Leo's Blog: Infinite Insights — Page 81
I haven't tested this myself yet, but here's a very interesting lead to follow up on:
If this is true, to me, this would explain a lot about how early mankind discovered spirituality. It's such a simple technique that even a caveman can do it. You don't need mushrooms, you don't need fancy extractions of psychoactive substances, you don't need elaborate yogic techniques.
Think about it... Any ancient culture could have stayed in a pitch-black cave for 4 days straight. If that is enough to create a full 5-MeO-DMT whiteout — that is deeper than I have ever tripped on 5-MeO — that is enough to become conscious of the absolute nature of everything, deriving the purest spiritual wisdom directly from the source. Could this be the technique that the ancient Egyptians used? The ancient Jews? The ancient Meso-Americans? It would not be hard to construct a dark room inside a temple or shine or stone monument complex like the pyramids or ziggurats.
How cool would it be to travel back in time 7,000 years to ancient Egypt and learn all of their priests' secret spiritual techniques?
Here's a fascinating report from a woman who completed a 40-day dark room retreat!
Reflections On A 40-Day Dark Room Retreat
If you have experience with 5-MeO-DMT, you know what is feels likes. For the sake of science, try doing a 4 day dark room retreat and see if you can get the same kind of high. If so, this should prove beyond a shadow of doubt that 5-MeO-DMT is endogenously produced, and responsible for the deepest awakenings of the highest enlightened masters. If you run this experiment, be sure to post your results on the forum. I'd love to gather the data.
Here's a place that offers a Dark Room. (I haven't actually done it, so I can't vouch for that place).
If spiritual purification was a song, this would be it:
Always great to listen to...
- After you've failed
- When you're stuck
- When you're feeling depressed
- When you're battling a stubborn addiction
- When you're facing an impossible obstacle
- After a breakup
- When you just want to reflect on life
All of your suffering is just the friction of your ego against the grinding gears of Truth.
Out of your saddest moments will come your greatest growth.
Those moments when you feel the most alone in life — when you feel that bitter sting of reality — are also the most alive. That is true spirituality. Don't run from it. Embrace it. Yes, it's difficult as fuck.
When people hear the word "Nothingess", all too often they get a totally wrong idea about what that word is pointing to. Nothingness is NOT an empty void, a black screen, or a black hole.
Here's a better approximation of what nothingness looks like:
Now keep in mind, this is just an analogy. A pointer. So don't start expecting to see the above flashy object in your meditation sessions. That's never going to happen.
What the object above is showing is the dream-like, immaterial, illusory, quality of consciousness. Consciousness is totally empty, like the above object. It is fluid and can take on an infinite number of shapes, with infinite resolution and zero limitation. It is vibrant, alive, and intelligent.
Can you see why the above object would be called Nothingness? Because it has no substance to it. It's pure appearance, and it can appear as literally anything. So we call it Nothingness, which is identical to Everythingness. Or, we could call it Infinity. Imagine if the above object was infinite in size and dimension such that it depicted every form imaginable. That would be what reality is, with your present experience being one of those forms.
Try this: Look around the room you're in right now, and notice that the whole room is Nothingness, just like the object above. Don't expect the room to disappear! Stop looking for black screen. Instead, notice that the room is pure appearance with no substance behind it. The room is like a hologram. Appearance is none other than Nothingness. The room AS YOU SEE IT RIGHT NOW, is Nothingness!
"Form is emptiness, and Emptiness is form."
-- The Heart Sutra
Here's how my Hawaii solo retreat went down. Lots of dirty details and wisdom in the Nightly Insights videos below.
Nightly Insights:
Note: Keep in mind, the Nightly Insights videos are raw, off-the-cuff, and unpolished. They were shot at the end of grueling sessions of meditation.
I'm back from a week of meditation in Hawaii. Here's what it actually looked like. It's hard to imagine a more beautiful place to meditate.
"Teach the tongue to say, 'I don't know'."
-- Hebrew proverb
I don't like to get too political or too alarmist, but the reality is that if you believe in holism, you ultimately cannot separate politics from personal development. Being conscious also translates into being a good citizen and taking responsibility for the community in which you live.
These days people take government totally for granted. As if a well-functioning government is a right or a guarantee. It is not! Government is not a service. You are not entitled to any rights or any fair treatment whatsoever. The only reason we have well-functioning government today (if we do) is because high-consciousness people put a lot of blood, sweat, and thought into orchestrating and defending it. The default position is not good government. The default position is corruption, theft, gross inequality, abuse, egotism, and domination. Free democracy is a very precious and fragile thing. You should be very thankful that you live under such a regime, if you do.
It is no coincidence that the ancient Greek and Roman philosophers were also deeply involved with politics — because mankind is a social creature, and community affects consciousness ENORMOUSLY. Perhaps the best example of this was Marcus Aurelius — one of the best Roman Emperors who also happened to be deep Stoic philosopher. In his work, The Meditations, you can clearly see how his level of consciousness affected his governing. Compare the thoughtfulness of someone like Marcus Aurelius and Obama vs Caligula and Trump.
So with that justification out of the way, I want to present a couple of really good videos about the troubling situation happening with the Trump presidency. This isn't your typical partisan mudslinging contest. This is really wise analysis from hard-nosed and experienced thinkers which you rarely hear on TV or Facebook.
Please note that I am not sharing these videos to convince you to become a liberal. Whatever your political leanings are, that's okay. What's being pointed at here is a meta-issue, beyond partisanship. I want you to start to think of how it would look if you started applying principles like consciousness to your relationship with your government. If you are not American, there are still lessons to be learned here. This really isn't about Trump per se, but about psychology, ideology, consciousness, groupthink, dogma, epistemology, tribalism, critical thinking, self-deception, ego, ecology, materialism, etc.
Bonus videos from Noam Chomsky:
P.S. If you use these videos to become ideological, or to entrench deeper in your political position, you've missed the point entirely. Go meta!