I am enlightened. Sincere seekers: ask me anything

[AlldayLoop]

1 hour ago, winterknight said:

Everything has drawbacks, and people very often make excuses about access that are really about conflicted motivation.

Is this a typo? What did you mean by “access”?

[winterknight]

1 hour ago, AlldayLoop said:

Is this a typo? What did you mean by “access”?

Mandy talked about some people not having access to therapy — like there are no therapists where they live, presumably, or they can’t afford it. 

[winterknight]

2 hours ago, mandyjw said:

Are you sure that the conflicted motivation isn't just a sign of not being ready? I'm not sure any method would work if you weren't really passionate about doing it. I believe the desire to do it is key, at least is was for me. 

Thank you. My experience was a bizarre combination of a lot of those things. I had no idea what was happening at the time, and am still working to understand it. I feel the need to pay it forward. 

Well, desire is always king. You’re right that it’s a sign of not being ready. But the point is that often people aren’t internally ready but then blame it on lack of access, when the real issue is their own internal conflict. 

[Arhattobe]

@Leo Gura sure : ) will do. Give me a day or so though. On vacation haha. 

[AlldayLoop]

I used to follow Mooji very regularly, but have since seen a limitation with his teachings. Unlike you, he never teaches about the usefulness of therapy or reading books.

Are you a critic of this over-simplistic style of teaching? It does help people get started on the path, but I just can’t help but feel bad for people who just stay with that forever. 

[Aakash]

@Arhattobe basically I think your in the top 1% of people that think they know truth, from what you said. So I agree with Leo to create the thread.

[winterknight]

2 minutes ago, AlldayLoop said:

I used to follow Mooji very regularly, but have since seen a limitation with his teachings. Unlike you, he never teaches about the usefulness of therapy or reading books.

Are you a critic of this over-simplistic style of teaching? It does help people get started on the path, but I just can’t help but feel bad for people who just stay with that forever. 

It can indeed be somewhat simplistic, although I think his feel for nonduality itself is among the best of that style of teacher. 

[Aakash]

@Arhattobe I think you should also create a threAd because what you said is the best Interpretation of bushhist triuth

[Arhattobe]

@Aakash sure : ) will do. Not today though. Going to the pool today to relax haha

[Leo Gura]

6 hours ago, winterknight said:

Well, for the reasons I laid out in my previous post, this makes zero sense.

You’re commenting without actually understanding how or why therapy works. When a psychedelic enables someone to play the violin without ever having picked one up before, or learn German without studying, you can make these sorts of claims. 

And I’ve had trips and have talked to people who have had many, many trips.

Talk therapy can be helpful but it is notoriously inefficient at resolving deep psychological issues. There have been studies done on this. People go to therapy for years and show only mild improvements. The studies and the anecdotal evidence backing up the effectiveness of psychedelics is simply too voluminous ignore.

The trick with tripping is that it can be done in very different ways. Some ways are frivolous. And most people who do psychedelics are not serious, they are dicking around. I've read so many idiotic trip reports that it amazes me how often people misuse psychedelics.

If psychedelics were widely available and people where taught to properly use them, I'd guess that 50% of therapists would be out of a job.

There are aspects of your psyche which can be accessed on psychedelics which you will never access sober or with a therapist. And I don't believe there is anything a therapist can help you access which a psychedelic cannot.

Maybe you've done psychedelics but it does not seem like you've realized their full potential yet. Perhaps because you were already fairly pure before taking them. Or simply because you have some sort of natural tolerance to them (as some people do).

I'm not really saying anything bad about therapy. It think it's a good method for some. But I just don't see how it can match the power of psychedelics. Verbal analysis of psychological issues is simply very indirect. It's the same problem as trying to verbally talk someone into awakening. It's highly inefficient.

What kind of psychotherapy allows someone to play the violin without practice????

Let me put it this way: if I had a daughter who was raped, I would not a trust a psychotherapist to heal her trauma. I would send her to do some psychedelics.

My ex-girlfriend was an alcoholic and had panic attacks because she was sexually abused in her teenage years. She went to therapy for years. She was still extremely dysfunctional to the point where I could no longer be in relationship with her. She could not handle honesty at all and she was extremely insecure. If she went to therapy for another 5 years, I doubt it would solve her issues.

There is a reason why AA was founded on LSD. AA minus the LSD is much less effective.

[Nexeternity]

@winterknight @Leo Gura   

Hey guys,  I feel the need to contribute to this conversation.

I did three years of Freudian psychoanalysis (In Buenos Aires its very normal here) and while I saw many of the roots and causes of my problems there wasnt much room for deep transformation.  I felt it helped me live with my neurosis instead of freeing me of it.  I also felt an old school feel where the therapist would dogmatically hand down to me certain rigid ways of being to better "fit in" with society.  It was done innocently and with the best of intentions but there was a lot of truth and authenticity lost in translation.  The relationship is very vertical, they are in the position of power and have the knowledge and you are a patient being helped.

Since then I have done Jungian therapy with visualizations and meditations which I felt were much more helpful and faster, more effective.  I am also doing an alternative therapy where you breathe together in meditation as part of the session and you feel the things you have been talking about as sensations in the body that can be seen with much more clarity than if you only talked.   Its really much better.

And yes, I second what Leo says about the psychedelic trips being more effective.   The purification that happens, the literal "seeing" of your normally hidden beliefs, the authentic you that comes foward on the trips and shows you what you are really made of existentially.  If used properly growth can occur so much quicker than in psychotherapy.

Right now I am combining the best of both worlds.  I am doing sessions using Yopo with a shaman, I trip and I get to talk about things with this dude I really resonate with.

 

[mandyjw]

4 hours ago, winterknight said:

Well, desire is always king. You’re right that it’s a sign of not being ready. But the point is that often people aren’t internally ready but then blame it on lack of access, when the real issue is their own internal conflict. 

Yes, shortly before my awakening I started studying the law of attraction, and I realized how dead I was inside, and how my ego had co-opted spirituality to steer myself away from a life of following passion and inspiration. The magic of life was already starting to unfold before my eyes and it just needed me to open to it. 

2 hours ago, Leo Gura said:

Let me put it this way: if I had a daughter who was raped, I would not a trust a psychotherapist to heal her trauma. I would send her to do some psychedelics.

My ex-girlfriend was an alcoholic and had panic attacks because she was sexually abused in her teenage years. She went to therapy for years. She was still extremely dysfunctional to the point where I could no longer be in relationship with her. She could not handle honesty at all and she was extremely insecure. If she went to therapy for another 5 years, I doubt it would solve her issues.

Can you see what a masculine trait/bias it is to say that talking through issues is highly inefficient? A woman with that kind of past trauma and a tendency to hide from her own pain would need a lot of emotional support and guidance to handle psychedelics in that situation. Kundalini energy is partly sexual in nature and works differently in many women. It's dangerous to risk overloading it, opening up to raw sexual energy without having done the ground work of depersonalizing the trauma. 

One thing that I uncovered during my awakening was how much fear there is inherent in being female and living in this world. We conflate our self worth with being sexually attractive, and that becomes a source of daily fear and insecurity in itself even if we are never abused. There are a lot of collective shadows around identity with gender and repression or neurosis about sex itself that awakening can show you, but you still have to live in a world where they exist. The freedom comes from letting go of it being your own personal problem and viewing it as a collective "pain body" or energy that only exists as a sensation beyond one's own story of it. Talking with others and seeing/feeling that those feelings are shared rather than being unique to you is the first step in letting go of the personal story. Many women are wired to talk through their feelings naturally, many men are not, hence men have tremendous breakthroughs with psychedelics. 

[winterknight]

3 hours ago, Leo Gura said:

Talk therapy can be helpful but it is notoriously inefficient at resolving deep psychological issues. There have been studies done on this. People go to therapy for years and show only mild improvements. The studies and the anecdotal evidence backing up the effectiveness of psychedelics is simply too voluminous ignore.

The trick with tripping is that it can be done in very different ways. Some ways are frivolous. And most people who do psychedelics are not serious, they are dicking around. I've read so many idiotic trip reports that it amazes me how often people misuse psychedelics.

If psychedelics were widely available and people where taught to properly use them, I'd guess that 50% of therapists would be out of a job.

There are aspects of your psyche which can be accessed on psychedelics which you will never access sober or with a therapist. And I don't believe there is anything a therapist can help you access which a psychedelic cannot.

Maybe you've done psychedelics but it does not seem like you've realized their full potential yet. Perhaps because you were already fairly pure before taking them. Or simply because you have some sort of natural tolerance to them (as some people do).

I'm not really saying anything bad about therapy. It think it's a good method for some. But I just don't see how it can match the power of psychedelics. Verbal analysis of psychological issues is simply very indirect. It's the same problem as trying to verbally talk someone into awakening. It's highly inefficient.

What kind of psychotherapy allows someone to play the violin without practice????

Let me put it this way: if I had a daughter who was raped, I would not a trust a psychotherapist to heal her trauma. I would send her to do some psychedelics.

My ex-girlfriend was an alcoholic and had panic attacks because she was sexually abused in her teenage years. She went to therapy for years. She was still extremely dysfunctional to the point where I could no longer be in relationship with her. She could not handle honesty at all and she was extremely insecure. If she went to therapy for another 5 years, I doubt it would solve her issues.

There is a reason why AA was founded on LSD. AA minus the LSD is much less effective.

Therapy isn’t about talking someone into something. That’s a misconception  

There’s nothing magical about therapy, but actually the overwhelming evidence of 100+ years of talk therapy shows that in fact therapy does work. Nothing even remotely close to the weight of that evidence exists for psychedelics sans therapy.

And therapy is a relational-symbolic activity, that teaches how to be in the world, a skill that, like playing the violin, cannot be had through a drug, no matter how much one may wish it were so.

That said, of course not all therapy “works” for everyone. Therapists vary in competence. Patient match matters. Patient condition matters. There’s a reason I recommend analysis and not just therapy in general. Even the very idea of “solving” problems is itself a simplistic way of looking at things. 

The complicating factors go on and on. But the mind is far, far more complex, not less complex, than is usually imagined. Symbolic questions cannot be ultimately solved through chemical means.

That’s what’s termed in the philosophy business a category mistake.

2 hours ago, Nexeternity said:

@winterknight @Leo Gura   

Hey guys,  I feel the need to contribute to this conversation.

I did three years of Freudian psychoanalysis (In Buenos Aires its very normal here) and while I saw many of the roots and causes of my problems there wasnt much room for deep transformation.  I felt it helped me live with my neurosis instead of freeing me of it.  I also felt an old school feel where the therapist would dogmatically hand down to me certain rigid ways of being to better "fit in" with society.  It was done innocently and with the best of intentions but there was a lot of truth and authenticity lost in translation.  The relationship is very vertical, they are in the position of power and have the knowledge and you are a patient being helped.

Since then I have done Jungian therapy with visualizations and meditations which I felt were much more helpful and faster, more effective.  I am also doing an alternative therapy where you breathe together in meditation as part of the session and you feel the things you have been talking about as sensations in the body that can be seen with much more clarity than if you only talked.   Its really much better.

And yes, I second what Leo says about the psychedelic trips being more effective.   The purification that happens, the literal "seeing" of your normally hidden beliefs, the authentic you that comes foward on the trips and shows you what you are really made of existentially.  If used properly growth can occur so much quicker than in psychotherapy.

Right now I am combining the best of both worlds.  I am doing sessions using Yopo with a shaman, I trip and I get to talk about things with this dude I really resonate with.

Well good for you, but your conclusions don’t really follow from your experience. You went for three years. You wouldn’t have done that if you hadn’t been getting something out of it. We’d have to really see who you were before and after to judge.

Not to mention that orthodox Freudian psychoanalysis is only one type of analysis.

And you ended up someone still intensely interested in self-discovery and self-improvement. Sounds like not a bad outcome. 

[Socrates]

1 hour ago, winterknight said:

Therapists vary in competence.

This is a big issue making therapy inconsistent.

I can't trust a therapist that doesn't have basic self development knowledge let alone spirituality. 

If you could gurantee everyone, no matter the shithole country they live, that they could get excellent treatment by great therapist then I am all down for it. But it is utopian.

On the other hand an Lsd tab is an lsd tab no matter where you are in the world.

 

[Nahm]

1 hour ago, Ero said:

Natural tolerance is IME directly connected with the lack of purity in my mind-body and intuitively I see it in other people.

Your insight here, expressed with acuities in before and after perspectives of this realization, combined with @Arhattobe ‘s potential thread on samsara would be very insightful & powerful. Imo that would trim the fat of this convo, and draw out the heart of this.

@Leo Gura @winterknight If you guys added ‘one liner’ insights to that thread as it unfolds, in harmony, in friendship, that’d be crazy awesome. 

[AlldayLoop]

5 hours ago, winterknight said:

And therapy is a relational-symbolic activity, that teaches how to be in the world, a skill that, like playing the violin, cannot be had through a drug, no matter how much one may wish it were so.

Can you please explain what you mean by “relational-symbolic” activity?

[Nexeternity]

@winterknight Touche. 

Still if therapists were well versed in the use of psychedelics for therapy it would be an amazing combination.  

There is something about someone being completely present with you that is healing in its own right.

 

[AlldayLoop]

@winterknight@Leo Gura

I think it would be great if you guys did a video together discussing psychedelics and therapy at some point. 

While it is complex, I still don’t think it is something to ignore. Just like how political discussion on here was taboo, but now the time has become ripe.

I think that many people will benefit hearing about both sides. And discussing about this live (such as through one on one video) vs. written discussion will certainly bring out a different flavor to this.

We desperately need a well informed discussion about psychedelics and therapy, especially in this crazy ass world we live in. 

Both psychedelics and therapy are misunderstood pervasively throughout our culture, and it’s utterly a shame. 

[TDLH]

I would like to add my thoughts on the ongoing debate about Psycho-analysis vs Psychedelics.  I was fortunate to experiment with many tools along the path towards self awareness. It has been my observation (thru experience) that using only One Tool from the Tool Box of Life is very limiting.  I spent years trying different tools such as Breathworks, yoga, Tia Chi, Therapy, Mankind Project, Vipassana Meditation, Aboriginal healing sessions, Shamanic studies, Shamanic ceremonies, (several versions of Vision Quests, Sundance, Shamanic Psycho-analysis through ceremonies etc…), and most recently Ayahuasca, San Petro, Kambo.  What I have learned over the past 15 years during my journey is that the Psyche is very complex and that the journey to awareness/consciousness requires countless tools/experiences along the way.  Each tool will arrive at the right time and place when you open yourself to your intuition and when you swim GENTLE, with determination, down the stream of Life.  

 

During my two-week Ayahuasca/San Petro retreat I observed and discussed with my fellow colleagues the kind of experiences and insights they received, during and after each ceremony.  What I noticed was that everyone that did the Aya/San Petro ceremonies had different depths of experiences and insights relative to the level of self awareness.  Those that had used only one or two tools from the tool box of life, and did very little work to discover the source of there behaviours, belief and traumas, had more three-dimensional personal experiences. Most had Blue, Orange and Green traits (I am generalizing from my subjective and objective observation) Those that had used several tools and had diligently worked on there behaviours, beliefs, and past traumas, seemed to have deeper more 4th/5th dimensional experiences. I believe they were more orientated in Yellow and Turquoise.

 

What I also noticed was the type of experience an individual received during there trip tended to relate more towards there belief system. If they believed in Religion, they tended to receive experiences that related to those belief systems. If they believed more towards Atheism, abuse, materialism, the type of Culture they grew up in, etc. would have a bearing on what they experienced. 

 

Please keep in mind these perspectives and observations are generalizations and are not intended to sway the debate between Psycho-analysis vs Psychedelics.  Having said that, “I” needed to do a lot of work cleaning my mental, emotional, physical, spiritual, and sexual life force energy (Chi) to obtain a degree of God consciousness/awareness with the use of psychedelics and Vipassana meditation that lasted for relatively short periods of time.

 

Some individuals are lucky and don’t have to do a lot of self-work advancing to higher levels of awareness and consciousness.  We are all different, and we all have our own ways and journeys.

 

Row, row, row your boat gently down the stream,

Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, Life is but a Dream!

[winterknight]

1 hour ago, AlldayLoop said:

Can you please explain what you mean by “relational-symbolic” activity?

I mean it’s something which is both relational (that happens between people) and symbolic (having to do with symbols or language). In this case, therapy has to do with making meaning with another person. That involves both relation and symbol.