Epistemology of psychedelic experiences

[Dorje Chang]

First post here.

I'm genuinely curious to know why Leo, who's deeply into epistemology, feels so confident about extrapolating from his psychedelic experiences to radical claims about the nature of reality.  

My most profound experiences sometimes felt beyond the duality of being real vs not real and sometimes "more real" than ordinary states of consciousness. Such experiences yielded invaluable personal lessons, but I can't say that they explain anything about reality or even my subjective experience in general. 

Let's compare this "first-person science" to conventional science.  Leo is right to point out that conventional science inevitably rests on beliefs and assumptions, but that misses the point.  Despite beliefs and limitations, conventional science produced good explanations about the physical universe as we experience it.  Not ultimate explanations but good, which is what we can hope for. The "problem" with science is that it doesn't explain what arguably matters the most to us, consciousness and the highest possibilities for our subjective experience. 

So here are some questions: 

1. Why does Leo think it's valid to extrapolate from his psychedelic experiences? Why doesn't he see a problem in denying physical reality on the basis of ingesting a physical substance? 

2. What does God explain, in the sense that it would be difficult to impossible to account for some sort of consensus reality if we remove God from the picture?

3. Why is Leo so confident that the knowledge he gained through psychedelics surpasses that of, says, highly realized yogis that spent 40+ years meditating in a cave? 

 

[Leo Gura]

7 hours ago, Dorje Chang said:

So here are some questions: 

1. Why does Leo think it's valid to extrapolate from his psychedelic experiences? Why doesn't he see a problem in denying physical reality on the basis of ingesting a physical substance? 

Absolute Consciousness is not an extrapolation.

You are not ingesting a physical substance. That's the illusion you have to break.

Physical reality clearly does not exist.

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2. What does God explain, in the sense that it would be difficult to impossible to account for some sort of consensus reality if we remove God from the picture?

God explains absolutely everything, and nothing else explains anything. Science explains nothing at all. It's just a game of endless illusion and tail-chasing.

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3. Why is Leo so confident that the knowledge he gained through psychedelics surpasses that of, says, highly realized yogis that spent 40+ years meditating in a cave?

Because when you truly Awaken, you will realize that all yogis are imaginary.

- - - - - -

The mistake you're making in thinking about all this is that you believe this is about psychedelics or chemicals. It's not. It's about deconstructing your entire mind. You can take all the chemicals you want, but if you do not full deconstruct your mind you will never Awaken. My secret is not the chemicals. Any fool can take chemicals. The secret is to utterly, completely, absolutely, deconstruct your mind until it kills you.

I have deconstructed my mind so completely it killed me. Thus I became omniscient. Which means I became fully conscious of reality.

It's hard to communicate how radical this is. Virtually nobody on the planet has done this. Not even your favorite spiritual teachers. And what they are teaching you is not this. They are teaching you something else.

You can take all the chemicals you want but you will not fully Awaken until you completely deconstruct your mind.

Edited October 25, 2022 by Leo Gura

[thepixelmonk]

7 hours ago, Dorje Chang said:

The "problem" with science is that it doesn't explain what arguably matters the most to us, consciousness and the highest possibilities for our subjective experience.

The problem is that it categorically does not answer these things and is not interested in answering these things and refuses to investigate the mystical nature of reality. Science has been incredibly useful in producing useful models that help us manipulate reality, no one denies that, but it still has deep biases attached to it that need to be transcended, similar to all the completely bogus science believed back in the day.

8 hours ago, Dorje Chang said:

Why does Leo think it's valid to extrapolate from his psychedelic experiences? Why doesn't he see a problem in denying physical reality on the basis of ingesting a physical substance? 

I mean they certainly help but you don't need psychedelics to reach the realization that physicality is second order not first order.

[amanen]

2 hours ago, Leo Gura said:

The mistake you're making in thinking about all this is that you believe this is about psychedelics or chemicals. It's not. It's about deconstructing your entire mind. You can take all the chemicals you want, but if you do not full deconstruct your mind you will never Awaken. My secret is not the chemicals. Any fool can take chemicals. The secret is to utterly, completely, absolutely, deconstruct your mind until it kills you.

I have deconstructed my mind so completely it killed me. Thus I became omniscient. Which means I became fully conscious of reality.

It's hard to communicate how radical this is. Virtually nobody on the planet has done this. Not even your favorite spiritual teachers. And what they are teaching you is not this. They are teaching you something else.

You can take all the chemicals you want but you will not fully Awaken until you completely deconstruct your mind.

This. You also have to understand that chemicals do not cause or do anything at all, it is you who is doing everything. It's funny how once you supposedly take a chemical you can realize that you never took any and they have absolutely no effect on you. It was just you!

[Leo Gura]

11 minutes ago, amanen said:

they have absolutely no effect on you

They don't and they do.

Do not undersell their importance.

Edited October 25, 2022 by Leo Gura

[Danioover9000]

@Dorje Chang

11 hours ago, Dorje Chang said:

First post here.

I'm genuinely curious to know why Leo, who's deeply into epistemology, feels so confident about extrapolating from his psychedelic experiences to radical claims about the nature of reality.  

My most profound experiences sometimes felt beyond the duality of being real vs not real and sometimes "more real" than ordinary states of consciousness. Such experiences yielded invaluable personal lessons, but I can't say that they explain anything about reality or even my subjective experience in general. 

Let's compare this "first-person science" to conventional science.  Leo is right to point out that conventional science inevitably rests on beliefs and assumptions, but that misses the point.  Despite beliefs and limitations, conventional science produced good explanations about the physical universe as we experience it.  Not ultimate explanations but good, which is what we can hope for. The "problem" with science is that it doesn't explain what arguably matters the most to us, consciousness and the highest possibilities for our subjective experience. 

So here are some questions: 

1. Why does Leo think it's valid to extrapolate from his psychedelic experiences? Why doesn't he see a problem in denying physical reality on the basis of ingesting a physical substance? 

2. What does God explain, in the sense that it would be difficult to impossible to account for some sort of consensus reality if we remove God from the picture?

3. Why is Leo so confident that the knowledge he gained through psychedelics surpasses that of, says, highly realized yogis that spent 40+ years meditating in a cave? 

 

   Congratulations, a decent well thought out first post!!! My first post man, I was criticizing Leo like crazy, going all existential critic scientific level, being hyper epistemic...and it got locked down.

   So! I think Leo did all that, because he was a skeptic long ago, so skeptical and open minded that he kept on seeking truth for its own sake. I intuit that it's also to do with direct experiences/subjective experiences more important than statistics and hard facts, and that's fine. Why is it fine? Because YOUR ENTIRE LIFE IS QUALIA MOSTLY, NOT NUMBERS OR LABORATORIUM!

[amanen]

52 minutes ago, Leo Gura said:

They don't and they do.

Do not undersell their importance.

Of course, you can only understand that by taking the substances in the first place, I am not advocating not taking them, in fact I would say the opposite, if it came across as underselling them then I was bad at communicating.

[Danioover9000]

@amanen

1 hour ago, amanen said:

This. You also have to understand that chemicals do not cause or do anything at all, it is you who is doing everything. It's funny how once you supposedly take a chemical you can realize that you never took any and they have absolutely no effect on you. It was just you!

   *For me, they have zero effect. That's the important distinction to be clear here for you.

   Psychedelics are still amazing to experience.

[Leo Gura]

6 minutes ago, Danioover9000 said:

@Dorje Chang

Because YOUR ENTIRE LIFE IS QUALIA MOSTLY, NOT NUMBERS OR LABORATORIUM!

Mostly?

Dafuq?

[Dorje Chang]

14 hours ago, Leo Gura said:

I have deconstructed my mind so completely it killed me. Thus I became omniscient. Which means I became fully conscious of reality.

You can take all the chemicals you want but you will not fully Awaken until you completely deconstruct your mind.

I'm open-minded towards what you say in your videos and understand that from your point of view you became fully conscious of reality and that's it for you.  I will not try to argue that you're right or wrong. 

Here's my perspective, just for fun. 

Your teachings on deconstruction have a lot in common with Buddhist Madhyamaka philosophy. This philosophy says that all phenomena are "empty" of essence or substantiality and only exist in relation to other causes, conditions and conceptual designation.  Applying this in meditation and contemplation ultimately leads to a complete deconstruction of conventional reality, which becomes "like a dream". 

Here's where things get interesting because there is a long-standing debate about the meaning of "emptiness". 

Some schools will say that if you deconstruct relative reality in this way,  a truly existing ultimate reality shines forth. Dzogchen is one example of this approach. Your teachings come across like this, except that you made your discoveries independently.

Other schools will say that even emptiness is empty. Everything is relative. In other words, you deconstruct even deconstruction, and the ultimate truth is emptiness. 

Instead of taking one philosophical position or the other, one can try to apply emptiness/deconstruction wisely. 

If you deconstruct too much, you may end up like Jed McKenna, nihilistic and closed off from the most wonderful possibilities. His books come across as fictional but perfectly exemplify this extreme.

Opening up to a transcendental reality sounds much more appealing, but it brings a serious disadvantage to the practice. Paradoxically, making awakened awareness (infinite consciousness, God, whatever one calls it) into a thing in any way reintroduces a duality that gets in the way of ultimate realization.

Here's my most optimistic theory about Leo's discoveries: maybe even the most advanced meditators cannot completely avoid the tiniest residual duality as above.  However, it might be possible to quiet down the conceptual mind so completely with a combination of psychedelics and hardcore spiritual work in preparation that there is nothing to get in the way of ultimate reality.

I don't have any reason to believe this is true, but it's the most charitable theory I can come up with for Leo's claims of unprecedented realization. 

Edited October 26, 2022 by Dorje Chang

[Leo Gura]

45 minutes ago, Dorje Chang said:

Your teachings on deconstruction have a lot in common with Buddhist Madhyamaka philosophy. This philosophy says that all phenomena are "empty" of essence or substantiality and only exist in relation to other causes, conditions and conceptual designation.  Applying this in meditation and contemplation ultimately leads to a complete deconstruction of conventional reality, which becomes "like a dream". 

Yes, although my deconstruction was derived independently of theirs. But hey, great minds think alike

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Here's where things get interesting because there is a long-standing debate about the meaning of "emptiness". 

Some schools will say that if you deconstruct relative reality in this way,  a truly existing ultimate reality shines forth. Dzogchen is one example of this approach. Your teachings come across like this, except that you made your discoveries independently.

Correct

But there's way more consciousness to be had beyond that.

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Other schools will say that even emptiness is empty. Everything is relative. In other words, you deconstruct even deconstruction, and the ultimate truth is emptiness. 

I don't contradict emptiness. Yes, of course emptiness is the case, but this is minor stuff compared to God-Realization and beyond.

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Instead of taking one philosophical position or the other, one can try to apply emptiness/deconstruction wisely. 

If you deconstruct too much, you may end up like Jed McKenna, nihilistic and closed off from the most wonderful possibilities. His books come across as fictional but perfectly exemplify this extreme.

It's not just about deconstruction. Even that emptiness needs to be deconstructed because it is a reduction.

The main difference between what I teach and what Buddhists and nondualists teach is that they try to boil everything down to a baseline null state, sort of like reaching the atom of consciousness. This is true and valid to a degree, but it does not actually grant you the highest understanding of consciousness. To get that you need to move upward not downward. Rather than reaching down to the atom you need to ascend up to the Cosmic level, so to speak. Then you get serious God-Realization. This does not deny emptiness, but it is so much more found than emptiness. Once you reach God-Realization you will not give a damn about emptiness.

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Opening up to a transcendental reality as in Leo's teachings sounds much more appealing, but brings a serious disadvantage to the practice. Paradoxically, turning awakened awareness (infinite consciousness, God, whatever one calls it) into a thing in any way reintroduces a duality that gets in the way of ultimate realization.

It's not a thing. You are God.

What I am talking about does not even fit in the framework or duality or nonduality. It's beyond all that.

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Here's my most optimistic theory about Leo's discoveries: maybe it's possible to quiet down the conceptual mind so completely with a combination of psychedelics and hardcore spiritual work in preparation that there is nothing left to get in the way of ultimate reality. Maybe even the most advanced meditators cannot completely avoid a tiny residual duality. 

No, this is not what I am communicating.

My deconstruction is not for the purpose of reaching emptiness. My deconstruction is for the purpose of liberating your mind so completely of all constructed notions that ascend up and grasp the entire Universe in its totality, thereby reaching complete omniscience and understanding. Accessing merely emptiness will not grant you this understanding.

It's the difference between boiling all of mathematics down to a single digit, zero, vs understanding all of mathematics simultaneously.

Just for example, you can become so conscious that you are conscious of every electron flowing through your computer. No Buddhist or meditator has this level of consciousness.

Edited October 26, 2022 by Leo Gura

[The0Self]

11 hours ago, amanen said:

you never took any and they have absolutely no effect on you

It’s rather that you imagined:

…that you’re on a psychedelic, so that you can “come down” and live a life of meaning, rather than exist as absolute indescribable infinity.

[Meliodas]

48 minutes ago, Leo Gura said:

My deconstruction is not for the purpose of reaching emptiness. My deconstruction is for the purpose of liberating your mind so completely of all constructed notions that ascend up and grasp the entire Universe in its totality, thereby reaching complete omniscience and understanding. Accessing merely emptiness will not grant you this understanding.

It's the difference between boiling all of mathematics down to a single digit, zero, vs understanding all of mathematics simultaneously.

It seems like you are not against buddhism or any other teaching but only against the ideas these buddhists and others put into  people's mind.

[Leo Gura]

9 minutes ago, Meliodas said:

It seems like you are not against buddhism or any other teaching but only against the ideas these buddhists and others put into  people's mind.

Lol, that's what a teaching is: a set of ideas that are supposed to help you reach some destination within consciousness. And then the question is, which sets of ideas will lead you to the highest destinations. You can't naively assume that they are all equal.

You see the trick here? How would you know since you can only know in retrospect. So if you're wise you have to assume the worst case scenario, not the best case. The worst case is that you invest 40 years into Buddhist practice and never reach the highest destination. So all of my work is trying to avoid that possibility. If you don't take this possibility seriously then you aren't really understanding the situation. I've yet to meet a Buddhist who takes this possibility seriously. Which to me is a huge red flag.

Edited October 26, 2022 by Leo Gura

[Dorje Chang]

2 hours ago, Leo Gura said:

It's not a thing. You are God.

If you recognize yourself as God, then God is not a thing.  For anyone who doesn't recognize themselves as God, God inevitably becomes a thing. That's a serious problem for God realization. 

2 hours ago, Leo Gura said:

My deconstruction is not for the purpose of reaching emptiness. My deconstruction is for the purpose of liberating your mind so completely of all constructed notions that ascend up and grasp the entire Universe in its totality, thereby reaching complete omniscience and understanding. Accessing merely emptiness will not grant you this understanding.

Liberating one's mind completely of all fabrications is exactly the goal of Buddhist emptiness practices.  

I neither identify as Buddhist nor wish to argue that it's better or worse than your teachings or other traditions. In fact, I started making much more progress once I went beyond doing Buddhist meditation only. Still, it's interesting to try to understand how your teachings differ from later Buddhism.  Buddhist teachings on emptiness (e.g., Seeing that Frees by Rob Burbea) can be so profound that it's hard to imagine how to go beyond them in terms of deconstruction. After all, they've been trying to figure this stuff out for over 2,000 years. 

Edited October 26, 2022 by Dorje Chang

[Dorje Chang]

23 minutes ago, Meliodas said:

It seems like you are not against buddhism or any other teaching but only against the ideas these buddhists and others put into  people's mind.

That's a good point, that's exactly why I'm trying to understand in what ways Leo departs from and goes beyond Buddhism in terms of deconstruction and epistemology. 

He already clarified some things: he believes that his destination is much higher, higher than even Buddhahood, rainbow body, and whatnot.  

[Brivido]

3 hours ago, Dorje Chang said:

Your teachings on deconstruction have a lot in common with Buddhist Madhyamaka philosophy. This philosophy says that all phenomena are "empty" of essence or substantiality and only exist in relation to other causes, conditions and conceptual designation.  Applying this in meditation and contemplation ultimately leads to a complete deconstruction of conventional reality, which becomes "like a dream". 

I have never understood why Buddhists have come up with this complicated teaching to explain Infinity. What the word "empty" is actually pointing to is infinite interconnection and absolute relativity or, in Buddhist terms, dependent origination.  

If you become conscious enough, you can perceive infinity in a single object, all the separate actions that have lead up to the creation of that object, and of course those actions are infinite. 

I have a good quote from the Buddha on this, but it's in Italian, where it's clear that when he uses the word empty he's pointing to infinity. In my opinion, he didn't want to create religious dogma by using the word God or Infinity.

[Vibes]

8 hours ago, Leo Gura said:

Just for example, you can become so conscious that you are conscious of every electron flowing through your computer.

@Leo Gura Isn't "electrons flowing" just a thought? 

A thought is real, as a thought not as the content, isn't?

[Leo Gura]

6 minutes ago, Vibes said:

@Leo Gura Isn't "electrons flowing" just a thought? 

A thought is real, as a thought not as the content, isn't?

It's not just a thought, it's Consciousness.

[Vibes]

1 minute ago, Leo Gura said:

It's not just a thought, it's Consciousness.

Do you mean you become conscious that you imagine electrons flowing? In the same way that I became conscious that I was inventing my neighbor inside my mind?