Consilience

Finding a soto zen sangha will be your best bet.

Somehow that’s not surprising at all ? Thank you for the link! Definitely checking dude‘s channel out.

Short answer is yes. Longer answer, noting gone is what starts to clue the attention onto this dynamic quality of perception, but there‘s no guarantee noting gone will always break one into emptiness. However, it is a very powerful, quite unknown technique. An absence of mind and thought isn’t this quality of expansion/contraction or arising/passing, but the fact that you can even get into states of thougtlessness is great. When you break into expansion and contraction, thought activity may still be going on, but at this level of mindfulness thoughts are no problem, they’re just more objects to observe expansion and contraction. Id say Shinzen’s teachings on expansion and contraction are part of what propelled my own practice into a whole new level of depth AND helped contextualize other contradictory teachings. For example, awareness doesn’t always carry with it this level of detection. If Ive entered a jhanic like state of awareness but can‘t penetrate the void like nature of experience via expansion and contraction, I know Im not resting as the awareness a teacher like Ramana Maharshi is pointing, for example. If the outside world still feels solid, there’s a shitload of mental fabrication, uncognized mind activity, and self deception going on. This is how noting/vipassana can be a powerful tool even in the context of self inquiry. But on the other hand, when one does start to breakthrough to THE Self in meditation, even expansion and contraction collapse in on themselves into infinite emptiness. There is a single thus-ness which is neither being, nor non-being. For now, Id try to start detecting the moment by moment flavors of how reality is constantly dying and being reborn. Noting gone or noting new are powerful entry points. For that matter, so is the See Hear Feel technique in general.

Can your attention concentrate deeply enough on perceptive experience to feel the moment by moment arising and passing/expansion and contraction of moment by moment perceptive experience? If yes, can you penetrate even more deeply onto the underlying emptiness? If yes, all you really need to do is just hangout there. If no, work towards each of these steps. Any sort of existential contemplation is best completed from this space of awareness, in my opinion. So until attention can stabilize onto this level of emptiness, keep going.

@peanutspathtotruth @Nos7algiK Really glad you both found value as well.

I remember watching an earlier Actualized video before I got serious about consciousness work where Leo made the claim that our radical baseline consciousness could be radically transformed. It was a killer sales pitch and I fell hook line and sinker. This was a couple years before he become so overtly pro-psychedelic. In many ways, it’s because of Leo’s old teachings that I’ve had such success with practice… hearing this dude claim I could make such transformations was really inspiring and for some reason I just had faith he was right. It wasn’t necessarily Leo, but something Leo’s words stirred inside. That instinct to go within has been the driving force that’s continued to push me further and further, to the point where my baseline state is starting to actually become psychedelic. Hundreds of hours of practice later, a lifetime to go, and nothing but gratitude for stumbling into Actualized.org. The irony that I now so vehemently disagree with my first spiritual teacher is… shocking. 1 hour per day of meditation for 2.5 years 2 hours per day of meditation for 1 year 3 meditation retreats of 80-100 hours of practice in the last 9 months Aggressive psychedelic travel, entering into foreign dimensions, past lives, parallel lives, meeting my ligh body/soul, horrific experiences, heavenly bliss, absolute Love and God, stepping into infinity, into the divine. Reading copious amounts of material from a wide variety of spiritual masters. Metric fucktons of passive contemplation while going on walks, hiking, exercising, working If one wants to truly know the truth, ironically all they’d have to do is apply the principles Leo teaches rather than believing the language Leo speaks. Actualized.org is an actual goldmine. “You can only lead people as high as you’ve gone.”

So is making claims about meditation and spiritual masters without decades worth of direct experience. No amount of you shitting on meditation will change the fact that my baseline meditation practice consistently feels like 35-50ug of LSD, not to mention sessions which get abnormally more deep. Im only 3.5 years into serious practice. Where will I be in another 10? Where will you be? Then let’s talk about what’s cheap.

Thank you for the updates sir! Looking forward to future breakdowns of how practice is going

Das it mayne ?❤️

Perhaps. ? Right just a few. Ive considered this too. @Leo Gura Im not looking for an argument. Only to plant seeds in the minds open enough to consider. The authenticity of my writing will either come across or it wont.

Ive had one on one conversations with Shinzen where he described his 5-MeO experiences. He explained that it was just a really really really deep meditation state, and that while he was impressed, it wasn’t a substitute for practice. This was a very recent conversation, and a very recent set of experiences for Shinzen. Last time I smoked NN-DMT, first time doing a serious psychedelic in months, I was shocked at how little the context of my experience shifted. Ie even though perceptive field did a 180 degree turn out of reality, consciousness was still just as much consciousness before and after ingestion. I went in with a awareness of God while sober, and nothing about that awareness changed while high. Even though egoic self referential thought was terrified, memory structures completely collapsing, surrendering, in awe, the background context out of which the experience arose and passed was completely unchanged. The most powerful part was I was still conscious of that unchanged quality. These are not bullshit ideas. Im actually out there doing the work to verify this. The fact that you think this possibility is bullshit speaks to a blind spot you’ve created out of this work and is incredibly unfortunate given how many people follow and are deeply influenced by your work. I very much used to be in the camp that these spiritual teachers must be full of shit, especially since many don’t have serious experience with psychedelics, and you know what? I bet many of them are full of shit. But people like Ralston or Shinzen speaking to the necessity and profundity of manual practice aren’t. Both have experience with psychedelics. You might argue that these teachers just need to experiment more, and ok maybe. Or maybe they’ve realized something so fundamental about the nature of reality, no particular state, experience, perception, alteration of mind, or shift in experience at all could change. What is a more powerful vision for life? Always needing another hit of a psychedelic to truly see God in its totality, or being able to access it at any time? Id say for 99% the latter is more powerful. But the only way that would be possible is to drop any beliefs about what is or isnt possible while sober and get serious about the work. Edit: please understand I say all this with immense gratitude and compassion for you and others on this site series about the work.

But Leeooo..!

Until you’ve committed to a hardcore spiritual practice for 15 years you really have no idea what you’re talking about with this. You’re reifying a very limiting *belief* taken on as an ego position that is not based in direct experience.

So much this. Btw @Enlightenment Eric Helms and the coaching group he works with, 3DMJ, is one of the highest quality sources of information on the internet about building muscle and losing fat and all things bodybuilding without steroids. I'd highly, highly highly recommend even if you're not interested in bodybuilding.

@Adamq8 @Raptorsin7 @Alysssa ?

Additionally to the above comments, when one sufficiently trains the mind to access high states of mindfulness our perceptive experience starts to break apart into spacious flow, which could also be described as vibratory. Quite literally, as one deeply pays attention to experience, experience is perceived as energetic, vibratory, spacious, fluid, paper-thin, pixel like, rapidly transient.

Ok I'm actually impressed. I see him

This. In Buddhism, it's taught that ALL things lack inherent existence, in other-words anything and everything appearing in the world of form are all completely empty of substance. How this is so is some pretty heavy philosophy not for the faint of heart, but a great book to understand the metaphysics of Absolute Emptiness is "Seeing That Frees" by Rob Burbea (he doesn't use the term "Absolute Emptiness" only "Emptiness"). Long story short, you can deconstruct reality literally into nothing analytically through logic and reason as well as experientially through deep meditation. This applies to space, time, self, non-self, other, world, all mind states, all dualities, all forms of intellectualization and understanding, absolutely everything. Even Emptiness. As far as materialism, it should be recognized is that physical reality in your direct experience is built out of a belief and interpretive filter from the mind, and once you recognize physical reality is not any way inherent in the nature of one's direct experiential perceptive field, all that's left is perception. One realizes that physical reality was only a belief super-imposed on top of one's direct experience of perception. And when perception is all that's left, you can start deconstructing perception all the way down into Emptiness, i.e. God. If this materialism deconstruction feels unavailable, start with studying quantum mechanics seriously. Then take seriously the philosophical implications of what these experiments have observed about the nature of reality. Even if there was a physical substance to reality, the nature of that physical substance is WILDLY different than mainstream understanding in both society and science. The default metaphysical view of 'the way things are' we were programmed with through language, up-bringing, and eduction is radically incorrect. Radically incorrect both in terms of what quantum mechanics experiments have found, in terms of deep philosophical analysis of one's direct experience, and in terms of what one observes from deep meditation.

Sounds like it will be amazing, but just curious why wouldn’t you be going for enlightenment while you’re there? That‘s what Buddhism is all about.

Perhaps long term. If we define the aim of meditation as the training of attentional skills, or mindfulness, coffee can help with paying attention. However, if we’re defining the aim of meditation to be with the way things are independent of state, not such a good idea. Ironically this second point can also be defined as a quality of mindfulness. Meditation without supplementation of any kind is certainly helpful in some contexts.

Coffee + Lions Mane + L-Theanine + meditation = psychedelic Have to be careful not to overdue it on caffeine though because it can and has created an over fried CNS in the past off of relatively small amounts. 1 cup of coffee per day is the max I try and stick around. As one becomes more conscious via meditation, the sensitivity of drugs seems to increase.

+1 Freedom feels like a nice pointer though.

??‍♂️Enlightenment happens when I drops. Nope. Self activity remains just as it remained before enlightenment. There is literally no-thing to drop. Cessation of self activity is not enlightenment. Cessation of self activity is just another transient (impermanent) state.

This is where you’re lost. All experience, the ‘isness’ of whatever is appearing, IS absolute truth as what is. The next step is becoming conscious of its true nature, it is experiencing ‘isness’ so directly you experience its empty nature.

What experiences enlightenment? A rhetorical question. Fantasy. There was never a you to end. Nothing disappears, nothing appears, nothing changes. What is true was already true. Something disappearing is more duality, another ego story. Good luck ?