Consilience

Your first 1000 hours of meditation, very little will probably happen. Don't stop though. The practice is working at extremely subtle layers of mind that are normally inaccessible for surface level awareness. Just because you don't feel anything, this doesn't mean nothing is happening. The changes happen gradually, with intermitted bursts or breakthroughs a long the way. Using psychedelics while also committing to a rigorous meditation practice also helps speed things along, as the psychedelics can help you gain insight into your practice, the nature of experience, the nature of sobriety vs. altered states, etc. For example, if your goal was to squat 500lbs, don't expect 1 month in the gym to be very meaningful. Don't even expect 1 month of perfectly optimized, intense training to even matter. If you're wanting to use meditation as a practice towards transforming the mind and/or awakening, the first phase is just retraining the mind out of it's lifetime of conditioning. Once you can sit down for an hour without fighting with experience, then the real work begins.

“I don’t like protein, I have steroids for that.”

Who says? The problem is all of this spiritual stuff is intellectual for you, it’s not actually grounded and embodied in your experience. Meditation is the practice of integrating all of this theorizing and arm chair non-dual philosophy into real, lived experience. The world is only an illusion insofar as it’s not an illusion. Your reality is what it is. If you want a solution, stop the mental masturbation. Or hey laugh! The devil will make any and all excuses not to turn within and face itself.

Meditate for 4 hours straight without moving and then let’s talk about child’s play

Why can't joy arise spontaneously? Why can't there be joy with playing a game and pretending? Everything is fundamentally distinct. There is an underlying sameness yes, but there is also an underlying uniqueness to everything. No two things or moments are identical to one another. Each moment, hell each momentary flux of the existence of a single object, is the same moment to moment. There is no such thing as a moment repeating. Once something is gone, it's gone. This impermanence imbues all of life with an inherent beauty, a divine reverence one can only awake to when the value of something is not derived out of its meaning, but its existence and the deep honoring of its transitory nature. This is all bullshit. Your ego is coopting something it's heard from Leo and pretending it's actually awakened to this truth. If you understood what it meant to be truly, existentially alone, you would also realize it is literally impossible for you to be alone. Let go of this identification my friend. Less spiritual theory and more meditation, more grounding into the actuality of your direct experience.

Lmfao wut.

Learn to be able to sit with yourself alone, without stimulation (or attention) and be happy. Meditation. Hours upon hours upon hours of meditation. Slowly you will learn that the deepest levels of fulfillment are found within, not from the attention of others. If you have a mental health condition, meditation alone won't be enough. So if you have a mental health condition, seek therapy and/or another type of mental health professional.

The technique instructions I prefer to follow are Shinzen's: 1. Sit down. 2. When you notice an intention to control your attention, drop that intention. 3. If you can't drop that intention to control your attention, it wasn't an intention - i.e. don't worry about it. What you'll come to notice after many many many hours of meditation practice is that being lost in thought has super subtle layers of intentionality baked into it. At first, yeah it feels like being lost in thought is something we should allow because we're doing nothing. But actually at unconscious levels of mind, being lost in thought in an intention the mind is choosing to carry out. Please note, YOU are not choosing this anymore than you choose any of your intentions to spontaneously arise. The mind is choosing. Yet this can create an issue, you might not think "oh I shouldn't be lost in thought if being lost in thought is an intention to control attention!" However, having the intention to not be lost in thought is also an intention to control your attention. The tricky of this practice is to go on full auto-pilot. The trick is to let the mind start to automatically notice intentions on its own and drop those on its own. Thoughts appearing in and of themselves are not an issue; you will find that many thoughts appear during Do Nothing practice. But just because thoughts appear, this does not mean thoughts have to have the stickiness of dragging into thought loops we're normally accustomed to during meditation. When we get pulled into thoughts, it's because a certain percentage of our mind (a higher percentage than the rest of the mind) wants to be thinking about whatever we're thinking about. When we notice that intentionality of the mind that wants to be lost in thinking, drop that and return to doing nothing. This doesn't mean thoughts or any aspect of our perceptive experience changes. It means the context of our holding of perceptive experience changes, but this changing of context is an automatic happening, reality cultivating mindfulness on its own. Overall, it takes practice to determine what is and is not an intention and whether you're actually intending to be lost in thought, or whether the lost in thought is a genuine act of automatic happening. It's actually both lol. The key is just sit down and experiment. You'll start to find a groove. In many ways, it feels like the Do Nothing technique is where all meditation practice ultimately leads. The dropping of the "meditator" and a surrender into the flow of reality moment by moment. It seems that regardless of what technique one is choosing, it is just a variation of the Do Nothing technique, at the highest level. So why not just cut the bullshit and sit down, do nothing? Well there are good reasons for that too but that's beyond the scope of this post.

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@Leo Gura your video was extremely well put together. Thank you for such an honest, nuanced, and deep discussion on this topic.

Yep I was thinking it was Brendan and Peter as well. When I was doing their workshops, one of the participants literally went crazy. They had a mental breakdown, become totally unhinged from consensus reality and had to end up leaving the workshop prematurely. Ralston ended up telling the group that this wasn't the first time something like this has happened, but that in every case he's witnessed the person always had some sort of predisposition to mental health issues. And to Brendan's credit, he handled the situation very well and managed to get the workshop back on track, and get the group refocused.

One of my fundamental, perceived, disagreements is your dismissal of manual practices like meditation. Not that you dismiss them per-say, but that you significantly down play their effectiveness due to a personal lack of success and label the people who have serious success with them as “spiritually gifted.” Yet I do not believe that should warrant me leaving the forum or to stop watching your videos just because I perceive meditation differently than you. In my view, the healthiest reaction would be for you to be open to the possibility that meditation, for example, is much more widely effective than the “spiritual genetics” argument claims and for me to be open to the possibility that most people will never have any hope of grounding high levels of God realization while sober. Id appreciate the opportunity to share my views on this in the future though without being labeled as a contrarian and asked to leave. Ive been working on a series of posts which may fall into the categorization of contradicting your teachings. Not in the ultimate nature of truth, but in the accessibility of truth regarding states of consciousness. Where does the line get drawn with too much contradiction? Having a community providing some level of criticism is healthy not only for you personally, but for the overall health of Actualized.org

What happened here speaks to the depth of these teachings. I believe this is why someone like Peter Ralston considers himself a "facilitator" (specifically not a teacher) and is incredibly cheeky, and at times, totally ambiguous with his communications about the deepest truths. This is why someone like Shinzen Young is so strict about teaching about mindfulness and not the philosophical implications of what the practice reveals. I believe this is why Gurus, Zen masters, etc., have a reputation of intentionally holding back how much they're willing to share with their students. If the student is not ready the results of repeatedly hearing these types of teachings can be disastrous. Yet on the other hand, even if someone where not psychologically ready to hear, "life is a dream, you are God, you were never born, you'll never die, your entire self and life is imagination, etc." I do not think the results would be suicide or self harm. At worst, someone may be plunged into an existential depression and at best, it could be the shell shock they needed to hear to begin their spiritual journey. For those with genuine mental illness, it doesn't really matter what the trigger is. It could be radical non-dual teachings, or it could be utterly self-derived delusional thinking. I do think there is inherent risk with the way Actualized.org has so successfully marketed itself across the internet, and the unintentional consequences that could result from these utterly radical ideas becoming so mainstream. However, I think there is a deeper risk with these teachings not becoming mainstream. Humanity is at an inflection point with our level of technological power; we are so severely lacking in a mature, compassionate, wise level of self-understanding. While these teachings may be utterly radical, and anti-thetical to the modern world's way of thinking, and therefore poses a certain level of risk, they are honest and authentic to one's direct experience of who and what they are. This type of radical self honesty is what the world is going to need if we are going to effectively face the growing number of existential threats on the horizon (increases in extreme weather events, rising sea levels, pollution of the oceans, world wide mass extinction, destruction of the rain forests, artificial intelligence, job loss as a result of artificial intelligence, gene editing, 3d printing, surveillance capitalism, virtual reality...) In essence, it seems that what Actualized.org has done with advanced spiritual teachings may not be ideal for the individual in every case, but given the need of these models and ideas for the collective development of the world, it seems the collective impact of Leo's work outweigh's the inherent risk for any given individual. That's my view. As is explicitly specified in the forum guidelines, this work is not for those with mental illness. Sometimes mental illness does not present itself as depression, but can at times present itself as delusional thoughts and feelings of connection and bliss. There are many flavors and forms of mental illness. It would be unreasonable to expect that moderators or Leo to have the capacity to monitor for this type of stuff. We are a community that exchanges ideas and communications, not a professional mental health service. Of course if the signs present themselves it is paramount that we take the necessary steps to help the individual. I think this applies for all of us, not simply mods. But again, mental health services is not the function, nor was ever the intention, of this forum. It was truly a tragedy with what happened with SoonHie. It's affected me more deeply than I thought it would. I have no words for his family and loved ones other than I'm sorry for what has happened, and I'm sorry you have to continue without him. There are no words that can fill that void. May his soul rest easy and may you all feel and heal deeply. With love.

@Ora I've never used 5-MeO. Still setting my foundation with weaker psychedelics. But from what I've heard across pretty much everyone is 5-MeO shoots people straight into God through psychological death. I don't think much mind activity would be available at higher 5-MeO doses. I've talked one on one with an advanced meditation teacher (50+ years, serious monastic training) who's tried 5-MeO and he said yeah it was pretty much just like a really deep meditation state and was "very impressed." He said it was like having a near death experience on demand. LSD and mushrooms seem more appropriate for gaining insights into the relative domains of life. 5-MeO is just sling shotting you into the absolute. Although actually one of my most profound LSD trips WAS such a sling shot... I literally lost the ability to think, or conceptualize in any way shape or form haha. So in regards to: That seems to be my impression as well. I'd be interested to hear other's experiences who have done a lot of work with 5MeO.

Your direct experience would tell you that taking on the belief that the Earth is flat is a belief you've created out of a perceptive experience and therefore, like all beliefs, is false and true at some level. Yet you must use your direct experience to come to this discernment. The problem with people believing in their own bullshit is that they've actually not dug deeply enough into their direct experience. I.e. the problem isn't direct experience, it's a misunderstanding of the nature of direct experience.

Direct experience is literally all you have. It is literally the ONLY reliable quality of your reality.

I've uncovered many by going into the trip with the intent to let whatever happens, happen. Often times with mushrooms specifically I've found it's useless trying to have an intention. They show me what they want to show me. And much of what they've shown has involved processing trauma. To access these wounds, I usually listen to emotionally provocative music. Yeah it's a really tricky, subtle topic with discussing the relationship between meditation and psychedelics... Because the integration into one's sober state is happening at an incredibly subtle level. A level well below the normal veil of awareness. Meaning, it's happening in parts of the mind we don't typically have access to while sober, bopping around living life. What I can say though is that as one develops a high level of mindfulness (concentration is an aspect of mindfulness) one starts to have an increasingly fluid, spacious day to day experience. Psychedelics actually induce a high level of mindfulness - they drag the attention into the present moment, sometimes so deeply the ego-mind no longer has any ground to stand on (the ego requires the illusion of time to maintain itself) and this can create openings into God, Unity, No-self, Emptiness, Love, etc. We can begin to recognize that our trips are actually showing us, in a sense, what it would be like to be a highly developed meditator. Now this isn't a perfect comparison by any means. There are certain mental qualities only a sober mind could pull off, and there are certain mental qualities only a tripping mind could pull off... But generally this is the principle. More Mindfulness = More God Consciousness. Please know this is a pitiful overview and the best way you'll discover the relationships between meditation and psychedelics is through personal direct experimentation. I would explore other forms of meditation besides simply breath concentration, although that's great too! The types I work with are: 1. Breath awareness (what you're doing already essentially) 2. Insight meditation (Shinzen Young's See Hear Feel is a good place to start) 3. Loving Kindness 4. Do Nothing 5. Self Inquriy I've found that the synergy between building proficiency with different meditation techniques to be very powerful at integrating psychedelics. Don't just stick with one, train, explore, play with multiple techniques and trust your intuition to guide you with what is best or most appropriate. Just by having a solid daily meditation practice you are already passively integrating your prior psychedelic experiences.

Shocked to hear this happened. Utterly shocked. Wherever his light is going, has gone, and is, May SoonHei be free from suffering. May SoonHei be free from ill will. May SoonHei be filled with loving kindness. May SoonHei be truly happy. And to his family and those who loved him, May SoonHei's loved ones be free from suffering. May SoonHei's loved ones be free from ill will. May SoonHei's loved ones be filled with loving kindness. May SoonHei's loved ones be trully happy. All we can do as a community is embody these teachings in our actions, in the ways we show up for ourselves, for our loved ones, for each other, and for the world. All we can do is hold space for this tragedy and understand that it is exactly as it is and could only be exactly as it is. SoonHei's decision was his own. And as fucked up as it was from one point of view, there is still the possibility for light from those who have been hurt most deeply. May that light shine.

If the whole of your spiritual work is using psychedelics, then yes they are temporary states and nothing more. However, if you have a grounded, rigorous spiritual practice such as contemplation/meditation 1+ hours per day, these experiences slowly start to soak in at extremely subtle levels of your mind and even body. Sometimes not so subtle. For example, I've done enormous amounts of healing work using psilocybin mushrooms. If I had the position that all of those mushroom trips were just useless temporary states, I would be missing the fact that those experiences helped open my mind up to many, MANY, hidden layers of trauma, attachment, and other unconscious aspects of my mind and further, helped facilitate a space wherein I was able to integrate and heal from these different unconscious wounds. So while it's true those states are long gone, their effects are actually what is generating my present moment experience. The healing work is undeniable. More generally speaking, repeatedly accessing these higher states on psychedelics can be thought of as planting seeds. For sure the state will come and go, but as we meditate, we can start to become sensitive to the fact that these experiences do leave energetic traces deep within our being. These traces, or "seeds", can then later be accessed in their own way through the process of manual practice. We can think of manual practices as providing the nutrients, the sunlight, and the water for the blossoming of these powerful experiences into our every day, lived experience. This is not to say that we will be tripping balls 24/7 in our grounded, sober state of consciousness. Yet we will begin to see how these 'higher frequency' feelings of bliss, love, peace, joy, gratitude, kindness, expansiveness are increasingly available while sober. Merely by accessing them at deep levels allows us to more easily access them while sober, yet this takes genuine work (i.e. meditation practice) to access. On the other hand, we will also begin to find the underlying unity between profound mystical states, and the mundane sober state such that we no longer need to be tripping balls to feel a deep oneness, a deep unity with all things. We realize this moment is none other than a complete, perfect expression in and of itself, needing nothing else. That perfection we find with all things while blasted off on a trip begins to ground itself across any and all states through the systematic training provided by manual practices like meditation. The trap of never using psychedelics is that we may very easily start to form blind spots within our own minds, with our spiritual practices, self-deception can run more rampant and we may begin to bullshit ourselves with how "spiritually developed" we think we are. The trap of misusing psychedelics is that we get caught on a hamster wheel of always feeling like we need to introduce an exogenic substance to the body in order to deeply understand and experience the unity of all things, accessing higher frequency states/God. The most holistic approach would be to keep using these substances with deep reverence, appreciation, curiosity, and humility while also grounding their use through manual practices like meditation. Eventually one comes to see the distinction between tripping and not tripping is imaginary, and therefore all one needs to do is see clearly into experience to see the truth across any and all states. As one deepens their meditation practice, the psychedelic experience begins to deepen as well. As one deepens in their psychedelic experiences, one's meditation practice will deepen as well. They are absurdly synergistic when both are practiced with diligence and intelligence.

I would argue Shinzen Young does have a pretty powerful degree of God Realization. He routinely talks about Emptiness and Love and God being one in the same. You have to read between the lines with his talks, but the understanding is there. Furthermore, I would argue his mind is much more integrated and in resonance with God Realization than Leo's because of all of his meditative work. Shinzen can sit and easily do a 4 hour SDS sit because of how deeply he understands reality, the nature of experience which is none other than God. There is much, MUCH, more to God than peak experiences. There is something to be learned through deep, silent, still, long, manual practice.

This is true. I guess I'm granting more authority to Leo when it comes to the overall "collective ego" of Actualized.org. From what I've heard in his videos and read online, he seems a bit too dismissive of manual practices like meditation or self inquiry. I've also seen a lot of members quickly recommend psychedelics and dismiss manual practice. Perhaps I'm incorrect though.

The I thought is made up at very subtle levels too. So even when one uncovers one layer of the I thought, there are still unconscious emotional perception knots still actively identifying and holding on. Keep inspecting, keep dissecting, keep feeling, keep untangling, keep releasing

@Being Frank Yang Thank you for sharing all of this to the forum. It's really nice hearing from someone who takes meditation seriously. It seems to be the biggest blind spot on Actualized.org. The dismissal of manual practice in favor of psychedelic exploration for awakening. Yet there is so so so much territory to cover using meditation. People don't realize just how profound it all becomes once one enters into the momentary awareness of the simultaneous arising and passing of sensate experience, moment by moment. When one can literally feel the expansion and contraction of reality, one's natural state begins become psychedelic, and actually even beyond psychedelic because the underlying nature of all witnessed experience begins to be penetrated. Hope you stick around these parts of the internet brah.

It seems like a lot of people on here conceptualize the whole Solipsism thing as the little self being alone in the Universe. Nope. Absolute Solipsism is totally one, whole, complete, perfect, and interconnected with all. It is the most beautiful possibility. You're so radically alone, you are literally one with all. The little ego thinking it's alone in the Universe would be horrifying to the little ego. But there is no little ego to be alone. There is only wholeness.

@Gneh Onebar Here ya go: https://dharmaseed.org/retreats/4496/?page=1