Leo Gura

@egoless You won't understand until you find yourself there. From the unenlightened perspective, enlightenment may not be possible. Hence a leap of faith is required. Who knows, maybe one day you'll discover it is absolutely impossible and this was all just a hoax.

Actually, it's stranger than that. "The brain" and "an impulse in the brain" are concepts! Not impulses! Concepts do not occur inside a brain. That's backwards. Rather brains are concepts occurring in consciousness. Reality is not a hardware system, it's more like a software system. The software is NOT running on hardware! Stop thinking about reality physically. There's nothing physical about physics. A self-consistent hallucination has the quality of appearing solid and material. Materiality is an illusion created by the consistency of ordinary consciousness. It has lulled you into a false sense of materiality because you haven't yet experienced the consistency break down.

Source? I have yet to see any conclusive evidence of this.

Humans are complex creatures. Being human ain't easy.

Consider yourself lucky.

Except are you really able to enjoy what life has to offer? No So here we are. The difference is in the one case you're happy, in the other case you're a drunk, crazed monkey with a Jalapeno stuck up its ass.

You got something better to do?

This is why studying history is so important. You gotta keep things in historical context. Go read about how the Mongol hordes butchered up to 1 million people in a single city, then you'll see Vegas and even Hiroshima in another light. The viciousness of humanity used to be a lot worse. The progress isn't fast enough for our liking, but it's still rather fast. In 2000 years we've come a long way. In classic antiquity, if a Greco-Roman city was sacked, all the men were killed and all the children and women were sold into slavery. It was standard operating procedure and everyone in the city knew the stakes. 30-40% of the entire population in Italy were slaves in the 1st century BC. In ancient Rome, punishment for a woman's adultery was that the husband gets to kill his wife with his own hands. Saudi Arabia just this week gave women the right to drive. Slow, but progress.

@MM1988 What if "you", "the brain", and "reality" are just ideas floating in emptiness? You think you are in reality, but reality is actually in you. The problem is, you're trying to couch enlightenment into a naive realist paradigm which you've absorbed from your culture without ever realizing it. What enlightenment means is that your naive realist paradigm gets destroyed. Which literally means, at the moment of enlightenment, physical external reality ceases to exist! Imagine that! See my videos: A Rant Against Naive Realism Understanding How Paradigms Work Understanding Absolute Infinity - Part 1 Not only will enlightenment remain after brain damage, enlightenment remains after you die, and it existed before you were born. It's the only thing which is Absolutely True, which means it's ever-present. It cannot be created or destroyed, because it's the absence of all dualities. It sits before the distinction of existence vs non-existence, or self vs reality.

@Wind I got my first sober enlightenment experience through Vipasanna. The whole point of Vipasanna is enlightenment. It's like you're asking, "Can a hammer be used to hit a nail?" The major limitation is that you spend 20 years practicing mindfulness but you never apply it to the root of matter: What are you? What is awareness? What is reality? What is existence itself? The key to enlightenment is that you must apply mindfulness to your IDENTITY as a physical being (or whatever the fuck you believe you are). If you're not questioning your physicality, you're not hitting the nail on the head, you're just sitting around waiting for a hammer to accidentally fall out of the sky and hit that nail square. You might be waiting for a while there.

@SuperLuigi Hehe... This is not just you, this is the general case with all materialistic (conditional) happiness. You think you're happy, but actually all you've done is constructed a cozy nest for yourself. As soon as your nest is disturbed (with breadcrumbs of whatever), you are forced to face the bitter reality that you haven't cultivated any REAL capacity for happiness AT ALL! It's all a house of cards! Of course this makes you pissed off, because it shatters your fantasy land illusion. You haven't yet become conscious of just how much you suffer and just little progress you've made towards true (unconditional) happiness. This isn't really your fault. It's the case for 99.9% of people. That's the results of unconscious living. Our culture leads us to confuse success with happiness, but the fact is, success is orthogonal to happiness, and often a huge distraction and energy sink. See my videos about The Happiness Spectrum, What Is Happiness, Fake vs True Growth, and Successful People Are Not Happy. What you're missing in life, but don't fully realize it yet, is spirituality. True happiness is when you're happy regardless of what happens with your nest. No matter how good of a nest-builder you are, in the end, it will get fucked with. The good news is, there's only one thing wrong in life. The bad news is, it's YOU and your entire way of being, rotted all the way down to the deepest foundation.

Mushrooms do have a very natural feel to them which feels Earthy and mushroom-like.

Be VERY careful with research chemicals. AL-LAD has been very well tested by the psychedelic community. The same cannot be said for something like 4-HO-EPT. You MUST start your doses super low. Chemical companies can sometimes send you the wrong chemical! Avoid buying things online from sketchy chemical companies.

@Heart of Space I am not a piece of meat for your titillation

@AlldayLoop You got something better to do with your life? Please share.

@Heart of Space I haven't tried it yet. I'd require a trip sitter for that one.

You can investigate whatever you want. The point is that from the convention realist paradigm, reality is assumed to just exist as though reality was some kind of "thing". People fail to realize that reality and self are fundamentally interconnected. "Reality" is what a self does to exist. In order for survival to be possible at all, a self and a reality must first be imagined.

I looked at the x100 extract and said, "Hell nah, man... That's nuts!" Went with x50

This is a common trap that people fall into of: natural vs artificial. This is an illusory duality. Just because something is "natural" doesn't mean a damn thing. There are many natural mushroom species which will kill you. If you've wanna go "natural", you better start by getting rid of your house, your car, your smart phone, your cloths, your computer, your toilet paper, your toothpaste, your aspirin, your soda, your band-aids, your surgeries, your music, your A/C, etc. The science and clinical evidence is clearly showing that "synthetic" psychedelics are just as good, if not better than "natural" ones. There is nothing as magical in nature as 99.8% pure synthetic 5-MeO-DMT. Nature equipped humans with a brain so we could use it to invent better solutions than can be found in the forest. Many "natural" psychedelics actually contain unneeded toxins. Which is why people vomit on them. Vomiting is your body's natural reaction to toxic substances. I have yet to vomit on any substance I've taken, because I go out of my way to make sure they are pure.

@Heart of Space They sell Savlia x100 extract in Vegas smoke shops right by the front counter. It's only illegal in a few states.

@Serotoninluv Indeed

Again, had to re-shoot to get better quality. Will be out in the next 24 hours.

Shermer runs Skeptic Magazine. They push a pro-science agenda. That kind of skepticism was what I called "False Skepticism" in the True vs False Skepticism episode. An unfortunate trap that many modern skeptics fall into. They are skeptical about everything but their own skepticism. It fails to acknowledge the twisted complexities of science and gathering true knowledge. Graham's theories may turn out to be wrong in the end, but Shermer's skepticism is still misguided in principle. That kind of epistemic attitude just doesn't cut it for serious truth-seeking. It's too self-biased and lacking in self-reflection. But it is worthwhile to listen to folks like Shermer just to learn how tricky the mind is. In fact, I ended up ordering a few copies of Skeptic Magazine, just to research how they think. To outwit the Devil, you must study the Devil's work

@Space Graham was also taking anti-migraine injections for months on end, which apparently caused the stroke. Ironic how many problems we have with prescription meds.