BipolarGrowth

Another key thing to understand about non duality is that any boundaries separating one thing from another are ultimately created by the judgments of the mind. Reality is actually just one “thing” which dualistic interpretations break down into a bunch of more or less randomly divided parts and aspects.

@trenton Keep in mind that all of this desire to not self-deceive is coming from your ego’s desire to improve or “level up” in some way so it can feel better about itself. The only solution to this problem for you or really anyone is to just spend time doing consciousness work that works to remove beliefs and judgments by becoming more present. When you are fully present and have dropped all beliefs and models for understanding the world, you come to a state that is sort of inoculated against self-deception. If you are existing free from concepts entirely, you cannot be deceived. As long as you live in a world of thought judgments based in the past or future, there will always be the possibility of self-deception. Leo’s last YouTube video should help with this.

You talk about relativism being a problem, but you can also use it to your advantage with this problem. First, realize that everyone participates in self-deception to some degree. You seem to be looking at lying or lying to yourself as some kind of objective sin. That’s not very relativist my friend. What makes lying bad? What makes less self-deception good? How does the person who is aware of the issue of self-deception become free from it? They probably don’t to be honest. I’d say anyone thinking they are free from self-deception have deceived themselves to even be able to reach that conclusion. At the end of the day, what’s the point in beating yourself up for not following some list of virtues? No one’s perfect. Just live your life man. You’re doing your best with what you’ve been given to work with, just like everyone else. I could go on.

Channeling to me requires a lot of trust in what is coming out of your mouth. Once words start coming, you just have to keep saying whatever comes without allowing your ego mind to judge what is being said. If you allow your ego mind to judge, it will slow or stop your channeling. I’ve only really done this once, but I think it’s important to remember you can “channel” information that sounds very much like your normal opinions. In a sense, everything you say is a form of channeling. You are always collectively channeling from the parts of other people’s minds you are acquainted with, as well as from your own mind simultaneously.

Ayahuasca helped me to develop “magic” abilities.

I think Leo’s biggest flaw is that he has not taken advantage of using his fans to expand his business and his impact on humanity. Actualized.org could rise to be something truly next level if Leo starting working with people instead of doing so much on his own. Especially now that he is experiencing a lot of health problems, if he wants to reach his potential, he can only do this by leveraging the talents of his followers. He could easily hire 10 people who have had deep awakenings and great understanding of reality out of the million people who follow him on YouTube. These people could create content that would be supplementary to Leo’s videos. He also could hire a video editor to make his videos more interesting. Talking head videos just don’t draw enough attention. I could go on, but I’ve posted about this multiple times. My assessment is Leo just doesn’t care enough to get this done.

This is about as vague as you could get. If you want someone to change, which likely won’t happen anyway, at least be clear about what you think the problem is. Lol.

I would say doing expensive retreats is unnecessary. I went to an ayahuasca retreat for $375 in Kentucky that is conducted by a quite developed spiritual practitioner. I’d say doing 8 of these ayahuasca retreats for the same cost would affect you more than 1 5meo retreat at the same cost. Ultimately though, the only benefit of doing the retreat for me vs. tripping at home alone is that I got a sense of fellowship that I’d never had in my life before that retreat. Doing a powerful spiritual experience with a relatively like-minded group of individuals can be amazing, but you really don’t need to do retreats super often. I’d personally avoid a retreat that expensive while your savings are that low. If I were you, I’d take my advice to go to this ayahuasca retreat for $375, buy your own cheap apartment that’s affordable enough to avoid getting a roommate if possible, and then spend a few hundred on obtaining psychs for your own personal use at home. If you want that to be 5meo that’s fine. It’s certainly a good choice, but don’t underestimate the power of other psychedelics like LSD or shrooms at high doses. I haven’t had the opportunity to find 5meo personally, and it’s one of my goals as well, but I think a retreat that expensive just isn’t giving you fair value relative to the high cost. You could go much further doing a series of personal 5meo trips. I don’t think the substance is where you get the value in a retreat though. Using a substance is necessary, but I don’t think the 5meo retreat experience is worth 8x the ayahuasca retreat experience when you can get experience with a psychedelic retreat for $375 and do lots of 5meo on your own. You can knock out all your desired birds with this $3,000 stone. Don’t throw it at one target. Here’s a link to the retreat I went to. The facilitator Demian will definitely give you some good spiritual info and support. https://www.peacefulmountainway.org/

@PopoyeSailor https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-near-death-experiences-reveal-about-the-brain/ This covers the materialist view/partial explanation of NDEs. You’re thinking on the right track for providing something we can work with to potentially disprove the idea of the brain generating consciousness. So far, no one else in this thread has brought up anything but theory about consciousness which I’m well aware of and have experienced what they describe firsthand. None of that solves anything. This line of inquiry could. Have you seen any verified accounts of any of these events happening when brain activity is completely gone? If consciousness is generated by the brain, this does not mean that modern-day materialists are at all correct about the full capabilities of the human system and brain. I have personal experiences of telepathy, the teleportation of small objects, potential alteration of space and time, and quite a few other things 99%+ of materialists or scientists would claim are completely impossible. Even many spiritual people doubt the legitimacy of such experiences. With the reincarnation example, if we’re trying to explain this within the brain generating consciousness paradigm, all we need is a link existing between brains. This could certainly be possible. How exactly? Idk. We already know that time and space do not exist from the perspective of light. We also know quantum particles can interact with each other instantly across vast distances. It’s within the realm of possibility that brains can access reality in a similar way. Of course this is all speculation. I never claimed to be able to explain how the brain does any of this. I don’t think any single human being or even group of human beings knows exactly how the brain works when firing on all cylinders.

If solipsism isn’t the case for consciousness, then we certainly live in universes of consciousness all on our own. Each conscious entity does not exist in one universe, but instead every conscious entity is its own universe of experience entirely. The consciousness of an individual bull frog is the complete sovereign god of its own conscious field, and anything or anyone who enters that field is merely a guest whether they be Jehovah, Krishna, Jesus Christ, the Buddha, or the ants it will be eating for its next meal. All of these beings are essentially on the same level in the domain of this bull frog’s conscious field. They are all merely servants to his overarching and infinitely potent presence. Consequently, you are also the god of your own conscious field. It matters not the degree of perceived power or elegance of another being which enters that field; your consciousness is always the king of that domain. This will forever be the case.

When I was saying changes in consciousness there, I was referring to changes in states of consciousness. I think you knew exactly what I was referring to though but disregarded it to try to prove your point. A better way to rephrase the question, if you’re going to be picky, is as follows "How can we be sure that all of existence is not generated by this small part of existence typically called the brain?"

Notice that I never said the brain was matter or was not consciousness. The fact stands that not all parts of consciousness/existence/everything effect change in consciousness/existence/everything equally. For this discussion, it does not matter what constitutes the brain (such as matter vs. consciousness). Changing the brain can literally cause infinitely different experiences of consciousness/existence/everything. Consciousness is the substance of everything. Okay? I in no way disagree with this, however, you have to admit that you can feed 10 tabs of LSD to your dog, and according to direct experience, there is little change compared to putting those same 10 tabs under your human tongue. This directly verifiable difference occurs more when we play around with the brain in “our” individual human meat suit than in any other thing. This leads us to have to seriously consider the role that the brain, specifically the brain of the individual human being witnessed more in this experience of reality than anything else, has in affecting everything else. It certainly seems that this one thing is at the top of the hierarchy if we were to examine the transformative capabilities of everything experienced in this existence that is all consciousness.

@LastThursday What that sentence is saying is that if the other beings we see experience consciousness as well, they do so in their own individual universes of consciousness (otherwise referred to as perceptual bubbles more often here). I haven’t heard even a single person ever claim that they occupied another being’s perceptual bubble.

@Someone here I’ve watched all of these before lol. They could be worth visiting again, but I doubt I’ll find anything I’m not already aware of right now to some degree.

@Someone here okay, but if consciousness isn’t capable of generating consciousness then you are implicitly suggesting that something outside of consciousness is generating consciousness OR that nothing generates consciousness. Something outside of consciousness generating it can never be verified and is imo more far fetched than believing the bit of consciousness (the brain) most heavily correlated with changes in consciousness is responsible for its generation. The idea that nothing generates consciousness seems more plausible as it would just BE without cause.

If you’ve ever read The Power of Now, you’d know the answer is yes. Also consider the millennia old practice of jnana yoga. Do you really think they’d be doing this for so long if it didn’t have the potential to work?

I know nothing. I speculate everything. Just like everyone else.

@Jonty I watched all the videos posted by people in that thread about Rupert Spira. I didn’t find any them helpful as I’m well-versed in the nondual perspective and have had quite a few of these type experiences before. Ultimately he said nothing I wasn’t already aware of. The reality is that as long as there is any separateness perceived in consciousness it is real in its effect. Just because one can have direct experience of oneness does not somehow make the direct experience of limited and individual consciousness no longer existent.

Thanks for sharing. I’ve experienced some similar stuff and can attest it’s quite real.

“I have nothing but scorn for all weird ideas other than my own, and the reason I tolerate my own weird ideas is basically because of what I’ve gone through. I would never believe it if I hadn’t seen it.” -Terence McKenna The primary thing that caused this chain of events to occur for me was going on an ayahuasca retreat and taking two moderate doses two nights in a row with integration following each morning after the consumption of the ayahuasca. I naturally felt nauseated both nights, which I had been struggling with for months both during my everyday life and on a few psilocybin trips, to the extent in which I decided to just go to sleep instead of experience the nausea and seemingly weak effects of the ayahuasca “trips” which were incredibly underwhelming compared to my previous psychedelic experiences. This is where I believe the magic happened. We’ve all heard sayings like the conscious mind is the tip of the iceberg (let’s say 10%) and the subconscious mind is the majority of the iceberg submerged under water (let’s say 90%). My explanation for the life-changing effects that followed in the next few months is that, when we are conscious during a psychedelic trip, we are ultimately trying to reprogram our consciousness and mind through the 10% accessible during conscious states. When we are asleep during a psychedelic trip, we are accessing that 90% of the mind which is more powerful and can more easily and readily invoke lasting change. All of the experiences detailed here occurred days, weeks, and months after the ayahuasca was out of my system chemically. Having been abducted by extraterrestrials at 8 years old, the ayahuasca led me to explore this experience again. I had repressed memories of this event and even gave a valiant effort to try to explain that it wasn’t real, but Mother Aya, what many ayahuasca users call the spirit that is believed to dwell within the brew, was having none of this. A few days after the retreat, I had the intuition suddenly while driving alone at night that I needed to contact the very entities that had abducted me in my childhood. Keep in mind that these entities, typically called The Grays or Gray Aliens, had been my greatest fear for my entire life following the abduction. It was very challenging to reach out to the source of my absolute greatest fear. This fear was potent enough to create auditory and visual hallucinations if I ever attempted to sit in a dark room by myself. Deciding to put my fear to the wayside and contact these beings, I naturally went to the default place one might search for such information - Google. A quick Google search led me to an hour-long YouTube video which not only described how to contact The Grays but also their intentions for being involved with human beings on planet Earth. The information about their true intentions greatly reduced my fear. When the creator of the video mentioned that people with strong psychic abilities will often sense a presence typically at the edge of their visual field, I knew that this was real. I had been experiencing this ever since the childhood abduction. She said that all you need to do to initiate telepathic communication with The Grays is give mental consent and express your desire for communication. Within three seconds of doing this, it started. I felt a cool tingly sensation trickle all over my skull. I drove home for about 10 minutes, and as soon as I got home, I laid down in bed. As soon as I was in a safe location where I was no longer driving or doing any other activity that might be unsafe while experiencing the full effects of telepathic communication, the experience intensified drastically. It’s important to mention that intense telepathic experiences continued to occur for a few months after this initial experience. This telepathic communication was as strong of an experience as taking 10 tabs of LSD or 5.87 grams of dried psilocybin mushrooms for me while also having a unique neurochemistry which often amplifies the effects of psychedelics and other psychoactive substances, but it occurred 100% naturally without the use of any substances. It also later generated supernatural abilities and experiences for me such as clairvoyance, clairsentience, claircognizance, accidental interruption of the functioning of technological/electrical devices, accidental teleportation of small objects over hundreds of miles on two occasions, drastic changes in my perception of time (even getting stuck in a “time loop” which had me drive for three hours straight while failing to move at all from my initial location), and further telepathic contact with other entities such as Lucifer, Archangel Michael, deceased human beings, and what you might colloquially call ghosts. A few weeks after my first telepathic communication, my girlfriend was laying in bed with me one day while I was 100% unconscious/fully asleep, and I sat up and said “5424, we are here for you as well.” Keep in mind I have absolutely no recollection of ever saying this to her. After I said it, she went into a psychedelic state for hours also while taking no substances, according to her. I still get the same sensation of telepathic communication somewhat regularly although to a much less potent extent. It’s possible that my specific neurochemistry and experience with extraterrestrials plays a crucial role in the awakening of supernatural abilities within me, but I think the “ayahuasca nap” technique might prove successful for others wishing to develop supernatural abilities. Ultimately this technique will likely serve those already predisposed to supernatural abilities more than the general populace. Before ayahuasca, I had a few instances of supernatural abilities such as turning on an electrical alarm clock from across the room while a surge of what I can only describe as spiritual, possibly kundalini, energy surged through me and the interruption of GPS navigation on my phone the morning after taking 10 tabs of LSD. Ayahuasca seemed to turn the power and frequency of occurrence of such events up 10 fold. These experiences, especially the accidental teleportation of small objects over hundreds of miles and a drastically altered sense of time that made minutes feel like hours as well as many other rather unbelievable events, have shown me that literally anything is possible in this reality. Physical “laws” of the universe now seem to be more like regulatory suggestions rather than fixed rules that can never be altered or bent.

@RedLine because nothing else that could be considered even remotely mainstream discusses these topics. Is everything in the show the highest absolute insights possible? No, but it comes quite a far way compared to the rest of pop culture. It’s effective in introducing topics that the average person may never find any other time in their life. Episode three covers topics that could potentially be considered more advanced than practically anything nondual teachers promote by introducing nondual “total” enlightenment as a baby step in a much deeper process of Self Realization/Actualization. Episode five is actually quite good as well. The rest of the episodes are meh.

@Lyubov I’ve experienced the complete dissolution of anything that could be considered human, Earthly, or the ego. I entered a seemingly timeless state where nothing existed other than practically blank consciousness. I’m not an initiate in this. Unless your human nervous system was evaporated at ground zero when the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima or were subjected to a similarly destructive event, you have not been through complete, total physical death and have no reliable credentials to claim knowledge on such a thing. One’s speculation that consciousness can’t die or transcends complete, total physical death could be 100% correct, but until that has been directly experienced, it cannot be reliably verified. Speculation is fine as long as you don’t conflate it with Absolute Truth or unquestionable insight.

@Lyubov says the guy who has never died. Even all these people claiming to “have experienced physical death” on psychedelics or through meditation never actually had their physical body die 100%. Near death experiences do not count either because in every case the individual’s brain was able to return to at least enough functioning to articulate their experience. That is not complete physical death. When Sadhguru’s body decays into a pulp and he returns, I’ll take him seriously as a solid source of information on death. Until then, he’s speculating.

@Someone here I concur. Even direct experience leads to vastly different conclusions among people even if they experience essentially the same phenomenon or event. To be honest, no one on planet Earth ever has experienced the complete disintegration or destruction of the brain and then came back to tell a near death experience other than Jesus (although his brain was not destroyed he allegedly returned in incorporeal form) who existed 2,000 years ago and could be a complete lie. All of us on this forum and all people on the typical nondual spiritual path could be wrong about consciousness being prior to the brain. It’s just a belief that seems plausible and more developed than materialism which makes us all feel a little special inside for thinking we’ve outwitted 99% of the world whether we want to admit to that or not. As soon as the brain is actually destroyed, our consciousness or ability to experience might forever be gone. Consciousness and the brain are a chicken-and-the-egg problem whether spiritual people want to admit it or not. We’ve never been able to verify one separate from the other.

Edit: I should’ve made it clear in the initial post that I’m talking about solipsism from the point of consciousness being the self in the definition of “self alone/alone self” rather than the ego being the self instead of waiting until later posts to clarify this. This ultimately caused a lot of confusion in the responses. It was entirely my fault as I was using an altered definition of the word without clarifying, which I often get frustrated when others do this. About a month ago, I had some very solipsistic insights. This made me question every spiritual belief or even everyday non-spiritual belief I’ve had previous to that, and I’m still in a seemingly unshakable state of skepticism. Before these solipsistic insights and newly found skepticism for spirituality, I used to believe in a universe existing outside of what I directly experience in the moment. I used to believe all living beings had consciousness under the framework of Brahman. I even started to believe that all points in the universe could be conscious. Here’s an example of one thing Leo said that seems to support solipsism: Forum user - “I have determined mahasamadhi is impossible because causing emotional harm to your family members through suicide under the premise that something good will happen to you. It is selfish.” Leo responding - “Lol That's just an excuse you imagined so that you remain inside the dream. Realize deeper that your family and their suffering is just a dream you are hallucinating to keep yourself away from Infinite Love. What that is, is just fear of Infinite Love and formlessness. Once you are dead, your family will no longer exist.” The last sentence suggests that the world no longer exists when you die. This seems to be a very solipsistic view. Leo also regularly has talked about the universe as being some meta-being compared to the individual. This seems to go against solipsism, but all of Leo’s mentions of this that I’ve seen have come before that forum response and his latest video. Leo’s last Youtube video is seemingly even more solipsistic than the response above. He talks about there being no other perceptual bubbles than your own. Was this only said in order to guide people toward recognizing themselves as God and ultimately false information given for that purpose, or was it one of Leo’s insights?