Peter Ralston NEW statement about psychedelics

[Raptorsin7]

Just now, Salvijus said:

sorry Leo, you're a great guy

Watch your back. There's no greater insult on the forum then calling Leo a human guy

[Salvijus]

4 minutes ago, Raptorsin7 said:

Watch your back. There's no greater insult on the forum then calling Leo a human guy

Lol, don't ruin my genuine apology ? i meant what i've sayed:)

Edited May 16, 2022 by Salvijus

[vladorion]

6 hours ago, Leo Gura said:

You will never reach thru manual practices the levels of consciousness I have reached. No amount of meditation will get you there.

To think you have or will is delusional and misleading to students.

Trampolining to high levels of consciousness is not the same as reaching them and staying there.

[Spiral Wizard]

6 hours ago, Leo Gura said:

I could turn this around on you: in 10 years you'll still be having to meditate to access God. Silly logic

Well, after 10 years of proper practice your base line is God. 

 

PS.: Why is there such debate about this? It’s not an either or… BOTH psychedelics & manual practice serve their purpose. Push them beyond the fucking limit and see where they take you! 

 

Edited May 16, 2022 by Spiral Wizard

[Consilience]

33 minutes ago, Spiral Wizard said:

Well, after 10 years of proper practice your base line is God. 

 

PS.: Why is there such debate about this? It’s not an either or… BOTH psychedelics & manual practice serve their purpose. Push them beyond the fucking limit and see where they take you! 

 

Besides one of these methods being wildly more sustainable and accessible, there may be energetic consequences on the energy body and mind with chronic use of psychedelics as well as the fact that they aren’t uprooting karma in the same way meditation does, which could have very real, very painful consequences in future incarnations. 

In general I do agree though. But from what I see from most psychonauts, they massively undervalue meditation. Somehow even the serious one’s like Leo do as well. It’s a huge and apparently common trap one can deceive themselves into. 

[The Mystical Man]

10 minutes ago, Consilience said:

Besides one of these methods being wildly more sustainable and accessible, there may be energetic consequences on the energy body and mind with chronic use of psychedelics as well as the fact that they aren’t uprooting karma in the same way meditation does, which could have very real, very painful consequences in future incarnations. 

I made a thread about that exactly a year ago. 

[Jodistrict]

This emphasis on enlightenment has become another scam.  American culture turns everything into a business.  These men are providing competing services so have to talk down the competition.   Ask yourself:  are you living a high quality life or a shit life?  That gives you a difference that you can actually measure.

[Consilience]

22 minutes ago, The Mystical Man said:

I made a thread about that exactly a year ago. 

Not exactly the same. In the thread you’re asking about if psychedelics have specific karmic consequences. What Im claiming is psychedelics do not uproot the karma that leads to suffering in future lives. However, yeah that thread is extremely fascinating and along the same lines.

What Ive seen on this forum is psychedelics promote a kind of greed and delusion that will 100% have karmic consequences. There are already consequences in this single life, never mind the immeasurable incarnations waiting for us. 

The type of purification meditation facilitates is so much subtler than anyone without serious contemplative training can imagine or access. Im only just now beginning to truly appreciate it. Psychedelics are too energetically overwhelming to even begin to understand the nuances of these subtle sankharas. Yet we can rest assured, the nature of these sankharas is that they keep going and going and going and going, life after life after life, until the point is finally understood. It’s a beautiful, immaculate, but horrifying design when seen with true wisdom and treated with reverence.

[Spiral Wizard]

47 minutes ago, Consilience said:

there may be energetic consequences on the energy body and mind with chronic use of psychedelics

How do you know that?  

[Batman]

30 minutes ago, Spiral Wizard said:

How do you know that?  

What is there to know? It is felt. You may ingest or inhale a physical appearance, but the real transformation occurs on an energetic level. The altering of the mind causes significant shift in the subtle energy of the body. You can easily feel how chakras are influenced by this, as they become aggressively active. Even kundalini may be activated on a trip with deep awakening. 

So you get massive energy shift in a matter of minutes. This is taxing the energy system, and the cause for depletion of energy that is usually felt a day after the trip. If you are tripping regularly, you should really really take care of your sleep, nutrition and general use and preservation of energy. Yoga and Meditation, for example, support this because they preserve the vitality of the body and reduce the activity of mind. 

Why do you think people can do Ayahuasca ceremonies at night, and not go to sleep and continue to the next day almost with no rest? The energy is flowing like crazy, even though the physical body is totally exhausted. This is why it is also hard to fall sleep hours after the trip. The after glow is just the continuation of the movement of energy, and it is hard to sleep when you are so energized. 

So Psychedelics cause an experience of high energy, but afterwards there is depletion and heaviness because the system is not used to such extreme activity. 

[Consilience]

49 minutes ago, Spiral Wizard said:

How do you know that?  

My own direct experiencing watching the subtle ways psychedelics have left my energy body feeling weeks post an intense trip and how the mind and attention is less clear and precise following a trip. Even though there is certainly the classic after glow effects on the surface of perception, in the depths of extremely subtle mental activity, there is this underlying dis-harmonization effect I started to discover after trip sessions that I just literally never noticed because of a lack of meditation experience. It’s very hard to describe. 

[Carl-Richard]

@Consilience

I notice this with basically all psychoactive substances to some degree (especially weed or alcohol), not really while under the influence, but the hours or days after. It's like I lose my 6th sense. It disturbs aspects of subtle processing, of how the mind usually flows. I haven't done psychedelics for a while, so I can't speak for them.

[UnbornTao]

22 hours ago, Leo Gura said:

So he says, but he is still wrong.

Ok, I'm open either way, then.

Until I personally settle the matter for myself with massive experience, I'll try to remain grounded.

20 hours ago, Leo Gura said:

That you think my teachings about awakening are focused on the relative is a profound misunderstanding of my teachings.

Not sure how you got this idea. All my awakenings and spiritual teachings are grounded in direct consciousness of the Absolute.

That's not what I meant. Poor choice of words on my part.

I was just trying to point out that methods are relative. And that a process isn't direct.

Edited May 16, 2022 by UnbornTao

[RickyFitts]

1 hour ago, Consilience said:

My own direct experiencing watching the subtle ways psychedelics have left my energy body feeling weeks post an intense trip and how the mind and attention is less clear and precise following a trip. Even though there is certainly the classic after glow effects on the surface of perception, in the depths of extremely subtle mental activity, there is this underlying dis-harmonization effect I started to discover after trip sessions that I just literally never noticed because of a lack of meditation experience. It’s very hard to describe. 

This is what puts me off about psychedelics, you might see more obvious results much more quickly with them but I imagine it could take a long, long time for you to integrate the mental and energetic effects of it. The more gradual approach of practices like meditation might seem more arduous and slow, but I'd personally much rather go down that route,  seems to me that it's much less destabilising and less fraught with complications in the long run. I get why psychedelics would appeal to people, particularly in our culture of instant gratification, but I think you've got to be so, so careful and responsible with them, seems like it could be a very slippery slope.

[Jodistrict]

I have seen too many variations to generalize about how the medicines affect energy.   Some people will sleep all night through a ceremony and not remember a thing.  Others will walk around or go outside.  For me, I feel waves of energy that are so intense, that I feel like I am being electrocuted.  Also there is no conflict between “psychedelics” and meditation.  Breathing and following the breath can get you through a difficult journey.    Another combination that works, is to take Kambo to release blocked energy followed by Yopo for mind expansion.

[Bufo Alvarius]

@Consilience Where does your whole take on karma stem from? Can you elaborate on your theory about karma bit more? How do you know it's true?

For example, out of body wizard Tom Cambell says that Karma is a consequence of the evolution of consciousness. You have to evolve, as you are being part of the whole consciousness that is evolving. You have to do that by your own choices. You have to outgrow you fears, negative emotions and believes, basically your ego. If you don’t, you don’t ‘graduate’ and move forward and therefore will be faced with the same challenges over and over again until you learn your lesson.

 

He also talks about how there is no ‘done’ place for you. He particularly talks about how he visited reality frames, where many enlightened consciousnesses went, after they were ‘done’. After a while, they started deevolving again and so had to start evolving further and find new ways to serve and help other consciousnesses to evolve. 

Escaping the cycle of suffering is the wrong reason to want to become love, e.g. “I want to become love because I want to get out of here” is equal to “I want to become love because I’m self-centered”. It is all about self.

He advocates the view, that if you grow up, you want to come back to this messy place full of suffering because you naturally will want help people, because helping other is not viewed as a burden but comes as a result of the unconditional love you have grown into. Helping people and help them grow is what makes you happy, is your joy. It's what a mature consciousness tends to do/want, rather than to escape the cycle.

See below (8 min)

 

Edited May 17, 2022 by Bufo Alvarius

[amanen]

He doesn't seem to understand the difference in a temporary and a permament increase in consciousness.

[Consilience]

5 hours ago, Bufo Alvarius said:

Where does your whole take on karma stem from? Can you elaborate on your theory about karma bit more? How do you know it's true?

Ironically, it partially stems from my use of psychedelics, having very profound past life experiences. These experiences deeply opened my mind up to the possibility of this whole cyclical nature of death and birth. As I've further meditated on and contemplated the possibility of rebirth, I've realized the only reasons Id hold death as some kind of permanent end is from cultural programing. The fact of the matter is, consciousness already manifested as as this individuated form once, why wouldn't it happen again? It's already happened. To claim it wouldn't happen again actually goes against what's already happened, ie a spontaneous emergence of perception and life as this individual we identify with. Couple this logical analysis with the direct experience of past, parallel, and future life experiences I've had with psychedelics and in meditation, and it just becomes so obvious this single lifetime isn't in anyway indicative of the torrent of consciousness.

How do I know it's true? I cannot know with the logical, egoic mind whether rebirth is true. When stepping into states of deep samadhi and openness, it stops being a question though. Moment by moment, life and death are blinking into and out of existence, as existence. One can start to penetrate this dynamic birth death process as being driven by one's karma. To link the process of karma and the existence/nature of mind to the physical body would be to deeply misunderstand the existence/nature of mind, to deeply misunderstand one's direct experience. There are levels of mind that are very much affiliated and karmically intertwined with this current physical body, but from my own experience, there are also deeper, more primordial all encompassing depths of mind that still function through sankharas that are independent (yet still inextricably connected with) the physical body. This whole mechanism of mind that is deeper than the surface of mind typically associated with the physical body is what drives birth and death. If this whole mind actually relinquished itself, what would unfold is a complete union with God. This is what happens on 5-MeO. Mind at ALL levels completely drops away. 

Yet because psychedelics numb the mind, in a sense, the sankharas driving this whole process of egoic identification and self clinging (a clinging so so so much deeper than the nonsense Neo Advaita espouses) are not uprooted. Hence they regrow, return, reconsolidate. Meditation, on the other hand, through means that I currently do not understand due to a lack of training, can uproot these sankharas. 

How do I know all of this? Through so much careful examination of my direct experience. At this point, multiple thousands of hours of meditation & contemplation. I'm still not 100% clear on all of this, and am open to being wrong, but this is what I've seen through my past with psychedelics, and a maturing, deepening, and clarification of view from manual practice. 
 

5 hours ago, Bufo Alvarius said:

Escaping the cycle of suffering is the wrong reason to want to become love, e.g. “I want to become love because I want to get out of here” is equal to “I want to become love because I’m self-centered”. It is all about self.

He advocates the view, that if you grow up, you want to come back to this messy place full of suffering because you naturally will want help people, because helping other is not viewed as a burden but comes as a result of the unconditional love you have grown into. Helping people and help them grow is what makes you happy, is your joy. It's what a mature consciousness tends to do/want, rather than to escape the cycle.

Yeah this seems to match my experience as well. In Buddhist terms, this is talking about the distinction between the path of an Arahant and Bodhisattva. I've always been more drawn to the path of the Bodhisattva, the kind of consciousness that willingly returns to try and help others rather than extinguishing the whole thing and permanently merging back into the Godhead beyond existence and non-existence. To be honest though, the type of consciousness an Arahant or Bodhisattva possess is so far beyond where I am on the path I cannot really comment on what would motivate an Arahant or Bodhisattva. I would just say, be careful dismissing the Arahant's ambition; it's coming from an incomprehensibly deep place of wisdom and clarity. Both paths are immeasurably noble, in their own way. 

[Spiral Wizard]

 

 

[Spiral Wizard]

@Leo Gura I found it interesting how you explained that the mind creates believe systems and models around psychedelic experiences which can distort future trips and realizations. (I’m referencing your new video about infinite Gods) 

I guess that’s why raising the base line is so important because you ultimately want to be free from that and only speak from direct moment to moment experience instead of memory and mental constructs.