tsuki

If it doesn't then I don't understand what we are discussing. I agree with the rest of your post.

Hmmm?

That is simply not true. If that was the case, then it wouldn't be possible to guide people towards the truth. No thought-story about the truth is it, but these stories can be of lesser or higher quality simply by the fact that they lay down less obstacles. You can be so direct about the truth that you would trigger physiological effects such as nausea and panic attacks.

And so what? That fact does not invalidate it. Your response tells me that you misunderstood what I wrote. I was not against conflict! I said why is it in the best interest of everybody that we say what we consider to be true and that this is going to create conflict. By exiling people that fundamentally disagree with you, you are trying to prevent conflict from resolving in a fruitful manner. You just kicked off winterknight and alienated his, let's say - fans. If you had a sincere conversation with him instead, you would have an opportunity to educate a lot of people and possibly help him too. If your teaching is truly higher than winterknight's, then these people are part way to understanding what you're trying to convey. With this kind of behavior, you are doing disservice to yourself. That is why there are hierarchies in spiritual schools and not all hierarchies are corrupt. The above serves those that are below and those below obey those that are above. They do so because it serves them. God does not rule with power, Leo.

No. Seeing the truth is not the end of the person's life, nor does it end the person's needs. By teaching the truth you do not refine your access to it, but find new ways of sharing/expressing it. Your proclivity to seek the emotion called love is an expression your ego. It has very little to do with love in the non-dual sense. Don't treat this statement as an affront, we need more egos like that.

@Leo Gura Exiling people because they contradict your highest teaching is criminal, Leo. If your teaching was truly the highest, it would include and transcend the teachings that are inferior. Even if @winterknight's teaching were inferior (and I am deliberately not taking a stance on this matter), then they are still vastly superior to what everyday people think. If what you say is true and you have reached some of the deepest layers of reality, then isn't it to be expected that average viewer wouldn't be able to relate to what you say? By explaining how your teaching includes and transcends inferior ones, you are actually teaching the highest truth without getting this territorial about it. Of course, it would be ideal if people that use your platform didn't shit on the plate they are eating from, but the responsibility to resolve these conflicts peacefully is on you. Even if someone is "deluded" and presents an inferior view, at the very least he does so to invalidate it, if the opportunity presents itself, and grow. While this responsibility may be too burdensome when it comes to random people or trolls, I think that you should treat advanced seekers differently. Right now, by resolving conflicts through exile, you are basically saying that all teachings that are incompatible with yours are worthless. As you supposedly possess the highest vantage point of us, it is your responsibility to build this bridge. Otherwise, you are just talking to yourself.

@d0ornokey I have. I am not and have never been against psychedelics as a part of the path, on the contrary. What I am against is wounded egos deciding to resolve their conflicts this way.

Let me add to this: It is admirable that the two of you have the courage to stand by what you know to be true, but it is outrageous that once given the opportunity to discuss your differences you resolve it this way. @winterknight is sincere when he calls psychedelics a distraction and is true to himself. Given the fact that he is at the very least an advanced seeker and a teacher, wouldn't it be appropriate @Leo Gura to dedicate some effort for a proper discussion? We could all benefit from this. You have undoubtedly earned a lot of trust here Leo and asking winterknight to leave undermines a lot of it. Conversely, it is admirable @winterknight that you are speaking your heart despite the possibility of being outcasted, but to accept it just like that contradicts your sincerity. Please, talk this through.

@Leo Gura @winterknight This is outrageous. I am thoroughly disappointed with the two of you. If awakening has many degrees, then using the word 'delusion' towards a person that is halfway awake is a profanity. We need more people that are 'deluded' like Leo or winterkinght, not less. Stop being territorial for God's sake!

I'm reading The Nine Stages of increasing embrace in Ego Development Theory and the 5th person perspective summarizes pretty well my last 3-4 years of development. I do not feel comfortable saying that I'm at Unitive stage stably. I still want to transcend the ego, I still want to climb the spiritual ladder and I still see it as a limitation. I will continue to work on satisfying this need until I master this domain. There is some progress here as I'm beginning to recognize that my ego is starving and I'm doubling down on keeping it this way. Just how crazy is that? I progress spiritually by enabling my ego. What the actual fuck? The underlined paragraph perfectly summarizes the situation that I'm constantly finding myself in. It has always been the case, to the point where I simply never learned to expect from others to understand me and if they did, I considered them to be friends regardless of the actual quality of our connection. That has to stop, I need to find people to connect with and actually be the one that is admired for a change. If I start talking about things that interest me with random people, they are terrified. I need to find my equals, but how do I do that?

@Matt8800 You said somewhere (I'm paraphrasing) that you are asking the absolute to speak/act on its behalf and it grants you the authority to, let's say - do the miracles. In my personal experience with siddhis that are confirmed by what I have read on the subject, these requests have to come from a non-egoic place and are, hmm... synonymous? with ego death. My question is: how do you prevent this personal relationship with the Absolute from forming into spiritual megalomania? Traditionally, it is done by the practice of devotion to a guru, or at least the recognition of superiority of another magician, like, let's say - Jesus if you are a Christian. Do you practice such a thing?

I don't want to disagree with you for the sake of disagreement, but I think that is what I call a highly evolved Ego. As the ego climbs the Maslow's hierarchy of needs, it reaches the apex where the pyramid inverts and transcendence begins. The ego does not need anything from the world and understands that progress is only attained by extinguishing itself. Late stages of this state that are furthered by practice seem like what is describing. What I want to say is that God is not personal. It is a self only in a metaphoric sense. It is the self of all selves. The self of the ego, but also the self of the world. The same God lies at the bottom of the individual and at the top of the 'objective reality'. We must understand suffering in a different way then. Suffering is the divergence from the present moment. It is a simultaneous occurrence of two realities that create a rip, tension, contraction, in your being. By willful, active, imagination you are extending, stretching your 'soul' (consciousness, light) and losing the grip of what you are. It has nothing to do with pleasure or pain, with poverty or abundance. You cannot desire what is already here. Mature egos (in the sense of the previous paragraphs) desire to not desire. It is also a form of suffering, but it's superior in the sense that it is stable. It guides you to freedom. I love you man . You are one of my favorite people. I really abhor the fact that it is so easy to overlook just how different juvenile egos are from the mature ones. Even if non-dualists that are not fully enlightened are in fact egoic, the difference between them and 'ordinary people' is immense. The best testimony to this difference is the fact that 'spiritual egos' can actually be shamed and hurt by being called 'egos', while the non-spiritual ones can't. Cheers.

It's difficult because that habit is serving a purpose. The purpose is to take care of your hands. It takes effort! Shocking, isn't it? You dislike how they look and try to fix them to the best of your abilities, but those abilities are not effective. The intent is good, but the technique is not because you learned it unconsciously. If you dedicated two hours per week with professional tools and proper knowledge on how to handle the skin of your hands, then you would have no reason to bite them whatsoever. The problem is that biting your fingernails is only a problem when you catch yourself doing it. It causes guilt and shame then, but this matter is absent throughout the day. What I suggest is that you actually go to a beauty studio just once and pay someone to do it for you. The ladies are very nice and they know that you're sensitive on this subject and won't judge you. When choosing a studio to go to, judge the book by its cover - the more glamorous and expensive it is, the better the service will be. See if it helps.

You cannot integrate God with Ego because God is the bottom on top of which Ego exists. It seems to me like you're calling highly evolved Egos 'authentic' because they pursue their goals gracefully (cooperation instead of violence). If there is desire to learn the violin, then that very desire is the desire for freedom. You can actualize your freedom by learning the skill, or letting go, but the freedom one seeks is always freedom from desire. Desire is suffering. Love in the sense that I used that word is not synonymous with appreciation, enjoyment, or things that are generally understood as desirable. Love is the law, God's being, the way in which God is. It actualizes itself as the present moment out of necessity and has no opposites. Egoic struggle is not an opposite of Love, it follows from it. From the point of view of God, the hardship of practice is the practice of hardship . It is just you being lost in your mind while you play the awesome piece you're creating on the fly. But in all seriousness, it is possible, but it's spontaneous. It's not possible to plan for this when you've given yourself to Love.

No. The truth is the end of the individual. That is why it is the rock bottom, regardless of the perspective an individual has. There is no individual, there is no other, there is no mind and there is no world. r o c k b o t t o m.

There is no God apart from you. As you die (ie psychedelic death) you embody it/him. The desire to learn to play violin is the dream of the Ego that struggles against what is arising. To God, using power to manipulate reality is unthinkable because reality is perfect as it is. That does not deny God's omnipotence, God is bound by law (love) that is its own being. Knowledge and logic are only true for the Ego because it has an objective that diverges from the present moment. Existential insights are the class of knowledge that is true through its capacity to relieve one from the egoic struggle for freedom. That is why realizing the truth (intellectually or through embodiment/death) does not let you off the hook when it comes to survival and the capacity to survive is not the measure of one's spiritual depth.

@Neorez I've been struggling with this myself ever since I was a teenager. In my case, the immediate interpretation when I catch myself doing it is that I dislike the way they look, and that I'm trying to 'improve' them (which obviously makes them even worse). It does indeed get worse when I'm in my head for various reasons. I know of two ways of 'fixing' this problem: Bitter nail polish with denatonium benzoate to break the habit (yet to try this method). Actually caring for your hands (manicure). This gives me peace for a week or two. In my experience, body awareness practice lessens the habit, but does not completely remove it.

I've been staying off the forum the past month, here are the things that have been happening: I was reading Meditations on the Tarot and it is probably the best book I have ever read. It is just pure genius and world-shattering insights on every page. I stopped reading it at the letter IX: the hermit because I got discouraged by the resolution by the previous letter and the fact that the author started demolishing philosophical dilemmas that I didn't find relevant to my current situation. Still, outstanding book - I will get back to it at some point. I had 2 week vacation, half of which I spent at my mother-in-law's that lives in the countryside. I was under the influence of Meditations and had a lot of insights about interconnectedness of the world. I talked to my mother in law a lot, she seems to be spiritually inclined, but lacks knowledge on the subject. I helped to soothe her worries about her partner's misuse of alcohol and her family dynamic in general. While staying there, I suddenly became inspired to code again. My python project was on hiatus for almost a year. I'm creating a program that automatically translates CNC programs between various languages. It started as a toy project to amuse myself at work and learn some python in the process, but after many iterations grew into something that I'm quite content with (even though It's yet to translate anything). The program is implemented with two libraries that I wrote in this project: Babel and Hydra. Babel is a parser generator that is somewhat unique in that one grammar definition can be used to both read and write the language that was being described. I developed it independently from the ground up, but it turned out to be similar to something called parsing expression grammar. This "invertibility" of the grammar is crucial for my project because I don't want to write programs for reading and writing independently. Currently, commercial translator programs are one-way only and they only work from one set language to another set language and it's impossible to mix them. My program reads the CNC program, 'understands it' by simulating the CNC machine state and outputs from that simulated state. This is the trick that allows for translation, the intermediate 'meaning' of the program that is machine-dependent and preserved between languages. Hydra, on the other hand, is the library that I created to implement the 'meaning' of the program, the state of the CNC machine. The machine that runs the program is described by the tool position and orientation expressed in various coordinate systems that are linked by transformation functions. The translated program is interpreted as a set of commands to update the state of the machine, and Hydra calculates the entire new state given partial information (using the transformation functions). I tried to do this by simple numerical solvers in SymPy, but it turned out to be too slow for my purposes. Hydra is much more generic than that, it can be thought of as a discrete dependency solver. So, in the past 2-3 weeks I've been writing Hydra from the ground up and developing the conflict-solving algorithm which was pretty daunting, to be frank. Actually this is the ting that has been stalling my project for the past half year and the result is very, very interesting. Hydra is, hmmm... let's say alive. It is a tree-like organism that rebuilds itself after being disrupted by the update. it traverses the dependency hierarchy and produces parts of itself and checks if they are not in conflict with each other to maintain the set constraints. it's very beautiful and has a kind of its own intelligence. While testing it, there were many cases where I thought that it should be able to reconstruct itself when it actually failed and I spent hours looking for bugs only to be proven wrong in my assumptions. I'm very pleased with how it all turned out, the only downsides are that the Hydra user code is difficult to write (many complexities in solving) and it's getting slow again. I'm considering rewriting the program in C++ for this reason and started to dabble in my other C++ library too. For now, I implemented Heidenhain language in Babel and described a 3-axis milling machine in Hydra. Heidenhain can only read programs for the time being and is yet to feed them to Hydra for processing. I've been testing Hydra in isolation thus far. In the meantime, in the second week of my vacations, I tripped on LSD again - 100 ug. I wrote a mini trip report on the consciousness forum, so I won't repeat myself here. In short, I experienced the active coherence of the present moment as infinite love. I understood my own stupidity on a whole new level and bonded with my wife tremendously. We had a few fights in the meantime, but there's been great progress in how we understand and appreciate each other. After many heated discussions we finally decided to share our finances fully and merged our bank accounts. This got a LOT of burden off my shoulders and relieved many implicit tensions between the two of us. She also decided to actually start being responsible with our money and educate herself in this manner and I'm absolutely astonished with the results! So far, no fights about money! Yay! I also started to actually cook instead of just helping in the kitchen, so it also took some burden off her. Win-win overall. The other thing that happened is that a Zen master was giving a lecture in my town and I showed up to see him. It was around the time when I was reading Meditations and was looking for someone to humble myself back to normality after my latest awakening. it was just spot on, his presence just floored me. Amazing person, soft and firm at the same time. I kind of crashed the party there, but they were really nice and did their best for me to feel welcome and hold their curiosity at bay. Last Thursday I went on the meeting of that group and had a great one hour zazen sit. After that we were discussing the five skandas and I had an opportunity to deepen my knowledge about Buddhism. Very,very,very busy. I was actually feeling a little down today, but writing this made me realize just how amazing of a person I am. Keep on rockin' tsuki.

It seems like every stage is like that with respect to some dimension of consciousness that is being opened. I would imagine a purple person confusing himself for blue while rejecting red.

Satanism and new age are related in the sense that an individual person ventures on the quest to liberate oneself through his own effort. It does not necessarily entail doing things that are widely considered evil, but sorcerers and magicians oftentimes lose touch with their own human spirit and do things that are commonly considered as such. This is not something that is inherent in the occult practices - science and organized religion are subject to he same horrors. They happen when power (capability) is obtained and used without... God's guidance, or grace. Satan is not opposed to God. He is the incarnation of law that guarantees your freedom, the ability to create your own order that diverges from the world's harmony. You do not oppose God when you create such divergence - you become Him, a God within God, and are solely responsible for your creation. This is why human endeavors are mostly arbitrary (good or evil, as opposed to divine) - because we're free and finite at the same time. There are many new-agers that are enlightened, and yet - they maintain their faith. They do so, by acknowledging their prophets as superior in order to lock the threat of magical megalomania down.

I feel honored by the fact that you guys posted in this thread. You're awesome @Serotoninluv @Nahm . @Zigzag Idiot Always having a Gurdjieff quote handy. Thank you ?? @Jack River I love you man, keep on rockin ❤️

I had my second LSD recently, this time with the intention of experiencing infinite love, of wanting to feel at home in the world. I took 100 ug in the morning and had a wonderful day with my (sober) wife. The substance did deliver what I prayed for (literally), and strangely enough, I knew beforehand that it will be a good trip. What happened was kind of what I expected - an ego death. I had many of those without psychedelic substances, but this one was , hmm - kind of involuntary in a sense? I knew that I was on a timer and all I could do is simply to surrender. I was stripped of my regular ways of being and was able to reflect on them freely. I had a lot of emotional releases regarding my relationship and all the subtle ways in which we hurt each other unconsciously. The main takeaway from this trip is that in our everyday ways of being, we, as humans, are brutes. We occupy our speck of consciousness with things that we find most important in the tiny time-frame we can hold. At the same time, we think of ourselves as important because, well, we're occupied with the important stuff, right? Other interesting phenomena were, let's say, influencing the ways in which I interpreted my surroundings. I, myself, felt as if I was just my skin. I was the gatekeeper of the inside/outside of the body. What I noticed is that I was always doing things out of necessity, like I was riding the wave of flow, and this flow was inherently good, orderly and harmonious. Again, I was much more sensitive to 'my' bodily feelings, to the point where I wasn't even sure whether I haven't properly learned to move my body, or is this substance just painful. It was nauseating, and my body felt sore but it somehow felt right, like something good was happening. It felt as if I was so relaxed that it hurt and this pain was blinding, like staring at the sun. In my first trip I was overwhelmed by this feeling and went into semi-panic mode. The other thing was the beauty of the world expressed as symmetry and paradox. Each moment was just plain impossible. When I tried to say anything conclusive about what I felt and experienced, it was as if I was this ball of blinding light that could be decomposed to its negative and positive counterpart that formed union. I remember telling my wife that I feel like I have constipation and diarrhea at the same time hahahaha. Everything in the world seemed like it was in perfect harmony, perfect symmetry, propelled by one and only thing - care. I already knew this, but this experience was visceral. I could feel it in my non-existent bones. Stoics talk about Logos, Taoists talk about the Tao, but what I call 'I', is love. Love is literally moving my body, but I am so preoccupied with what it's (I'm) trying to accomplish that I'm missing it (well, not exactly). I know that we love each other unconditionally. I know that everything that happens is right. So, the question about morality is: Where is the line between being a total asshole that tells others what's the right thing to do, and caring about them?

@Truth Addict Ahahahaha. Alrighty. This is ridiculous. Thanks.

This is really difficult to communicate, I really don't want to cheese my way out by saying that you won't understand unless you have tripped. Partly because I did it only twice, and partly because It's very annoying. It's like the whole world gets flipped upside-down. When I'm tripping, profound things are unbelievably obvious like I was some kind of a genius, and yet - I'm a drooling, child-like idiot that's overwhelmed by going to the grocery store or taking a dump. I feel blissful and happy, and yet - every centimeter of my body is burning with pain. I am so vulnerable that a well-timed sneeze would kill me and yet - people can't help being nice to me. And finally - I know that when I'm 'sober' (like right now), I'm a complete and total idiot, a troglodyte and a brute to such a degree, that I don't even understand what it means to be stupid. Still, I know that this idiot, in his idiocy, navigates his life pretty damn well and I'm awestruck by the fact that he arranged these circumstances in which he can lose his shit on LSD safely. The degree of my sober stupidity is of such cosmic proportions that I was being thankful that God is guiding my actions with love, even if I normally have no clue about that whatsoever. In fact, I knew perfectly well that being a tripping, drooling, child-like genius, was the direct effect of having my consciousness raised. I frequently pondered about Leo's post somewhere where he said that it's possible to be so woke that you can barely stand. It's true. At the same time, I was observing my 'sober' obsession with self-development and self-improvement and felt, hmm... admiration? Compassion? Pity? for all those lovely "freaks" that self-inquire on psychedelic substances to 'go deeper'. Psychedelics are the cure for a restless monkey ego and the amount of trips are the objective measure of the obsession with being better. That is how upside-down the world gets turned when you're conscious. So, let me rephrase my question because I was too busy trying to be cool to articulate it properly: How do I tolerate my sorry stupid ass when I'm sober? How do I tolerate my need to take care of the world and develop others despite their pleas for mercy? There is no balance to be made because it is exactly how it should be, but I only see it as such because I'm an idiot. Did I clear this up a little?

@mandyjw I'm not seeking any longer. There is no balance to strike.