Meditating 2 Hours Every Day - 1 Year Later (& Psychedelics vs. Meditation)

[Zeroguy]

7 hours ago, Leo Gura said:

@impulse9 Are you conscious that you are creating yourself? That reality is your Will?

Yes I did man. I  fucked up honestly. Want return back to life this is just to much for me. Want back want solution. I fucked up my whole dream. That is why I am so mad. 

[Zeroguy]

Also took it all for myself ain't no idiot. 

So sorry. 

[Javfly33]

11 hours ago, Consilience said:

2) Im talking about transcending the entire fucking game altogether. That’s the path.

LOL You aint talking about jumping off a bridge too right? 

[Globalcollective]

@Consilience Amazing brother, when covid hit I got furloughed and basically spent 11 months in fully retreat meditating 3 to 6 hours a day and doing yoga. My life has never been the same since it turned into magic. Keep inspiring x 

[Leo Gura]

Nobody is ever talking about jumping off of bridges. Cut this nonsense.

[roopepa]

@Consilience Thank you ?✨

I sense something very familiar and friendly in you. I like it.

 

[LfcCharlie4]

Have to agree with the others, one of the best posts on this forum. I think a lot of us on here would benefit tremendously from reducing the time discussing things, and actually taking 'Action' or even living the understanding in all realms of life, beyond the meditation cushion. 

Rupert's quote of, 'Meditation is not something we do; it is what we are' always comes to mind in this discussion. 

[Jacob Morres]

both have their pros and cons

[archi]

6 hours ago, Zeroguy said:

Yes I did man. I  fucked up honestly. Want return back to life this is just to much for me. Want back want solution. I fucked up my whole dream. That is why I am so mad. 

Explore it as  a strange loop.

[Guest EmptyVase]

16 hours ago, Leo Gura said:

And also, for meditation to be effective is really needs to be done in intense, long retreat settings. An hour every day will get the average person nowhere. You really need to meditate for weeks at a time to get somewhere interesting.

I think what's confusing for a lot of people is the standards you set for an "effective meditation practice".

For most people who are self-actualizing, a simple meditation practice seems more than enough because it gives them the benefits they're looking for. Things like being a bit calmer, working more effective with less stress, actually feeling some peace in the present moment. So a lot of people think "but my daily 15 mins meditation is very effective for me cuz I'm chill an' all that".
But that's probably not what you mean when you talk about an effective practice.

Your definition of effective is probably more like realizing you're the whole universe. Self-transcendence, as opposed to self-actualization, though that duality breaks down too at some point.

Their definition of effective is probably something like "calm, no stress, mindful". Thus, confusion.

[Raptorsin7]

@Consilience Nice man. Good luck with your channel

[archi]

@Consilience 

Congratulation, just 2h per day for 1y is zero in terms of time of the universe. 

 Without Leo's or similar explorations it is difficult to grasp the is-ness.

 The order of understanding is as in @Leo Gura quote:

"You are God. You are Love. You are Infinity. You are Leo." 

Contemplating  in the reverse order .... who am I?  what am I?  who is the other ? what is this ?

 

[Leo Gura]

54 minutes ago, EmptyVase said:

I think what's confusing for a lot of people is the standards you set for an "effective meditation practice".

For most people who are self-actualizing, a simple meditation practice seems more than enough because it gives them the benefits they're looking for. Things like being a bit calmer, working more effective with less stress, actually feeling some peace in the present moment. So a lot of people think "but my daily 15 mins meditation is very effective for me cuz I'm chill an' all that".
But that's probably not what you mean when you talk about an effective practice.

Your definition of effective is probably more like realizing you're the whole universe. Self-transcendence, as opposed to self-actualization, though that duality breaks down too at some point.

Their definition of effective is probably something like "calm, no stress, mindful". Thus, confusion.

Yes, I am talking about God-realization.

Calm, no stress is not even something I care about.

[Guest EmptyVase]

4 minutes ago, Leo Gura said:

Yes, I am talking about God-realization.

Calm, no stress is not even something I care about.

Yep. Lots of folks don't seem to have the clarity and the ability to differentiate about that.

*calms down existentially deep*

*realizes that he/she is the cosmic self*

*bathes in bliss*

*ego returns*

*NOT CALM, SEND HELP*

one day later

*BIATCH, this was fun, I'm in for anotha ride ?????* 

[impulse9]

You're only fully God-realized when you can instantly materialize a brand new house with the snap of your fingers.

[Consilience]

6 hours ago, Globalcollective said:

@Consilience Amazing brother, when covid hit I got furloughed and basically spent 11 months in fully retreat meditating 3 to 6 hours a day and doing yoga. My life has never been the same since it turned into magic. Keep inspiring x 

Thank you man. That’s super inspiring to hear you took the pandemic as an opportunity to deep dive within… 3-6 hours is seriously hardcore??

[Consilience]

@roopepa ???❤️ Thank you

[r0ckyreed]

On 10/3/2021 at 11:11 AM, Consilience said:

I don't normally feel a need to share, but I felt a deep calling to share this one with the community. I just released a video on my YouTube channel about my experiences meditating 2 hours per day for a year. If you're interested in hearing about what deep, consistent meditation practice looks like, check it out. If not, you still may find the below post useful.

Below, I elaborate on some of recent feelings regarding the forum and this whole meditation vs. psychedelics debate, as well as share more in depth about my meditation journey.

Lately, there seems to be a growing chasm in the Actualized.org community regarding psychedelics and then other spiritual practices such as meditation. In one camp, we have people raving about the power of psychedelics, how they provide higher levels of awakening, raise consciousness to higher degrees and how psychedelics more or less shit on other sober practices like meditation, being far superior for Spiritual Awakening or more recently "God Realization." In the other camp, you have people who are against this growing sentiment regarding psychedelics. I seem to have fallen into the latter camp.

Initially, I was extremely pro-psychedelics, believing spiritual teachers who more or less dismissed them were full of shit. Let me be clear, I am still pro-psychedelics and still believe many spiritual teachers who dismiss them are full of shit. I have achieved enormous amounts of healing, enormous amounts of spiritual growth, have elevated my baseline levels of compassion and understanding using these tools to degrees that I cannot attribute to anything other than psychedelics. They've propelled my meditation practice into levels and depths that I do not see other meditators achieving, even serious practitioners with more experience. They've tested the limits of my sanity, broken my conceptual paradigms over and over, provided absurdly magical, mystical, and profound journeys into the fringes of consciousness… The journeying has been utterly beautiful and I still have every intention to continue their use for these purposes of exploration. At the very least, they're fun! And even after some heart wrenchingly dark trips, like borderline traumatizing trips that almost feel like they've left scars on the energy body/soul, all of my trips have been nectar for the True Self awakening to what it really is.

However, after my first 9 day vipassana meditation retreat, there was a 180 degree paradigm shift. Originally, I was using meditation as a tool to propel my psychedelic journeying to deeper levels. I was successful; the harder I meditated, the deeper my trips became. Yet after that retreat, something very primordially deep shifted, almost like an internal earthquake, a transformation at the level of soul, at a level of self identity which transcends individual lifetimes and is instead the self activity driving reincarnation into subsequent and past lives (I don't know the validity of this necessarily, only that the experience points to something 'like' that). I spent 5 straight days in the most heightened states of consciousness I've ever experienced, essentially tripping balls while being completely sober. Every time I sat to formally practice, reality would just melt into and out of itself. My concentration had penetrated so deeply into the present moment, I was just watching infinite intelligence spontaneously emerge, moment by moment, while simultaneously being palpably conscious of the boundless, formless void of God as giving rise and fall to these microscopically transient fluctuations of formed experience. The space of consciousness would boundlessly expand into infinity as the formless jhanas, and contract into a singularity of non-existence… It is a challenge using words to describe just how profoundly powerful these meditative states really were. Since this retreat and after 2 other vipassana retreats within the span of the next 5 months, these types of mystical experiences have become regular. By the end of this first retreat, I realized psychedelics are tools for plunging more deeply into meditation first and foremost, not the other way around. While rigorous meditation will certainly facilitate deeper trips, meditation will also uproot the attachment to psychedelics as the means by which we awaken to God.

Though I do respect the authority and individuality of everyone's path, from what I read on the forum, Leo and those who align with Leo's paradigm have vastly underestimated the potential for meditation and utterly misunderstood the true nature of God. It is very clear to me Leo understands the mechanics of God, his videos are evidence of this, but true understanding of God is the embodiment of God in all moments, not in the transient states of psychedelic trips nor the intellectual conceptualizations about reality after the fact. Furthermore, the paradigm that claims it understands God because of psychedelics and meditation is peanuts in comparison is a paradigm NOT based in direct experience. It is a paradigm based on reifications of self that happen when the ego structure reforms after a deep psychedelic trip. Without the appropriate attentional skills (mindfulness) sober meditation trains, this paradigm occurs at an unconscious level, at a belief level, at a level that is silently creating the context by which psychedelic experiences are conceptualized after the fact.

Of course such an explicit criticism will most likely be met with opposition by the ego structure, an authority built behind "You don't know what you're talking about, I've achieved levels so far beyond all teachers, teaching or techniques. Your awakening is far less than mine! Etc. Etc." But please keep in mind, I have enormous experience with tripping. Not just tripping, tripping fucking balls. Please look at my past trip reports as evidence. This position I'm coming from is from the very principles Leo promotes - radical open-mindedness, experimentation, rigorous work ethic, balance, taking my own authority, existential curiosity for knowing what is really true.

 

Now let's be clear -

 

The True Nature of God

God is none other than this moment, exactly as it is.

This moment, exactly as it is appearing in all of its ignorance, entanglement, delusion, and suffering is an expression of divine perfection, as none other than the love of God.

The capacity for God to awaken to itself is infinite.

The context out of which experience expands out of, and contracts back into, moment by moment, is God.

You as what you really are, is God.

God is not an ego structure, but an ego structure is God.

God is Mind.
The human mind is not God, but arises out of God, as God.

God is pure intelligence.

God is pure imagination, manifest.

God is pure formlessness, unmanifest.

 

The True Nature of Love

Love is that which holds space for all states of consciousness.

When the mind stops pushing and pulling at experience through the contraction of craving and aversion, the surface level of the human mind slowly comes into union with God's Love. In Buddhism this is referred to as Equanimity.

Equanimity is Love. As the activities of the human mind cultivate Equanimity, you are merging into the union with divine, Absolute Love.

Notice, the Universe never fights with itself; the actuality of what is happening is the IS exactly as it is appearing as itself. As the Universe permits the actuality of what is, is radical permission of all form, as Love. A mind which radically permits all form, regardless of state, is a mind that embodies Absolute Love. This form of love is heart wrenching, heart cracking because it recognizes the necessity, role, and beauty of horror, delusion, suffering, atrocity.

All states of consciousness are Loved, recognized in divine equilibrium.

Absolute Love is not an emotion, perception, or transient form, but the context out of which all forms appear.

 

The True Nature of Self

You are the field from which all arises, passes, emerges, and vanishes.

You are comprehensible through direct incomprehension.

You are the expansion and contraction of all phenomena.

You are the expansion and contraction as all phenomena.

You are the context out of which all phenomena expand and contract.

You are the witness that sees self activity act its drama.

You are the witness, witnessing, and witnessed.

You are the witness of the witness.

You are the space from which time and space manifest themselves into and out of existence.

You are the womb, the creator, the created, simultaneously.

You are the grain of sand and the Sahara. 

You are the wave in the ocean and the ocean.

You are paradox itself.

You are the absolute unknown mystery, as well as the humility and arrogance that proports to understand.

You are the nothing at all, the still point where all points of reality envelope, develop and exist as unmanifest potentiality.

You are yourself, exactly where you are, as you are.

You are always here; you are always now.

You could never have been more or less you.

If these types of insights and pointers are only deeply available through psychedelics, if you believe you cannot become palpably conscious of these insights and pointers through meditation, then your paradigm may very well be backwards. A psychedelic insight's true utility is to bring back the insight into lived, everyday, mundane experience. How can we effectively do that? Meditation. A LOT of meditation.

There are two fundamental lessons we will learn from deep meditation practice.

1) Meditation can take us into states rivaling and surpassing the profundity of psychedelics, while doing so in a way which actually trains the mind to access these states without the need for psychedelics.

2) Right where we are, exactly as we are, is Absolute Truth. This is the beginning of the final awakening that 'what we are' truly seeks. The self activity keeps going, the dramas of life keep playing. The awakenings pull us ever deeply into the unimaginable depths of consciousness, yet on some level 'what we are' understands that what it is cannot exclude even the most unconscious of states.

The appreciation I have for Actualized.org is ineffable. I found Leo at an inflection point in my life, a point where I was so lost. It was Leo's brash, borderline arrogant teaching style that cracked open my mind to start questioning itself. It was Leo's wit and philosophical intelligence that forced me to challenge my long held intellectual positions about the nature of self, mind, and consciousness. It was Leo's channel that invigorated my interest in psychedelics and facilitated a Hero's journey across the internal cosmos. It was Leo's channel that lead me to understand my own authority and limitation. It was Leo's channel that challenged me to become a true sage, mystic, and lover of Truth. It was Leo's channel that propelled me to take self-actualization and the cornerstone practice of meditation even more seriously.

But it is precisely because of Leo that I write these words. It is precisely because I Leo that I so vehemently disagree with the direction this forum is heading. And in a sense, I'm writing into the collective here, urging, challenging and demanding that this community, an actual gem for humanity, not get pulled off track.

And yet Actualized.org will do and become whatever it will. As a move and practice of detachment, and love, I won't be spending as nearly as much energy trying to pull back on the collective ego that is caught in the hamster wheel of samsara, constantly seeking the illusion of deeper, more grandiose awakenings. As long as you're meditating, you will awaken to infinite degrees of consciousness until you die; you don't need psychedelics to do it. And as you're awakening to the true nature of God, you will lose attachment to all of it.

When you finally awaken, you will let yourself unfold in its own time, in its own sequence.

When you finally awaken, you will recognizing the perfection of every step up the mountain, honoring the necessity of every grain of sand, blessing the flow of each drop in the ocean.

 

Unity will emerge

As infinity unfolds

Life will be death

And all states, surrendered

 

All moments will be one

A seeking which as was sought

All delusions to be none

Contractions of craving

Finally, undone

 

As children, we'll keep growing

Expanding evermore

But in the light of Truth,

Does this moment truly soar

In the Love of God

Perfection's indiscriminate pour

 

I am happy to answer any questions below.

I wish all of you well on your path. Perhaps you may find value in my perspective, perhaps not. Thank you for your path, thank you for your dharma, in whatever form it takes on.

With Love,

You

 

Wonderful post! I totally agree! Psychedelics are a cop out for grooving fully with the present moment. Psychedelics is this forums new hamster wheel where they are a rat in a maze chasing cheese after cheese. Chasing trip after trip after trip, while ignorantly failing to realize that the real psychedelic experience is right here and now. You don’t need a chemical to connect with God. If you aren’t high on life, and you need a drug to be high, then something is wrong. You gotta meditate and contemplate why you want drugs. It’s another cheese you are chasing the same way Trump chases women and money. 

[Consilience]

5 hours ago, LfcCharlie4 said:

Have to agree with the others, one of the best posts on this forum. I think a lot of us on here would benefit tremendously from reducing the time discussing things, and actually taking 'Action' or even living the understanding in all realms of life, beyond the meditation cushion. 

Rupert's quote of, 'Meditation is not something we do; it is what we are' always comes to mind in this discussion. 

Really appreciate that. Yes I do agree so much time is wasted with mental masturbation. Actually, finding the time for 2 hours of formal practice is a lot easier than it may seem when we realize how much time is needlessly thrown away through distraction. 
 

As far as the quote, yes that is very true but it’s one of those quotes that can very easily be coopted by the ego, turned into a belief that living life as we are and formally meditating are equivalent. While this is actually true, essentially, it’s not something we’ll actually live as experience without a shitload of consistency, intensity, and experience with formal practice.
 

What comes to mind for me is the 10 ox herding pictures, just how profound the depths of this path really go, diligent practice being necessary every step along the way until the very end. But also, I think this has to be balanced with the quote you bring up from Rupert. When both are held in simultaneous balance, magic.

Thank you again brother. 

[Consilience]

2 hours ago, Raptorsin7 said:

@Consilience Nice man. Good luck with your channel

Thank you man. Btw your recent breakthrough mentioned in your other thread is amazing. I had no questions but silently (now not so silently) excited for you as the path continues to unfold