

https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-jeff-foster-recover-from-chronic-lyme-disease Jeff Foster is an American spiritual teacher and is suffering from chronic lyme disease, he is unable to work, so if you can spare a donation, share the page, or send him a message of support and well wishes. The infection reached his brain and he's posting suicidal messages on facebook and instagram, (lyme disease sufferers are more likely to commit suicide than the average population) You can learn more about Jeff's beliefs and story in this interview at 51:11

@rnd I'm also quite cautious about the covid vaxx, check my profile for the thread commenting on Leo's "Social Matrix" video. It's a thread that has been locked by Leo and it seems like an anti-vaxx perspective. Overall though, I'm in a non-biased, neutral position and I like looking at both sides of the coin. Currently I'm not vaccinated. I keep hearing this from the anti-covid vaxxers. I get it, it makes people cautious because they keep pushing it on the news. But from a non-biased point of view, it doesn't really make any sense to me why. They push it because we're in a pandemic and they need everyone to take it to achieve herd-immunity? From the anti-vaxx perspective it seems like they believe they only push it because they're desperate for money and they want to bring forth the New World Order and control the population with 5G or some shit. Sort of seems like some deception going on here.. I'm open to both sides though of course. I definitely agree with the argument that the covid virus only has a 2% mortality rate and so with that information it doesn't seem like its worth the potential side effects of the vaccine. But the pro-vaxxer's argument is that this virus could mutate into a more dangerous variant if many decide to go unvaccinated. Basically the current vaccine is meant to build immunity against the current, less deadly form of the virus so that it dies off and doesn't mutate. If many are left unvaccinated then more deadly mutations would lead to us needing a stronger vaxx? I definitely question this too but, millions have taken the vaccine already and it seems like only a couple thousand had died or had some adverse effects because of the vaxx. But I'd say its because they need to achieve the herd-immunity? Why report or fearmonger the people about rare side-effects? That would only cause more vaccine hesitancy and push their goal of herd-immunity further away. I hear this one a lot too. People say things like suicide or smoking causes more deaths but suicide and smoking isn't on the news. To me its like, um.. Suicide isn't a virus that transmissible among humans. I think its more about how easily and how highly transmissible the virus is. Covid could be spread through a single cough, but other diseases are harder to spread. Like HIV only spreads from blood to blood contact.

@Preety_India I understand what you're saying. I took this "survival vs. spirituality/love" mind-story to a very dark place, psychosis, and almost killed myself. Basically... To the extend I understand it, you cannot "not survive". Even the fact that you judge yourself about your selfishness and survival IS survival and selfishness, only in a very deceptive manner. The "you", the very identity and the "decision maker" you think you are is the one surviving. There is no "a you" to transcend or let go survival. Even to try doing that would be survival. Remember, survival is not just about the physical body, but also mind-stuff, identity. For example, think of those Islamist suicide bombers. They physically kill themselves in the name of their muslim identity. The "you" cannot transcend survival. There is no-one that does that. There is nothing the story-character can or has to do in order to trancend itself, because it is the one that is being transcended. The You simply remembers that it's watching the story unfold, and that it is the story itself. This is the actual no-self. Not the selfless story character you think you are or should be.

(Something to keep in mind, this video came out in April 2015. In Leo's blog on Dec 2017 he wrote: “I was wrong about some of my earliest characterizations of enlightenment as the ultimate fix for unhappiness and all your psychological neuroses. That is a half-truth. In reality, enlightenment, strictly-speaking, will not fix all your neuroses. Although it is usually a big leap in the right direction.”) ? 199. Summary: Enlightenment FAQ - Part 2 This is the second part to Enlightenment FAQ - Part 1. Summary is here. 1) “What are the benefits of enlightenment?” -Breaking free from your mental prison. You stop being a slave to your thoughts and to your emotions and you get a deep, meaningful tranquility in your life, which is something you’ve been searching for your whole life without realizing it. You can experience tranquility, regardless of external circumstances (breakups, getting fired, losing loved ones, poverty, rejection, etc.) How cool would it be if you could keep your cool throughout that without getting crazy agitated? -A deeper understanding of reality and truth. Understanding how your consciousness works is the key that unlocks it all. -You’ll still have moments of sadness, loneliness, frustration, anger and annoyance. However, your relationship to these emotions changes completely. These upsetting emotions no longer become a source of suffering. They just become another experience, not really any worse or any better that any other experience. That’s freedom. -Relief from your self-image problems, like shyness, lack of confidence, low self-esteem, worrying about how you look, trying to live up to certain people’s expectations. You get rid of that by getting rid of the self. -There’s a whole video that answers this question. (ep: Benefits Of Enlightenment.) Summary is here. 2) ”Does this mean I’ll have complete control over my emotions once I’m enlightened?” -The truth here is there’s no self. There is no you. So, who’s going to have complete control over his or her emotions? Nobody. If you think that's going to happen, here's some bad news: you have zero control over your emotions because you do not exist. Paradoxically and counter-intuitively, once you surrender yourself to this fact, you get complete peace and calm with your emotions. You get pseudo-control, you get the appearance of control. It’s as though you have total control but, in fact, you have zero control. -The biggest reason you need control is you’re a slave to your emotions. Once you realize that there is no “you” who’s experiencing emotions and no “you” to control emotions, you get calm and cool with whatever emotion is happening. -Enlightenment doesn’t make you emotionless. There will be plenty of emotions, but your relationship to them will change completely. So, you will appear to have complete control over your emotions or a lot more control than the average person. -The reason other people suffer from emotions is because they believe there’s a “them” inside who’s being threatened by the external world. Once that notion is removed, life flows very, very smoothly. 3) “Why pursue enlightenment? What if I’m already happy in my life?” -Well, another bitter pill for you to swallow is, you’re not actually happy. You’re lying to yourself and saying you’re happy, but you’re not. -Currently, your happiness is contingent upon external circumstances. So, even if you’re happy right now, in this moment — maybe your career, relationship and fitness are going great. If we remove any of that, you’re going to be very, very miserable. So, your happiness is extremely contingent. You got to be very careful about saying that you’re “happy.” -It’s not possible to be truly happy without being enlightened. So, unless you’re enlightened, you can’t be happy. It’s psychologically impossible. Why? Because there's a falsehood that you’re living. You’re telling yourself you exist when, in fact, you don’t. -That’s reflected in your entire life. You’ve never been able to have consistent, true happiness. What you’ve had is this rollercoaster ride, because external circumstances change all the time. -Well, you’re happy right now, if we take one snapshot, but how happy are you going to be five minutes later? You’re not going to be very happy. That’s basically your current condition in life. 4) “But, Leo, why don’t I just earn millions of dollars and wait until everything is perfect? Won’t that sort everything out?” -That’s a delusion. Even if you get so much money and power that you’re “untouchable,” you’re still going to face disease, loneliness and death. In the end, your life is going to end in misery, no matter how happy you think you are right now. So, really, you’re not happy. -Even if you have a great relationship, career and great health, on a minute-to-minute, hour-to-hour basis, your mind is driving you nuts. You’re having insane thoughts. You’re sabotaging yourself, you’re getting angry, you’re jealous, you’re fearful. -It’s not possible for you to be happy because you actually believe if you lose these things you will be unhappy. You have a false paradigm in place. You must get aware of how your mind tricks you into a false sense of happiness. -Part of enlightenment work is to realize you’re lying to yourself all the time about how well this egoic paradigm is working for you. The ego keeps telling you it’s working and you should continue using this paradigm. If you look carefully, you can see this paradigm is rotten. It’s not working, if you’re very honest. 5) “Should I stop pursuing goals in my career, relationships, fitness and health and with my hobbies?” -Becoming enlightened doesn’t mean you no longer have any relationships, or hobbies, or an exercise routine. Enlightenment is an inner knowing and a realization, it’s not any lifestyle per se and it’s not any particular external situation. If you really, authentically want a relationship, be in a relationship. If you authentically want good health, go get good health. If you want to live in your house and be able to pay your electricity bill, then you should probably have a job. If you enjoy some particular hobby, like playing basketball on the weekend, or you like sailing or surfing or whatever, those are probably fine hobbies. -The problem is that a lot of people have egoic goals. You’re pursuing these goals because you think they will make you truly happy. So you’re like an addict. You’re a career addict, a relationship addict, a health & fitness addict, and you think that that’s going to be your salvation. Those are the wrong reasons, so you should probably stop. Why? Because they are not going to make you happy and they are an opportunity cost. They are taking time away from your ability to do inner mental development and find what would truly make you happy. -Everyone will have to judge for themselves which goals are authentic and which are not. This is a very tricky process. You don’t really know! eg: You might tell yourself that going to the gym is an authentic goal of yours, but you might discover the only reason you’re going is to uphold a self-image as a hot ripped dude. Authentically, if you weren’t trying to uphold that self-image you probably wouldn’t need to go to the gym as much. 6) “Isn’t enlightenment dangerous? Couldn’t it be eroding the foundations of a happy, healthy, normal life?” -The only danger, really, is the current egoic paradigm that you’re living under. All the evils in the world don’t come from enlightened people, they come from selfish people. If you think you can be above the egoic paradigm while still living from the egoic paradigm, you’re kidding yourself. If you think you’re not capable of evil (crime, theft, rape, murder, genocide, bigotry, racism, getting angry at people, and violence of all sorts), it’s only because you’re sitting in a cushy position in life where you’re not being threatened. -You would commit all those evils under the right circumstances. As soon as your ego is threatened sufficiently, you will resort to all those evils. Why? Because, fundamentally, you think you exist and that you need to be protected and defended. How do we overcome this? By removing the notion that you exist. In fact, there’s nothing that needs defending. -This can seem dangerous and threatening to talk about because it goes against a lot of your worldviews and cultural assumptions. It can seem like a negative process. Destroying the mental concepts in your mind can feel like you’re eroding the moral fabric of your being, that it’ll lead to nihilism, insanity or make you anti-social. (clip: Nihilism and Confusion [9 mins]. ep: Nihilism) In fact, all those bad things are just the ego paradigm run amok. That’s who you presently are, but you’re just masking it. The enlightenment paradigm frees you up from all that. This makes you the least dangerous person to yourself, to society and to everyone around you. When you have nothing to defend and protect, you have no need to go out and hurt people, or commit suicide or do anything dangerous. -Insane people, criminals and serial killers have monkey chatter in their mind all the time. This is the exact opposite of enlightenment. Enlightenment is the silencing of the monkey chatter. When you’re perfectly calm, present and happy in the moment, who are you going to bother? What’s the danger? You can easily discover this in meditation. When you’re meditating and very focused, you’re in a totally peaceful, innocent, innocuous state. It’s the ego that tells you this is dangerous. It’s how the ego defends itself. This is a defense mechanism. Watch out for that trap. 7) Is Enlightenment really for everyone? Isn’t it only for a very small segment of the population? -No! Enlightenment is one of the most universal things that people ought to pursue. Things like marriage, kids, a six-figure income, scuba-diving, marmite, cheese and mayo on fries, a Chris Evans film festival, are all particular things that some people might like and some might not. If you want to live to your full potential, if you want to be happy and peaceful, if you want to experience the truth of your being on a profound level, then this is for you. This is not just for monks or hard-core self-help junkies. -Leo feels very comfortable saying: You should become enlightened. No matter who you are, no matter what culture, location, religion, scientific background, age, income, family situation you come from. Why? Because this is one of the most fundamental truths of your existence — understanding your true nature. Your true nature is not what you’ve been told by society. It’s not this entity, this body or this mind. Your true nature is, actually, nothingness, but you need to discover this. Anyone with normal mental health can discover this. If everyone discovered this, society would be completely transformed. It would be the biggest shift that human civilization could experience, bigger than anything we have invented. -This would be more powerful because it would change the whole world’s orientation towards life. This would give you the happiness and peace that you really, really want. So, this is not for radical people. -One thing you can find universally, across all cultures and peoples, is that they have monkey chatter and drive themselves crazy with it. They have emotional, neurotic problems and can’t be happy. Because happiness is the objective of life, this is for everyone. The only reason you do anything, that anyone does anything, is they believe it will make them happy. The problem is that most people do things that will not make them happy, but they don’t realize it yet and they don’t want to admit this fact. 8) ”Won’t spirituality make me a tree-hugging, hippie slacker? How do I stay on the right track and avoid bongo drumming, singing Kumbaya and smelling like patchouli oil?” -This is a stereotype. In fact, hippie tree-huggers are not enlightened. Slackers are not enlightened. Leo’s doesn’t identify as a hippie, New Age thinker. He doesn’t like that sub-culture. He’s not a slacker. He’s very productive and wants to achieve stuff in his life. If you actually go and meet a real, enlightened person, you’ll see that they are not a tree-hugging hippie slacker. These people are productive when they want to be. This hippie sub-culture seems spiritual, but it’s actually a false spirituality. They live their lives incongruently. It’s one of the things Leo doesn’t like about hippies. -If a hippie was really living congruently, they would become enlightened and then counter-intuitively, they would drop a lot of their hippie ways. Hippies are reacting against a certain element of society, and this creates another element, a philosophy, a mind-set, belief systems, and a world-view. Enlightenment is about wiping that slate clean, emptying yourself of those cultural reactions and world-views. It’s just a calm, peaceful neutral. So, don’t worry about becoming a hippie slacker. 9) “I enjoy my vices (sex, alcohol, drugs, food). Sometimes I like to combine them in unique and interesting ways. I also enjoy my career. If I have to give that up why would I want to become enlightened?” -Enlightenment is not a particular lifestyle. It’s an understanding, a realization. Vices aren’t in and of themselves wrong, bad, evil, or even anti-spiritual. They’re not compatible with enlightenment. In fact your sex will become more amazing after enlightenment, if you choose to have it. You’ll appreciate alcohol, drugs and food more. You’re also less likely to get addicted to them. Why? Because you’re able to stay focused and in the moment, and you’re able to get rid of the monkey-chatter. You can perform amazingly well at work, because you no longer worry, doubt or have to protect your ego. You won’t need to look after your self image or be fearful about money. You could just focus on doing great work and be more creative too. So, none of these things need to be given up. -Enlightenment unhooks you from needing these things. So, if you do these things you’ll do it consciously, deliberately, because you want to. Your capacity to appreciate it will be much more expanded than it ever was in the past. Right now, you’re a drug addict. You’re probably going to give up addictions if you become enlightened because you’ll feel less pain all around. -So, you don’t really need to give up sex, good food, money or a great career. Although, Leo doesn’t recommend alcohol and non-psychedelic drugs because they aren’t healthy. 10) “My vices are immoral (sex, alcohol and drugs). Isn’t making money bad and evil too? If I become spiritually enlightened will I have to stop these activities? -Why are you so attached to engaging in these activities? It’s probably for egoic reasons. Even if you think these things are evil, you still probably have a hidden urge to do them. Maybe you guilt yourself for having sex, drugs, or cheating people out of money. The fact is that none of these vices are bad in and of themselves. In fact, this is a really blanket, outrageous statement, but…there’s nothing wrong with any action that you choose to do at all. The question is: why are you doing it? What’s the motivation behind it? It’s always about the motivation. -When you get the motivation right, when you remove the ego and act selflessly, without addiction and clinginess, then you can engage in these things and they will be of value in your life. They won’t have all the negative repercussions that these things generally have. -You can use drugs and alcohol in moderation after enlightenment. You can have amazing, enlightened sex and lots of money if you feel that’s something worth doing. So, don’t worry about losing that stuff, you just won’t cling to it. 11) ”I’ve already had an enlightenment experience using drugs or meditation. Isn’t that enough (mushrooms, DMT, meditation retreats, etc)? That’s the truth of no-self, right?” -Enlightenment is tricky. When you start on this journey you get little moments of enlightenment. Like on a very cloudy day, and the sun starts beaming. All of a sudden, the clouds open up and there’s little beam of light breaking through. But then, quickly, the clouds come back and close up and the light beam goes away. You’ll have mini, brief, tiny moments of no-self, maybe for five seconds here, for a whole hour here, maybe for a whole day, but you’re not going to be able to hold on to them. It’s frustrating. -This is like an expansion of consciousness. Your consciousness dilates like the lens on a camera, it zooms in and out. When the lens dilates up, you get this expansion, but then it closes back down and falls into its default state. So, what I’m really interested in here is not in a temporary expansion of your consciousness. I’m more interested in the permanent removing of the clouds. What I really mean when I say “enlightenment” is: the clouds are completely gone and you’ve just got light shinning all the time. You’re not trying, or holding on or struggling to make it work. You don’t even have to meditate anymore. You’re permanently enlightened. This is possible. This is a real state. Thousands of people have achieved this state, so it can be done. Any normal human being, as far as we know, can do it with enough work, but it takes quite a bit of work. A thousand hours of work is a ballpark figure. -Generally speaking, a drug will never give you permanent enlightenment. I don’t really know of any people who have become permanently enlightened off drugs. It can only give you a couple hours of enlightenment-like experience. -Meditation is more helpful. I recommend you start doing a lot of meditation. If you’re starting to experience enlightenment-like experiences with meditation, that’s great — but don’t just stop because you think you’ve “made it.” You haven’t made it yet. Keep meditating until you get the real, permanent deal. -Don’t assume that because you’ve had a little experience with drugs, you know what enlightenment will be like. In the end, enlightenment will probably turn out very different than you expect it to. 12) “What about my friends and family? Will I stop caring about them after enlightenment because I’m so detached from everything?” -It depends. A lot of people have very dysfunctional families and friends. So, if you’re hanging around in a gang or some horrible friends and you become enlightened, you’ll probably abandon those friends. They weren’t very healthy and now you don’t have much in common. -There’s nothing inherently wrong with family or with friends. If you have a good family and friends who bring you authentic joy, you’ll probably keep them. In fact, your relationships with them will improve. -You keep dysfunctional relationships because you have buttons that those people push. Your ego is involved in those relationships. When you take the ego out, it’s not going to bother you anymore. You’ll be capable of having compassion for them. You won’t need to be mean to them. -Also, if you’re in a romantic relationship with someone, enlightenment will make you independent of that relationship. So, if the relationship serves you, you will stay. If the relationship stops serving you, or becomes toxic, won’t have any hesitation walking away. That is what neediness does — it produces a toxic attachment. Having healthy boundaries doesn’t make you a monster or a bitch. -Living with toxic attachments is very unhealthy. Cutting them out is a good thing, not a bad thing. In general, your friendships and relationships with the right people will be significantly amplified and improved with enlightenment. 13) “How does love play into all this?” -What you call love right now, is not true love. It’s egoic love. That’s another bitter pill to swallow. You don’t really have an experience of true love. What you call love now, even in your most sacred relationships, is still egoic love. You love those people, but only on your terms. It’s a selfish love that serves you in some sneaky, underhanded way that you don’t like to admit. You try to change them, manipulate them in subtle ways, to make sure you’re getting the love you want. -If you want real, true love, all you have to do is break down the ego. Without the ego, you can love everything as much as you, right now, love yourself. Imagine how kind you would be to your family, friends, partner, and even people in general if you honestly believed that your body was not separate from their body. That you and them are literally one and the same. That’s the true meaning of the Golden rule. The Golden rule says: do onto others as you would do onto yourself. You can’t do that when you actually believe that you are here and everyone is separate and out there. If you really care about true love, you should definitely want to become enlightened. -You can only live the Golden rule when you truly believe there’s no separation between you and everything. So, you’re kind, compassionate, and loving towards everything. You’re here, there and everywhere, so you treat everything as though it’s you, which enlightenment shows to be true. That’s what real love is. Almost no one knows this practically because of their unenlightened state. 14) “Doing regular personal development has filled me with doubt. It’s created a lot of confusion about my life, my ambitions, my relationships and my business.” -In a sense, that’s exactly what we’re doing here. Because enlightenment is not about building up more of your ego, it’s about cutting out the ego. And this is going to feel scary, threatening and emotionally disturbing. It’s not going to be pleasant. That’s why so few people are enlightened. -Your mind wants clarity and certainty at all times. Your mind hates being confused and doubting itself. You need to get comfortable with uncertainty, because enlightenment is not ultimate certainty. It’s actually getting comfortable with ultimate uncertainty. It’s about realizing that there’s nothing to cling to and that there is no truth. The truth of no truth. Again, very paradoxical and fascinating how this works. -The problem with most people is that they are too certain and too afraid of getting confused once in a while. They’re also too afraid of questioning their world-view. If you’re doubting yourself, good. Stop trying to be certain all the time. This is what an intelligent, open-minded, intellectually honest human beings do- purposefully put themselves into situations where they doubts themselves. This is healthy, this is building you up, not tearing you down. 15) “Isn’t it better to hold off on this enlightenment until I’m older (50s, 60s) or retired? Isn’t it better to spend the first half of my life partying, running a business and traveling the world?” -No! Your ego’s procrastinating! The longer you put it off, the more suffering you will have in your life. Why would you delay happiness? You’re asking, “wouldn’t it be better to spend the next twenty years suffering and then finally be happy when I retire?” -In fact, many people who become enlightened report that it’s the most positive experience they’ve ever had. They wish they’d had it earlier in their life. -Some people become enlightened in their forties and their fifties, but then they have very bad experiences in their twenties and thirties, because they are just emotionally all over the place. There’s monkey chatter going around. This goes back to the earlier question of: Are you truly happy? The answer is that you’re not. -Realize that you’re closing your mind down. You don’t want to do a self-honest inquiry. You don’t really want to put the effort into this process. -Realize that your life is going to end in a very bitter way no matter how successful you are. You're going to die, you're going to have disease, and you're going to have bad relationships. All this stuff is going to disturb you a lot. -What you’re really saying is you’re at the lower stages of your development and you haven’t gone to the higher stages yet. -Normal is a very bad standard. The normal life is really a crazy, dysfunctional life. It might be necessary for you to do some stupid stuff, waste ten, twenty years, and suffer. Hopefully, you have the wisdom to short-circuit all that nonsense. 16) “But, Leo, what if you’re wrong? Are you enlightened? And if you’re not, how can you be talking about enlightenment? Aren’t you being a hypocrite?” -Leo isn’t enlightened, but he feels he can offer valuable information. He’s gone through the initial, early stages: the fight, the resistance to this idea of enlightenment. (This video came out more than 6 years ago). Enlightenment is a long journey. Leo can point out the traps. A lot of these questions in the FAQ are issues he had to struggle through. -Leo’s a normal person you can identify with, not some hippie or spiritual guru or Indian yogi who meditates in the woods for ten hours a day, everyday. He’s not a Buddhist monk, or the Dalai Lama. Those people might be more knowledgeable about this stuff, but those monks live very differently than you. Their lifestyle is probably very incongruent with the way you live your life. You probably live a much more normal social existence. -With personal development, once you move to the next level all the other levels suddenly make so much more sense. It’s so clear when you look backwards on your life and the lives of people around you who haven’t advanced yet, why they’re stuck. -If you’re very advanced, then maybe you want to go to some very advanced teacher. If you’re starting off and you like a very no-nonsense, non-mystical, non-religious, somewhat logical and scientific approach to enlightenment, that’s Leo. That’s his bias and perspective he’s bringing to you, which can be rare to find in a teacher. -As for the objection that he might be wrong: an intelligent person always has to leave room for the possibility that he might be wrong. Smart people are always revising their worldview and growing. Also, the same is true with everyone that you listen to. Whether it’s a scientist, a religious person, the Dalai Lama or the Buddha himself — they could always be wrong. That’s just a fact of life and a fact of communication. Even after enlightenment there’s still more to discover about consciousness. -Don’t believe this on blind faith. Verify it for yourself. Use your intelligence, your rational faculties, think critically but also self-honestly. Not with monkey chatter and ego defenses. Prove it to yourself. That’s how you know what’s real, through direct experience (clip: Validate Absolute Truth For Yourself [10 mins]).

I now am being put in the position of surviving the suicide of someone I love. Loved? Love. I got the message last Sunday. I felt nothing. The Monday after is when it hit me. I played her favorite Spotify playlists, and scrolled through pictures and videos of her, on her Facebook profile.

I have been on the edge of insanity and suicide. If one says death is imaginary, they should have no problem showing me there is nothing to fear.

I can see how this may apply to the majority of men who start the initial interactions with a sexual intent, but trust me when I say if a man doesn't establish a romantic intent with a woman they're interested in from the get go, there are two huge issues. 1) The likelihood of a woman placing you into the friendzone is exponentially higher. There are ways with slowly ramping up attraction without starting out as friends. A first date is going to have A LOT of opportunity for platonic development, it would be attraction suicide if a man came in to a first date raging with sexual intent, constantly trying to physically escalate, etc. While it is possible for a man to build the attraction of someone they've established platonic relationships with, the odds are VERY unlikely. 2) This is even more important - If a man is physically attracted to a woman and isn't honest about that attraction, this is extremely beta. Your strategy seems to be geared towards attracting a man. This issue is that men know within the first couple of minutes, for sure within the first interaction/hangout whether they're attracted to a woman. So if you, as a woman, are going after a man who you've established a platonic relationship with, either a) He's basically been lying about not having any attraction for you which is a huge red flag; you want a man who is HONEST, authentic, vulnerable, and un-apologetic about their attraction and sexuality. b) He wasn't very attracted to you in the first place, otherwise he wouldn't have let things play out as "friends." A man with a strong masculine presence won't accept the friendzone if he's attracted to a woman. If she's not into him sexually, s'all good, but friendship is not an option. To comprise into friendship would be dis-owning one's sexual interest and would be a direct lack of congruency. If that man is only in it for sex, possibly yes. But as a man who is high value, not dangerous, and not only interested in meaningless sex, a woman would be losing out with me if she followed this advice, and to her detriment. That may sound quite conceded, but it is what it is. "I am the prize" afterall. Besides, there are plenty of high value woman who would not only NOT have an issue with things starting out romantically, but would appreciate the fact that the man isn't going to hide their attraction. It's quite attractive for women for a man to not hide their intent. The masculine purser mode is more about chasing after goals, their life purpose. Feminine energy is more about the pursuit and creation of relationships, family, and all of that jazz. A man who is overly concerned with this type of pursuit I would argue is more in their feminine which is very unattractive. A woman will start dropping signs when she's ready to move into a formal relationship. A man should pursue of course, but I would vehemently disagree with the idea that 1) woman like men to chase them (every woman I've "chased" has either strung me along, or it's killed the polarity and therefore attraction. Many many many anecdotes confirm this is not just me) 2) it's a masculine role to chase/pursue after relationships. Just because a woman is doing the same amount or even a higher percentage of the pursuing does not mean she'll automatically question the man's interest. Giving a high quality man this amount of space is a recipe for letting him go, because for better or worse, there is an abundance of women out there who have no issues actively pursuing men who reciprocate that pursuit with facilitating dates, romance, and a love story. A high quality man living in an abundance of woman, looking for that high quality woman, will not be tripping out over the aloof woman. He'll be too busy living his life purpose and getting hit up by enthusiastic high quality women to keep up that level of effort. Or he'll move on and find a woman who's more enthusiastic.

Of course, hindsight is 20-20, but I would say this is far from 'jumbled' and infact shows clearly that he was entertaining dangerous concepts. Of course at that point, there was no protocol for dealing with users who express such leanings so it can be forgiven that it wasn't dealt with appropriately. I've seen you make reference to these 'edited comments' a few times and I wonder, do you have any evidence to suggest that any meaningful edits were actually made to these comments, and not simply cleaning up spelling errors and such? The insinuation I get from your claim is that any reference to contemplating suicide was added in much later, so you couldn't have been expected to notice any warning signs. It seems to me however that the entirety of this comment relates to the question of "if I die, will I respawn?" which is something Leo has clumsily claimed to be true before.

@OneHandClap It didn’t offend me. I’m trying not to let you make it out that’s it’s just my opinion when these I’m saying things that have factually cause problems. It’s not like shouting in the middle of a political rally because it’s not just my views. He really influenced a suicide and really influenced my friend to go homeless. That’s not just my opinion.

@OneHandClap Okay this is another problem. You’re saying this is just what I believe. It’s not. My friend went homeless and he’s factually influenced a suicide. And other people have come out saying he’s ruined their life. It’s a problem and all he does is smart off about it.

@OneHandClap Well I feel like you get understand me then. The thing is me saying something can help, even though it isn’t going to stop him. If that person that committed suicide would’ve seen someone questioning Leo, it may have helped him reconsider.

@johnlocke18 You agree that you see teachings giving recklessly which this whole thread is about. He never adjusts Or takes criticism, them even after a suicide, like making a dude feel like he has to choose 5meo over his family. It’s a problem and saying “that’s just the way it is” And letting the same things continue is why so many horrible things happen in the world. Even another person posted not too long ago about considering suicide, and instead of suggesting a psychiatrist, Leo just gave his unprofessional opinion knowing he influenced a suicide just recently.

Uh yeah it is his fault if he advocates it multiple times with very few warnings and smarts off when multiple people tell him to be more careful. He literally said you have to physically die to awaken fully and even Said it again after influencing a suicide. This is why people stay in abusive relationships, because they are constantly told it’s their fault that their partner is getting angry or whatever. Leo’s careless wording to an audience with a heavy amount of vulnerable people, which he constantly gets evidence of, is no different. You are responsible when you know you have influence.