About The Many Facets Of Awakening Episode (My Extra Commentary on Emotional Mastery)

[ardacigin]

I think that this episode was exceptionally deep even for Leo's standards. I also think that this one video crystallizes the value and importance of psychedelic investigations.

I think it a valid path to use psychedelics with weak embodiment for a year or two, using that time to be conscious of all of these 30+ insights. And then going through the meditation/yoga path to strongly embody these insights for the next 30 + years and also doing psychedelics on the side if need be.

I think this is not only valid but a solid strategy overall if you can execute it properly. (I'd personally do the psychedelic investigation at this depth AFTER I've relatively mastered the samatha path which usually takes at least 3-8 years of intense hard work. Until then, I'd casually do psychedelics. But I understand that both of these strategies have their own pros and cons.)

See if you can combat the certain negative effects psychedelics can have while becoming conscious of those 30 shocking insights in such a short amount of time. The ego backlash, quick psychological dis-integration and energy problems can be 10 times more severe compared to the experiences described in 'The Dark Side of Meditation' episode Leo talks about.

Even if you are meditating while becoming conscious of these insights, they can still be very disruptive psychologically and emotionally. Just because Leo is handling it easily doesn't necessarily mean everyone can handle it. So keep that in mind.

The only issue I've observed was the claim at the end that 'Becoming conscious of these insights won't solve the problem of emotional mastery. You can still identify with emotions, experience deep sadness etc.)

This claim must be said within the confines of the psychedelic-heavy path. Once you have the skills to be conscious of these insights sober (not even embody deeply), your existing skills of emotional mastery MUST be on advanced levels to even start this process of insight enquiry for most of these 30+ insights.

On the samatha-vipassana path, your development of emotional mastery comes as a preliminary work prior to insight penetration on suffering, unconditional happiness, love and impermanence. In fact, emotional mastery is the requirement to do long 4-8 hour long SDS sits.

It is a mistake to assume people do such practices with a lot of pain or suffering. After mental and physical pliancy develops, you are not nearly aware of the body boundaries as a beginner usually is. Adept meditators not only cultivate unconditional happiness and joy but also delve deeper into some of these 30+ insights within those hours.

So if you are at this level, the samatha-vipassana path already trained you deeply in emotional mastery. You are better at handling emotions than 99.9 percent of people at this point. (the rest 0.1% are deeply awakened people who've not only mastered samatha but also embodied the insights).

 Compared to this weakness of psychedelic-heavy path and dry insight methods, this is one of the major advantages of the samatha path. (Which includes all forms of jhana practices as well)

At that level, you could easily deal with any negative emotion by applying many antidotes. Here are a few:

1- There is an automatic mechanism called 'Mind Unification' that develops which creates an overall reduction in resistance to ALL negative experiences. 

2- You can do a jhana practice where you cultivate joy and happiness and dwell in it until it intensifies to an anti-depressant- SSRI intensity of pleasure and joy. Cultivating positive mental states has a more radical effect on adept meditators than beginners. This is basically a resilient but temporary form of unconditional happiness.

3- You can turn towards all negative/positive emotions and see their impermanent nature. (This requires sufficient embodiment of impermanence. If you don't have that, you can't do this process reliably.)

4- You can maintain metacognitive awareness on mental states which arises as a reaction to negative emotions. This is a similar insight practice to Mahamudra. You constantly monitor the mind for potential dullness, distractions, aversion, craving and emotional mental states. This introspective awareness can eventually result in insights related to no-self, suffering, emotions and many more. It is a powerful form of meditation. In fact, this is my current primary method of investigating the mind.

5- You can focus on a narrow or broad meditation objects and stay in access concentration with awareness until the negative emotion slowly dissolves due to focusing away from pain.

6- You can get to high levels of equanimity and do noting (not labelling) practices to the negative emotions with detachment. Eventually, the pain wil go away and show its impermanent nature. 

You can do most of of these antidotes without being conscious of majority of those 30+ insights. As I've explained in previous posts, you don't necessarily need fully embodied awakening to feel radically happier.

At the advanced levels, certain skills you've mastered might mimic 'Awakened Consciousness' so much that it might be mistaken that person has deep insight embodiment or is definitely 'woke' (since he/she can do 8 hours of SDS in lotus posture, cultivate joy and happiness in the blink of an eye etc.)

An awakening embodiment will make these skills way more deep and powerful. But emotional mastery, in its practical form is possible prior to awakening. In fact, this is one of the biggest reasons people do samatha-vipassana as a path towards awakening.

 

 

Edited October 14, 2019 by ardacigin

[Nahm]

@ardacigin Have you even taken a psychedelic? 

[CreamCat]

57 minutes ago, ardacigin said:

the requirement to do long 4-8 hour long SDS sits.

Sitting for hours at a time is not good for health.

Why are you so dedicated to this pursuit of enlightenment? Is your dedication possibly another distraction?

Edited October 14, 2019 by CreamCat

[Forestluv]

@ardacigin You make good points from a personal/human perspective. Many of the issues you raise are very important to a person/human. In particular, your orientation has a destination in mind. A thing to achieve. A place to arrive. Relatively, that destination appears to be highly valuable to a person/human. Yet it is exclusive. For example, you seem to create two categories: a temporary psychedelic-induced “altered reality” and a permanent sober real enlightened reality to be attained. In doing so, a story is created in which psychedelics are some temporary alteration of mind to be used as a tool to achieve a goal of an abiding sober enlightened consciousness. This is a relative orientation. Having such an orientation will contract a mind (regardless of how deep and profound that orientation appears to the human).

Notice the following orientation: psychedelic mindstates can be a tool or distraction to an ideal sober mindstate. This is in opposition to the orientation: sober mind states can be a tool or distraction to an ideal psychedelic mind state. If the destination was to achieve an ideal psychedelic state, then everything you are writing gets flipped. Now, SDS sits becomes the distraction. Yet this will be very difficult for a conditioned human mind to see and accept. 99.99% of humans mind conditioning is toward a sober orientation. If 99.99% of human life history and mind was conditioned in psychedelic state, humans would have the opposite orientation - the psychedelic state would be normal/sober and the non-psychedelic state would be a temporary alternative reality. 

By considering psychedelics as an altered state that can be a tool or distraction from achieving a “real” non-psychedelic destination, there is an assumption that the standard of what is real and what should be attained is non-psychedelic. With this assumption, one will not be able to see (or accept) that the psychedelic state is as real as sober state and sober state is as hallucinatory as psychedelic state. Psychedelic vs. sober is a duality and with enough direct experience, this duality collapses, like all dualities. One begins to see inter-relationships between psychedeluc ad sober. One sees grey areas and begins to question “what is psychedelic? What is sober? What aspects of real-ness are within psychedelic? What aspects of hallucination is with sober?”.  This opens a whole new world of realizations and awakenings. Eventually the duality collapses: sober  = psychedelic and psychedelic = sober. This is not simply theory. One can directly experience this in that they have a difficult time distinguishing between the two mind states. They don’t know if they are on 5-meo or not. There is no longer “”breakthrough”. Yet ime collapsing thus duality takes a lot of experience and work - both in psychedelic and sober realms. . . .

During my first Aya ceremony, I sat next to a man who had done over 100 ceremonies. Before the ceremony, I asked alit of questions about the altered Aya state of mind and how to use that toward sober awakening. He told me that the two worlds will gradually come closer together until they are One. It seemed so foreign to me at the time. Yet after over 100 trips, I now know what he was pointing to. 

You are tripping right now, yet don’t realize it. 

[ardacigin]

17 hours ago, Serotoninluv said:

By considering psychedelics as an altered state that can be a tool or distraction from achieving a “real” non-psychedelic destination, there is an assumption that the standard of what is real and what should be attained is non-psychedelic. With this assumption, one will not be able to see (or accept) that the psychedelic state is as real as sober state and sober state is as hallucinatory as psychedelic state.

This distinction is very important. I'm not denying the validity of this insight. Sober reality is a controlled hallucination. I'm making a claim about the different natures and depths of insight penetration. These are different issues.

The issue on the psychedelic front is that no one so far (from what I've known), has permanently embodied deep insights using only psychedelics.

This is for practical purposes. There IS a huge difference between full vs semi embodiment. An embodiment in the sense that how a stream-enterer permanently loses their egoic boundaries. Any afterglow or intermittent experiences of peak states are semi-permanent embodiments.

Currently, meditation/yoga path is known for a fact to produce permanent realizations. The psychedelics path has not been observed to create this cognitive shift (even in heavy hitters and long time users) and is always seen as either a good starting point for motivation or for advanced insight recognition.

No one uses psychedelics for full embodiment and I think this is not due to fact that all spiritual and enlightened folks are close-minded and dogmatic. I definitely recommend psychedelics. For what it is amazing at: insight recognition and semi-embodiment.

But I have to see at least a few human beings who have permanently liberated themselves with psychedelics. I'm always open to be proven wrong. And I think Leo is doing good experimenting with it. But I think there is a deeper reason why more psychedelics (time wise and quantity wise) is not what produces permanent awakening.

And we don't know exactly how full embodiment occurs. If it is an accident, meditation makes you accident-prone. Probably the same is true with psychedelics. But until we know exactly how this process unfolds, we'll always be a little in the dark and 'just do more psychedelics and go deeper' mindset won't be enough to produce permanent awakening for the majority of the people.

 

[Forestluv]

5 hours ago, ardacigin said:

This is for practical purposes. There IS a huge difference between. . .

This is what I’m pointing at. You have created a construct that has practical purpose. I’m not denying that. Your construct involves profound mastery attained through discipline and consistent practice. What I’m pointing at is the use of this relative construct as absolute. When you write “IS”, you are creating a relative and presenting it as an absolute. It’s like saying “a IS b” without realizing that “a” is also not “b”. When you create a construct of “embodiment” there is automatically “non-embodiment” to contrast embodiment with. There are many such dualistic opposites in your writings: embodiment vs. non-embodiment, psychedelic vs non-psychedelic, temporary vs. permanent, awakening vs non-awakening. All of these constructs collapse into Nothing/Everything. The human mind loves to construct, yet becomes attached to such constructs. I doubt you would be able to discard all of the constructs you have written about as if they were an old newspaper. This would be liberation. To be liberated from any construct, including spiritual constructs like embodiment, insights, meditative states, enlightenment etc. . . What you write about has relative value. Training to become an Olympic gold medalist in the decathlon also has relative value. Yet in the absolute, it has no more relevance or more ISness than bird chirps. 
 

Regarding psychedelics. . . one thing psychedelics (especially 5-meo) do is dissolve dualities. One can observe the deconstruction of dualities to nonduality and the reconstruction back to duality. Deconstruction to Nothing and re-construction to Everything. Such that Nothing = Everything. Not in theory. In embodiment. Knowing. Permanent embodied knowing. Eternal. . . . I meditated over 20,000 hours without any drugs. Then I tried 5-meo and it blew away all the meditation. It’s not even close. And not just the peaks, the embodiment. When I was shown Mu and infinity, that realization never left. I can’t unsee it. I also did 24 consecutive days of 5-Meo in which a consistent nondual consciousness manifested. There was no difference between 5-meo and no 5-meo. No difference between meditation vs non-meditation. There was continuous singular nonduality. When duality finally reappeared, the contrast between nondual and dual was striking. So striking that I went into an insanity zone because my mind couldn’t handle it. And then the duality between dual vs nondual collapsed. This has been embodied and permanently accessible Now. . . Perhaps the previous 20,000 hours of meditation and 500+ hours of psychedelics provided structural support to embody the realization. I don’t know what would have happened without that previous experience. And perhaps this description doesn’t qualify as deep insight, permanent, embodiment or enlightenment within your construct. Which is fine. All constructs are relative, including the one I describe. And in the absolute, all the deep deepness I describe is no deeper than a butterfly pollinating a flower. Not in theory, in knowing that comes prior to theory. ? ? 

[Eu Sint]

@Serotoninluv Very well said, I agree with what you said and I like that you do not speak from books, but bring arguments from your own experience.I was about to write a response to this topic, which in my native language , Romanian, sounds quite similar to what you wrote.Thank you for exempting me from the translation work, however it does not look the same in the end, considering the basic of the English language I know?.   I do not know how many hours of meditation have been in total 20 years of  my practice, but when I started to use psychedelics, it was as if until now I had circled around the Earth and all of a sudden I circled the universe, if we can say so as a degree of comparison. In my case, it didn't take 500 +hours of psychedelics, only about 150 + hours in total, but when the time came for 5 meo dmt everything was so ,quote you.     “One can observe the deconstruction of dualities to nonduality and the reconstruction back to duality. Deconstruction to Nothing and re-construction to Everything. Such that Nothing = Everything. Not in theory. In embodiment. Knowing. Permanent embodied knowing. Eternal. . . .. And not just the peaks, the embodiment. When I was shown Mu and infinity, that realization never left. I can’t unsee it.” 

In my case, I continued the meditation and after 5 meo dmt, another two years, because I wanted to convince myself that this continuous nondual state can be obtained through meditation, which also happened. In fact, I have removed the last doubt that there is a state to come and go.So I realized that there is no difference between, I quote you:  “ There was no difference between 5-meo and no 5-meo. No difference between meditation vs non-meditation. There was continuous singular nonduality. “ 

And in the end I went through this too, because of course something was still missing, cherry was missing from top of the cake ?, madness as the last obstacle of Maya. I quote you : “ I went into an insanity zone because my mind couldn’t handle it. And then the duality between dual vs nondual collapsed. This has been embodied and permanently accessible Now. . .” 

So one must have experienced both sides , meditation and psychedelics .And after you have convinced yourself by both methods that what remains is identical, permanent and constant you are free to form an opinion which in its turn will be in the field of the relative as well. But when you are living from there effortlessly all the time and have permanent non-dual awareness in daily life which you don't have to do anything to maintain, then you can call it true liberation.From here on any explanation, any ancient spiritual books, as well as your entire spiritual practice loses its meaning .I will end with your quote:  “ All constructs are relative, including the one I describe. And in the absolute, all the deep deepness I describe is no deeper than a butterfly pollinating a flower. Not in theory, in knowing that comes prior to theory. ? ? “.

Thank you.?