BipolarGrowth

I went to an Ayahuasca retreat in Kentucky for one weekend (two nights of taking the substance/medicine - three days total). It costed $375. It was an amazing experience, and the guy running the retreat is very knowledgeable and experienced spiritually. You even get a membership card for the church that allows you to legally possess natural psychedelics and marijuana in any state (you can’t transport 20 kilos of course lol). This card/membership has already been used to win legal cases for psychedelic users. Here is the website where you can sign up. https://www.peacefulmountainway.org/ If you think the psilocybin retreat is for you, go for it, but I think this is a great alternative choice which is much more financially feasible and requires less travel. This isn’t the only ayahuasca retreat possibility in the U.S., but I can attest to its quality. One of the guys who was there with me said he went a lot deeper in this experience than when he went to an ayahuasca retreat in South America. He expected an ayahuasca retreat in America to be less powerful and overall less effective, but he was pleasantly surprised. I saw the retreat change multiple people's lives in ways they had no hope for change occurring before they finished the retreat. It’s amazing stuff man.

@Forestluv what is the difference between a realization and an experience in your eyes then? To realize happens within experience by the definitions I’m using which are the accepted definitions. If you’re using non-standard definitions of these words, please define each. I cannot possibly gain value from or understand what you are tying to say if we are using different definitions which is what seems to be happening.

@Forestluv How can one reliably know that every possibility was experienced?

@oMarcos there are many who claim it is a permanent state.

"If you think the Universe is mundane, if you think there are no more frontiers to cross, no more adventures to be had, I'm telling you, you can turn your living room into the bridge of Magellan's ship on a long Saturday evening with five grams of psilocybin in silent darkness." - Terence McKenna 100% right and 100% necessary for more people to implement, especially in today’s crazy political climate. Take some fucking mushrooms. Lose your fear of death. Experience the core truth that all religions and spiritual disciplines are based upon. See shit no human being has the capability of imagining without this enhancement. Experience things no human being has ever experienced that might never be experienced again by another human being. These experiences are tailored to you and are oftentimes purely unique to you. Lose your worldview. Gain a new one. Lose that one. Meet extra-dimensional intelligences that could be more real than any of us or completely generated by your own mind - you’ll never truly know, but it’s cool as fuck any which way you could look at it. Get possessed by a cephalopod goddess for 5 hours transforming your physical body to cephalopod form while speaking in tongues, potentially communicating on an intergalactic scale with beings no human has likely contacted before, like I did. I can’t say this will happen for everyone or happen on mushrooms, but after taking a moderate dose of ayahuasca two nights in a row, my life changed forever. The ayahuasca “trips” were almost nonexistent as I ended up sleeping through them both nights due to the initial nausea I chose to avoid with sleep. In the months that followed, while no longer chemically under the immediate effects of the substance, I started having what certainly appeared to be and felt like telepathic communication with the Gray Aliens, Archangel Michael, Lucifer, the cephalopod goddess mentioned above, deceased human beings I had a strong intellectual or emotional connection to, ghosts, and other entities that escape my memory at this time. I potentially became the first human being to share what sexual experiences are like for humans to an extraterrestrial species through this telepathic connection. Again, I’m not saying everyone will get this result, but I seemed to accidentally teleport small objects over hundreds of miles on two occasions. Clairsentience, clairvoyance, claircognizance, and much more just might await you if you choose to use psychedelics. This isn’t only for the duration of the trip either, at least potentially. I experienced time dilation to the extent of minutes feeling like hours and seconds feeling like minutes. I was potentially saved from a car accident by my “guardian angels” or other metaphysically capable beings looking out for me. I’d like to point out that I’m just scratching the surface of what I’ve experienced. To go into detail of every remarkable thing I’ve experienced due to my decision to take psychedelics in only roughly a dozen moderate- to extreme-dose trips in the past few years, I’d likely need to write multiple books, and there’s literally an infinite amount of things I haven’t yet explored in the psychonautical or psychedelic landscape. It’s quite possible that my life has been more strange, unbelievable, exhilarating, and meaningful than anyone you’ve met due in large part to what psychedelics sparked in me. It’s not for everyone. The faint of heart should stay well away. If experiencing terror possibly exceeding that of physical death even by torture or extreme experiences such as being burned at the stake or gassed in a concentration camp, this might not be for you. If you fear experiencing hell on Earth, this might not be for you. If you are currently attached to your personal beliefs to the point you don’t want to lose them or find yourself believing something radically different, this might not be for you. On the other hand, if you value or seek adventure, the potential for an incredibly rare understanding of existence as a whole, and Truth, you’ll likely find no other method as effective as the psychedelic method. Slaying a dragon on Mount Everest with Jesus as your comrade while wielding Excalibur very well could pale in comparison to what you’ll find in the psychonautic/psychedelic landscape. I could go on. This is most certainly an unpaid advertisement for psychedelic substances. Many of the good ones are physically safer than alcohol with psilocybin mushrooms being likely physically safer than marijuana according to a recent study. If you wish to be the next great explorer, look not to distant galaxies or the edge of the universe as your goal and a starship to get you there. Instead, look to exploring the infinite potentiality of consciousness as your goal and psychedelic substances as the metaphysical transportation method to get you there. I didn’t even mention you recognizing with utmost certainty the likes of which you’ve probably never experienced that you are God. It sounds like the paramount impossible Truth and experience to most, but honestly, I’ve found some of the other experiences psychedelics have given me as even more profound than that. Experiencing Infinite Freedom might be one good example. If you do wish to pick up the gauntlet I’ve laid at your feet and assume your role as the sovereign navigator of your own infinitely powerful creative vessel aimed toward untold realms of splendor, glory, ecstasy, delight, intelligence, and pleasure, I wish you luck. I say Godspeed to you my fellow explorer. Know that these journeys will mature you in ways normal humans will likely forever be incapable of fathoming. With Love, Your fellow traveller on his own ineffable journey

When you’re not directly conscious of something, does it really exist? And how can there ever be reliable verification that something outside of your direct and present consciousness exists? These questions seem quite silly to most people, especially those who haven’t been on a philosophical and spiritual quest for some time, but most people who have knee-jerk reactions to these questions are basing their conclusions off of stories or explanations for consciousness that they haven’t thought through at all for themselves and almost certainly haven’t verified for themselves. I’m interested to see what people think and the arguments that are presented in favor or against the existence of things outside of present consciousness.

@Someone here elaborate please.

@No Self yeah my intent was not to get into some nondual word game where we lose all value of discussion by changing definitions. I’ve likely had the same insight you’re getting at, but that’s not what is being discussed here.

I’ve probably had around 15 intense trips at this point on moderate to high doses of psychedelics. I’ve done 10 tabs of LSD, 5.87g of shrooms, and ayahuasca all at separate times to note my highest dose experiences. I found a psychedelic that’s far more common or easier to obtain for most people than the substances listed above that gave me some of the most intense trips of my life, at least on par with anything else if not stronger. I’d like to note that I believe this substance’s effects have in some way been affected by previous psychedelic use as well as my specific neurochemistry. People have hit the same exact batch as me and had no psychedelic effect multiple times. I’ve even had far less of a psychedelic effect after a couple weeks of building a tolerance to this substance. What’s this common substance that has the potential to produce greater effects, intensity, and insights than psilocybin, LSD, and ayahuasca? It’s concentrated THC, more commonly called dabs. I figured I’d tell you guys about it’s potential in case it works for you. It certainly won’t work for many people, but I believe experienced psychonauts (including meditators) are more likely to experience this effect. It’s been known for a long time that marijuana can produce psychedelic effects in a small portion of the population, but marijuana never did this for me. A high dose of concentrated THC did. It produced my only experience of infinity out of all the trips I’ve done. The main insights I gained from it were intensely solipsistic and pointed to the unreality of existence. After one of the trips, I was in a super conscious and present state where the “enlightenment experience” you might call it was more palpable for me than ever. Anyway, I just thought I’d share this in case it could work for others. It truly has been powerful for me, but it kind of reminds me of the 434 YouTube channel creator Peter Hedron who regularly contacts machine elves on low and moderate doses of psilocybin mushrooms. It seems like I might have a unique reaction to concentrated THC, but there could quite possibly be some of you here who could experience similar results.

@Michal__ have you tried dabs/concentrated THC after having these mystical stages? Weed definitely has been stronger for me when my state of consciousness is already naturally higher, but for me at least, weed has produced nowhere near the same effects for me as concentrated THC. If you’re looking for an intense experience, I’d give concentrated THC a try. It’ll likely work for you if you’ve already noticed differences with weed.

@Javfly33 I think psychedelics are instrumental for me to experience everything you describe other than simplicity, and even then, if you are describing simplicity in understanding or a simplified knowledge of the truth, psychedelics can help get you there from my experience. The journeys themselves just aren’t what most would call simple. How can an atom in a table come to owe the table something? Or conversely, if you can recognize yourself as reality, how can you come to owe yourself something when you are all that is? I can agree with this on many levels, but ultimately what’s important comes down to an individual value judgment imo. If exploration and experiencing the extreme limits of existence is not important to you, then you’re right. This is certainly the case from specific spiritual traditions and schools of thoughts, but I think this is not an absolute truth by any means. It’s an opinion. If a monk on Earth in year 2,500 said the endeavors of the Starship Enterprise (living in the Star Trek universe for a moment) were useless for example, he could reasonably be considered to be both right and wrong from different perspectives. For me, the deepest realization of Truth shows the ultimate futility of Truth. Once you realize worldly pursuits mean nothing, what makes you still believe spiritual pursuits mean anything either? Just curious how you see this.

@emptiness dancing I’m well aware of this arcane knowledge. I just happened to not give a shit about following it during this individual writing. Separate the text into paragraphs for yourself if you struggle to read without them lol. Do you need my help in grasping the esoteric mystery schools of the question mark, since we’re being nit picky? Also, your last period needs to come before your last quotation mark if you are using American English. There’s a big difference between knowing how to use something and choosing to use something. Don’t assume someone doesn’t know something simply because they don’t follow it or use it.

I also wanted to say that I’ve experienced the complete transformation of my physical body into a cephalopod body and spoke in tongues for 5 hours straight on one of my 5 dried gram mushroom trips. He’s right about that, but I think it’s unrelated to the Holy Spirit mostly. I’ve never felt the Holy Spirit during a trip, but ayahuasca made it possible for me to experience the Holy Spirit to levels like never before. This happen after the trips though, not during.

In my opinion, comparing enlightenment to baptism of the Holy Spirit is unnecessary. These are two mainly separate yet loosely related spiritual experiences. I believe I have experienced the Holy Spirit to degrees 99%+ of Christians have not. It certainly brings power in a metaphysical sense from my experience. I don’t think it’s power as in you’ll suddenly have the ability to overthrow a government or physically heal people at will, at least not in most cases. The power I’ve found through my deepest connections to what I call the Holy Spirit is a connection to spiritual, and for me also likely physical extraterrestrial, beings. During the time period I was most attuned with the Holy Spirit, many inexplicable things happened such as objects in my life teleporting or manifesting hundreds of miles away from their last known location to me with no scientific or logical explanation that seems plausible from my judgment. Telepathy, clairsentience, clairvoyance, and possibly claircognizance came to me. I was saved from a car accident at this time in a miraculous way potentially by guardian angels or other spiritual or extraterrestrial beings trying to protect me. I began to come in contact with entities such as Lucifer (at least a Luciferian clairvoyant woman said it was Lucifer) which literally changed my vision from dark to bright in a sort of undulating fashion and even altered the color of a photo I took on my phone. This happened while I was in the same room as her during a tarot reading and also a couple other times. Enlightenment, to me, comes in many forms, but the most notable is God Consciousness and God Realization. This is to say knowing or becoming unquestionably and fully conscious that you are God and you literally created everything you’ve ever experienced and the entire world you’ve ever known. Other enlightenment such as satoris are similar to what Eckhart Tolle might experience as being fully immersed in the present moment without thought or ego. It’s much different than experiences correlated with feeling the Holy Spirit in your life, in my opinion.

I don’t believe in Jesus actually being code for psychedelic mushrooms as some scholars have suggested, but there is some decent evidence to show that mushrooms have an abnormally high prevalence in ancient Christian art. Imo, nearly all major religions are in some way tied to psychedelics. I think it’s potentially likely the first spiritual experiences Homo sapiens ever had were very close to the genesis of our species due to the commonality of psilocybin mushrooms in the regions where Homo sapiens originated. Human spirituality could in theory go back much further than Homo sapiens and actually be older than our species itself due to psilocybin mushrooms being present throughout the whole duration of every human species’ existence in every place humans have existed other than modern Antarctica. Humans like easy food, and mushrooms are a good source once you can distinguish the lethal, safely psychoactive, and food only mushrooms from each other. I’d say it’s almost unquestionable that Homo erectus stumbled upon psilocybin mushrooms and accidentally ate a dose high enough to support an enlightenment experience in the over one million years they existed. Soma and kykeon are good examples of psychoactive substances that were likely psychedelic if you follow the descriptions of their effects. The Aztecs called psilocybin mushrooms teonanácatl - the Flesh of the Gods and are known to have regularly used the psychedelic in spiritual ceremonies. It’s funny that most modern understandings of eastern religions and even Christianity think there is no connection between psychedelics and the history of their religions. Even if those religions did not use psychedelics themselves, they were nearly unquestionably influenced in meaningful ways by other spiritual traditions built upon the use of psilocybin mushrooms as this activity could quite possibly be millions of years old and in every region where humans lived. Compatibility with psychedelics and likely specifically psilocybin mushrooms is built into our brains and our DNA. We have far more receptors to accept psilocin than other great apes. This suggests a possible long-running symbiotic relationship between humans and psilocybin mushrooms. These mushrooms are known to have been used for spiritual purposes for over 2,000 years in North and Central America making their use verifiably older than Christianity and potentially verifiably older than Buddhism with a bit more data. The Aztecs arguably might have a more developed understanding of spirituality than many of the most popular world religions. Their mushroom use gave them many similar insights to the most developed forms of Buddhism and Hinduism which as far as we know had no connection to Central America. This is evidence that spiritual truths are not specific to one religion and that different religions are accessing the same source of insight through different methods. This shows there are many paths to spiritual truth and claimants of one religion or belief system being the supreme truth while all others being false is quite laughable if you truly have not only heavily studied but also experienced spirituality for yourself.

What doses are you doing? It could be possible that doing a higher dose would force you to only have one choice: surrender. This could backfire though. Terror is an important aspect of psychedelic trips imo. It isn’t pleasant in some ways when you experience it of course, but it is providing you with a valuable experience of the potential of consciousness nonetheless. Maybe it’s time to try a different psychedelic too.

On another thread, someone asked, “Are you the Big Bang?” My response further solidified my growing sense that spirituality, philosophy, personal development, and making a sandwich are absurd and preposterous. Absurdity defined by Albert Camus: “If I see a man armed only with a sword attack a group of [people armed with] machine guns, I shall consider his act to be absurd. But it is so solely by virtue of the disproportion between his intention and the reality he will encounter, of the contradiction I notice between his true strength and the aim he has in view. Likewise we shall deem a verdict absurd when we contrast it with the verdict the facts apparently dictated. And, similarly, a demonstration by the absurd is achieved by comparing the consequences of such a reasoning with the logical reality one wants to set up. In all these cases, from the simplest to the most complex, the magnitude of the absurdity will be in direct ratio to the distance between the two terms of my comparison. There are absurd marriages, challenges, rancors, silences, wars, and even peace treaties. For each of them the absurdity springs from a comparison. I am thus justified in saying that the feeling of absurdity does not spring from the mere scrutiny of a fact or an impression, but that it bursts from the comparison between a bare fact and a certain reality, between an action and the world that transcends it.” WARNING: Skip this paragraph if you value comedy whatsoever and desire to maintain sanity. Absurdity defined by me: Here’s a side note and horrible joke I need to say before I can get on with my post that no one will laugh at: Camus said, “If I see a man armed only with a sword attack a group of machine guns, I shall consider his act to be absurd.” I’d say that’s the most absurd thing I’ve heard of Mr. Camus. Why in the hell would a guy in the modern world wield an archaic weapon in an attempt to destroy a pile of modern weapons also made of similar metal as the archaic weapon? Is this some kind of tasteful artsy exhibition of the old ways being superior to the new performed in front of high-brow intellectuals with too much money and time meant to amuse them? Okay. Back to the post. This was my response to the Big Bang question: “I’d argue that no, you aren’t the Big Bang in a certain sense at least. You are no more the Big Bang than you are Christian Heaven with pearly gates and an anthropomorphized caricature of God. Both of these things are 100% given to you by and based upon the speculation and beliefs of others. Do you really think any scientist has direct experience of the Big Bang? Do you really think any Christian has direct experience of the Heaven they believe in? Furthermore, both of these things are completely irrelevant to what you are in the most fundamental or real sense because you have not directly experienced either of the two even if others have. You ARE the Big Bang in the sense that the Big Bang exists within your imagination, thoughts, and beliefs. You are consciousness, of course, as has been explicated around here and the Actualized.org YouTube channel ad nauseam, but if we extend the word consciousness to follow the one hour+ long definition exhibited in Leo’s latest YouTube video about directly experiencing yourself as God, you are everything in your perceptual bubble. My extension of this that Leo does not cover is that beliefs, thoughts, your ego, and anything spiritual teachers or traditions tell you is illusion, Maya, not ultimately real, or false in some way is actually you just as much as any other “aspect“ of consciousness. Your beliefs, thoughts, ego, etc. that everyone around here lately seems to be saying aren’t you are just as much you as anything you’ve ever experienced on the level of your hand in front of your face. Of course, you likely won’t come to truly grasp this if you do not first have that direct experience of your hand as consciousness, God, colors and shapes alone. After you have that experience, it’s necessary, if your goal is progress, to move to the conclusion that “mental” things like thoughts or the ego are merely phenomena all the same as your hand or a red ball on your floor is. The distinction between the grouping of ego, thoughts, and “purely mental” (not physical) imagination and the grouping of “physical” objects, your body, “purely physical” imagination (typically called reality) and other such things is 100% and absolutely arbitrary. It’s god damned infinitely arbitrary lol. On a mini but relevant side note, even the individual’s direct experience of something leads to only speculation and beliefs if the individual makes any attempt to extrapolate that direct experience into words, explanations, or intellectual understanding. Yes, this applies to our resident God-teacher Leo Gura and any other being making such an attempt including me and what I’m doing right now as I’m writing this. Pleasant sounding spiritual realizations such as “the fabric of the universe is love” or plausible seeming statements like “consciousness is the fabric of the universe” are ultimately useless in the final step of realization. This is because using the word love or consciousness immediately divorces you from what your awareness experiences by bringing that experience to the level of abstraction. The level of abstraction is precisely where that experience did not occur. Every single word in any language is an abstraction. As soon as a word is used, you get lost in infinite permutations of definition. To understand how lost you get with any word, I’ll use a simple word as an example that is very directly experienced to every non-colorblind person. Define to me the word red in your own words. You’ll quickly see when trying this that you are no closer to capturing the directly experienced “essence” of red in language. You might say “it’s not blue.” Then you have to define blue. Then you have to define color. Then you have to define perception. You can go on forever using different combinations of English words or even eventually all words from all other languages that have even been made or ever could be made to try to capture what red is, but you’ll never describe the experience adequately with words. This is why a colorblind person or blind person will never understand a color that they can’t experience for themselves. Language doesn’t do anything if people don’t have shared direct experience of the phenomenon in question. Luckily, we can finally come full circle by realizing that words are reality just as much as what is directly experienced by your senses as the intellectual mind is just another avenue for a different sense than the 5 ones typically thought of as perceptual. You also perceive thought, mental images, definitions, etc. Where did we get with all of this explanation? Pretty much nowhere. That’s where your Big Bang is as far as anyone can truly verify, not to mention it’s a past event and only the present moment exists according to Eckhart Tolle who people call enlightened. What a joke. Fin.” So yeah, are we fucked or not?

@Aturban did you make that video? It’s probably the most entertaining video I’ve ever seen put on top of an Alan Watts audio track, and I’ve seen and listened to about all of the common/popular ones out there. If you did make the video, I’d say what you’re doing is a good way to get people to listen to Alan Watts who typically don’t lol. It’s got to be an effective way to create further interest in Alan Watts considering how the average person still isn’t likely to listen to a basically audio-only track of him. At first I just read the text in your post. After you asked me about listening to what was said, I went back and watched the video. To be honest, the 3 ish minutes of Alan Watts talking didn’t add much more to the essence of what was being said compared to the text you quoted from the video that I read initially. I don’t see anything worth adding or removing from my initial response after watching the video. So yes, you were right that I didn’t listen before my post, but I’m unsure of how you correctly guessed that since watching the video didn’t give me anything of substance that I didn’t address in some way with the initial post. Do you have any response to what I said?

I’d argue that no, you aren’t the Big Bang in a certain sense at least. You are no more the Big Bang than you are Christian Heaven with pearly gates and an anthropomorphized caricature of God. Both of these things are 100% given to you by and based upon the speculation and beliefs of others. Do you really think any scientist has direct experience of the Big Bang? Do you really think any Christian has direct experience of the Heaven they believe in? Furthermore, both of these things are completely irrelevant to what you are in the most fundamental or real sense because you have not directly experienced either of the two even if others have. You ARE the Big Bang in the sense that the Big Bang exists within your imagination, thoughts, and beliefs. You are consciousness, of course, as has been explicated around here and the Actualized.org YouTube channel ad nauseam, but if we extend the word consciousness to follow the one hour+ long definition exhibited in Leo’s latest YouTube video about directly experiencing yourself as God, you are everything in your perceptual bubble. My extension of this that Leo does not cover is that beliefs, thoughts, your ego, and anything spiritual teachers or traditions tell you is illusion, Maya, not ultimately real, or false in some way is actually you just as much as any other “aspect“ of consciousness. Your beliefs, thoughts, ego, etc. that everyone around here lately seems to be saying aren’t you are just as much you as anything you’ve ever experienced on the level of your hand in front of your face. Of course, you likely won’t come to truly grasp this if you do not first have that direct experience of your hand as consciousness, God, colors and shapes alone. After you have that experience, it’s necessary, if your goal is progress, to move to the conclusion that “mental” things like thoughts or the ego are merely phenomena all the same as your hand or a red ball on your floor is. The distinction between the grouping of ego, thoughts, and “purely mental” (not physical) imagination and the grouping of the perception of “physical” objects, your body, “purely physical” imagination and other such things is 100% and absolutely arbitrary. It’s god damned infinitely arbitrary lol. On a mini but relevant side note, even the individual’s direct experience of something leads to only speculation and beliefs if the individual makes any attempt to extrapolate that direct experience into words, explanations, or intellectual understanding. Yes, this applies to our resident God-teacher Leo Gura and any other being making such an attempt including me and what I’m doing right now as I’m writing this. Pleasant sounding spiritual realizations such as “the fabric of the universe is love” or plausible seeming statements like “consciousness is the fabric of the universe” are ultimately useless in the final step of realization. This is because using the word love or consciousness immediately divorces you from what your awareness experiences by bringing that experience to the level of abstraction. The level of abstraction is precisely where that experience did not occur. Every single word in any language is an abstraction. As soon as a word is used, you get lost in infinite permutations of definition. To understand how lost you get with any word, I’ll use a simple word as an example that is very directly experienced to every non-colorblind person. Define to me the word red in your own words. You’ll quickly see when trying this that you are no closer to capturing the directly experienced “essence” of red in language. You might say “it’s not blue.” Then you have to define blue. Then you have to define color. Then you have to define perception. You can go on forever using different combinations of English words or even eventually all words from all other languages that have even been made or ever could be made to try to capture what red is, but you’ll never describe the experience adequately with words. Luckily, we can finally come full circle by realizing that words are reality just as much as what is directly experienced by your senses as the intellectual mind is just another avenue for a different sense than the 5 ones typically thought of as perceptual. You also perceive thought, mental images, definitions, etc. Where did we get with all of this explanation? Pretty much nowhere. That’s where your Big Bang is as far as anyone can truly verify not to mention it’s a past event and only the present moment exists according to Eckhart Tolle who people call enlightened. What a joke. Fin.

Here are the studies that were referenced. https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/news/media/releases/single_dose_of_hallucinogen_may_create_lasting_personality_change https://www.beckleyfoundation.org/resource/lsd-induced-entropic-brain-activity-predicts-subsequent-personality-change/ https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/hbm.23234 I’m starting to wonder if it’s worth it to even try to show that psychedelics have spiritual value for people like this.

@Javfly33 my main argument here was not at all that psychedelics cause permanent enlightenment. I agree with you on this. Something being beneficial for spiritual growth is not the same as being a one-stop-shop for instantly gained permanent enlightenment. My argument was first that psychedelics can cause both chakra activation and kundalini energy to rise. For that part, all I can argue with is my direct experience. He won’t believe it if he doesn’t want to. Both of those things can greatly help enlightenment. The next part was that the personality shifts that psychedelics give are helpful on any serious spiritual path. Higher openness and less neuroticism is always going to boost things. Openness helps mainly with fine tuning your theory while lower neuroticism is going to make meditation more effective.

That’s not what you’re pointing to imo. You are using the accepted definition of nothingness which does not align with what he is saying as he is using a completely different definition. “so truth is that everything IS and will always BE.” Dude, go grab a piece of paper and a lighter. Take the THING that IS your piece of paper. Right now, it’s a thing. Right now, it IS. Use your lighter to catch the paper on fire. Soon you’ll have some ashes in front of you. Is that thing that was the piece of paper still IS’ing anymore? No. The piece of paper is completely eradicated from your direct experience. There is a different thing now IS’ing in front of you. The ashes. Is the paper still IS’ing out there in some unverifiable spirit realm designated for college-ruled papers only? Maybe. That’s the only shot the paper has at still BE’ing. You’ll likely never know one way or the other. If everything, literally separate the two words for simplicity in understanding, there’s every and thing. Every = all. Thing = any object, person, place, etc. Every thing will certainly not always BE. The very nature of the reality is for things to constantly be morphing into other things which constantly makes the previous forms no longer existent. Existence IS. Yes, you’re right. There’s no opposite to it? There’s no way to verify this either way for nonexistence literally, by definition, is the state of not IS’ing.

From the perspective of a nondual experience, you’re right, but these insights lose all value once you use the English language to describe them. In the framework of the English language, which we are using, the statement Experience = Nothingness means as much as taco cat = fat bear. By definition in English, neither is true or makes any sense as things that are clearly not the same are being said to be the same. Now I’m seeing more clearly why spirituality does not make any sense yet is the most true thing there is. No wonder Zen Buddhists used koans to create enlightenment in students. “What is Buddha?” and its answer, “Three pounds of flax.” Makes just as much sense as Experience = Nothingness

I think you are spot on except for this bit: “So to me it makes more sense thqt conciousness can assume the form of literal nothingness but it can also assume thr form of Infinite Imagination and infinite Mind.” Edit: Of course Leo beats me to this by 1 fucking minute while I’ve been typing out my response for some time lol. You say nothingness has form here. You say that consciousness (which is something) can be nothingness. Think man. That makes absolutely no sense. A form is something. A shape is something. The shape of consciousness changes constantly, but it does always have a shape nonetheless. If you’re in a box, the shape of consciousness is of a human being in the dark in a box. You also started talking about how consciousness cannot be nothingness as consciousness is something. You’re right. I’ve had the insight that this (existence) is nothing. This insight is essentially a word game and nothing else no matter how real it seemed to me, and it appears some others, at the time of the insight. Of course you can experience consciousness free from any beliefs or language used to describe it, and in this state it doesn’t really matter which label (something vs. nothing) you apply to it. The problem comes when you try to use tools like language or thought to describe that state. The tools simply cannot get the job done adequately. Go watch/practice Leo’s latest YouTube video if you want to understand this. It will get you into the state I’m referring to. Anyone arguing for the verifiable existence of nothingness, an experience of nothingness, or emptiness is clearly not using these words properly. Right now, we are having a discussion using the English language, so we have to be cognizant of that. We can’t use words in ways that are against their denotations and connotations and expect anyone to get value from that. The only time that the statement “this is nothing” is true is when the statement “this is something” is equally as true. This occurs in the state I referred to without beliefs, thoughts, labels, or anything else being used as a backstory or explanation of consciousness. As soon as you apply the backstory that we’re currently using to have this discussion, the only true thing to say is that there is always something and never nothing as far as we will ever be able to verify with our direct experience. When you experience what you interpret to be nothingness, there is always something, and that thing is experience. You cannot verify something without using some degree of experience, so there could be such a thing as nothingness. The problem is that no being in this reality or any reality will be able to verify nothingness. In conclusion, nothingness can only exist in our imagination, and even then, that thing that we are imagining is not nothingness. It’s the imagination of what we think nothingness might be like. In the past I’ve suggested on here that nonexistence or nothingness is actually the only place where truth can be found. This can be realized when you ask yourself the question “Is Truth static or is it always changing?” Jed McKenna argues that truth is that that does not change. This seems self-evident to many people. If this is correct, nonexistence is the perfect, unadulterated Truth for nothing does not change. There is nothing that can be changed when there is only nothing, but this is only ever a version of armchair philosophy rather than something that can be verified with direct experience. If your answer to the question above is that truth is always changing, then go no further. You’re already swimming in Truth. Consciousness is always changing, and it certainly exists as you are consciousness. Therefore, my ultimate conclusion is that the argument for consciousness being Truth wins as it can be armchair philosophized as well as experienced directly whereas true or total nothingness can never be experienced.

When you go to sleep at night, you often find yourself in dreams. In these dreams, most people will still have a human body. In waking reality, there is an unsubstantiated claim or story given by people that consciousness is somehow generated by the brain. The experts aren’t so sure, or at least they don’t have any solid evidence. Look up the “hard problem of consciousness” to understand how this is unsubstantiated. In the dream, you typically do not think along the same lines. If you were to lucid dream, you would certainly not think you were the dream body or somehow generated by the brain in your dream head. I say you, but I need to clarify exactly who you are. You are consciousness. Consciousness is the only constant you can find in all realities. In the dream, you are literally everything perceived in the dream. It’s all generated by your consciousness. We understand fully that everything created in our dreams comes entirely from us and is an extension of us. Surprisingly enough, there’s no solid argument against this being exactly the same case in waking reality. Your brain, body, and mind are all generated by consciousness in the same fashion consciousness generates the entire reality in dreams. Beyond your mind, body, and brain, you as consciousness generate this entire reality. This entire reality IS consciousness and nothing else. It’s the same way in a dream nothing is separate from you as consciousness. You as consciousness are the sole source for everything in the dream. No one thinks everyone in their dreams are conscious, separate entities once they’ve come back to the waking state. It’s the same in this reality. There’s absolutely no way you can actually be shown something outside of your consciousness. There will never ever be proof that other beings are conscious separately or outside of your consciousness. Even if you merged consciousness with another being in the waking state as a way to somehow prove the existence of another consciousness, guess what it would be? It would be fully engulfed in exactly one thing: you as consciousness or otherwise put your consciousness. You are the source of everything that exists in your consciousness, and your consciousness is the entirety of your universe and always will be. Nothing can ever exist outside of your consciousness. Existence relies completely on perception and consciousness to even be relevant. What is the difference between a fairytale land in a book, the black void people typically conceive of as nothingness or nonexistence, and a reality you imagine exists like heaven? They’re all just imagination. The only thing that’s real is what you can experience in this very moment. As soon as something exits consciousness, it exits existence. There’s no proof for something existing outside of consciousness, and there never will be because the most fundamental building block in any proof is, you guessed it, consciousness. Before using reason or logic or any other conceptual tool to prove something you use precisely one thing first: consciousness. In this way consciousness envelops anything one could conceive of as being outside of consciousness. Even if you and I are both conscious entities, we live in completely different “universes of consciousness.” Precisely, that is to say that one consciousness can never be shown another consciousness to exist without perceiving the other consciousness through the lens of the original consciousness. As soon as one consciousness comes into the other, the secondary consciousness immediately becomes an aspect of the primary consciousness. So if you were to completely merge your consciousness with mine, your consciousness would be held within my consciousness, and it would be the same for you if the process were done from your perspective. This is a clear mechanic of consciousness. We can never know if the person sitting across the lunch table from us is conscious. We can only assume one way or the other. Anything imagined to be separate from the perspective of the original consciousness will always just be one more aspect of the original consciousness. In this way, we are entirely alone as consciousness. We are not alone as human beings. There are plenty of humans walking around. You can clearly perceive that, but by the very nature of perception, consciousness cannot perceive another consciousness without it immediately becoming another aspect of itself. Consciousness cannot perceive another consciousness as some sort of separate thing. Once the “other” consciousness is viewed, it only exists as long as it is in contact with the primary consciousness - the point of perception, and it is only truly the primary consciousness the entire time. In this way, you can never truly share space with another consciousness. You cannot perceive another consciousness. Anything you perceive is just you. You are consciousness. Everything is you. Everything is consciousness. It will be this way for eternity. You as consciousness will likely visit innumerable dreamt up worlds that you’ve created. You’ll perceive yourself as some kind of avatar or character as far as we can tell. You’ll at first see all the rest of the characters in your dreamt up creation as separate from you, but in truth those dream characters are just as much you as your primary character is. They’re just characters held within consciousness. One, your primary character who you at first feel to live inside, simply exists in your consciousness more of the time than the others. Ultimately neither the other characters or your perceived primary character is you because you are the consciousness that permeates all aspects of the dream world including its laws of physics, characters, objects, and everything else. You aren’t the characters any more than you are the objects or the laws of motion that govern that reality. You are all aspects of that reality. You are all aspects of all realities. It matters not if your primary character runs into God or the Devil during his adventures in various realities. The only God is you. Your consciousness. The God perceived by your consciousness truly is a puny thing compared to you. He is completely enveloped by you and always will be. A reality can only exist within you. Something is only real to you if it is held within your consciousness. No realities exist outside of the one you are experiencing right now. This waking state planet Earth does not exist when you are in a dream. Your wife could tell you that the world still existed while you were asleep, but you have to see how this is exactly the same as if your dream wife told you the dream reality was there while you were asleep. It means nothing because you as consciousness were not there. That seems to be the pattern in what we can verify between both the waking state and dreams.