Spiral Wizard

What's your usual day to day structure and what technques did you train in? Mahasi Vipassana, Jhanas, something else, etc. ?

Yeah, he said it in the context of: he is happy to fail in teaching his teachings and others not getting it. Not in the context of failing in terms not understanding something himself.

Good point. I'm no longer with him so I can't forward any questions anymore. But he said that he is happy to fail, does not care, and he loves us more than we know.

@Leo Gura when I talked with Peter, he actually acknowledged that there are different degrees of consciousness. An analogy he made was: you can experiance one drop of the ocean, or a big chunk of ocean, or infinite ocean, etc. so there are different ‘levels’ you can comprehend yourself AND/BUT it’s all ocean / the nature of the ocean-ness doesn’t change (no matter how much you comprehend). That is the absolute nature (never different). Now, he still seems closed around the topic of psychedelics. I know you have contact with Brendan (not sure if with Peter) but I encourage you to have a genuine conversation with Peter about the topic of Absolute Consciousness & psychedelics. Your understanding has grown significantly since your interview with him and I think now you could really speak with him on eye level. Do it! I wanted to ask these questions for fun but since I have no experiance with 5 Meo or Salvia I can’t push back on his defense from experiance. I didn’t ask this question directly but we went deep on this topic throughout the workshops and it’s clear that Peter’s stance on this is that all meaning, emotions, stories, and cosmologies is something you do/make up because it helps your survival. Peter’s response to this questions was that people are trying to map it out/make a cosmology about it but that’s not how it works. He encouraged to grasp the truth directly without any attempt to map it out as any type of cosmology cramps/stifles the ability to openly look into the matter/wonder/contemplate. It’s basically finished & going to be published around March 2026 if I remember his words correctly. I didn’t ask this question directly but he said that a lot of times when he had a breakthrough, there was no self to communicate it so he didn’t even think of communicating it. He wasn’t hiding it, but there was no impulse to communicated at all. He also said that sometimes, after a breakthrough, he purposefully, doesn’t try to articulate it because once the mind gets a hold of it, it can kill the afterglow - if I understood him correctly. His approach to teaching: a lot of experimentation has taken place. Initially he thought he could just whisper the truth to someone’s ear and they would get it, but people would not so instead he started to push people into contemplation, but he noticed that just pulling people out of ignorance didn’t work so now he’s pushing them into their attachments/survival/self/etc. so they can see it clearly. By seeing it clearly, you also become conscious of what’s true and become free of it. Like when you realize you are clenching your first you can stop clenching. Rather than just ‘surrendering’ without being conscious of what’s going on. Although he said neither forcing it nor just surrendering would work. He said nothing really works. You just have to get it/do it. He told the story of the Buddha: he said it’s impossible to communicate therefore I will not teach but then his friend said but maybe one person will get it so then the Buddha started teaching. Bottom line: it’s worth teaching for decades even if maybe just one person gets it.

Can be worth it if you really like his style. After going to the fall retreat I got unique insights I would not have gotten anywhere else (VERY KEY). That being said, overall I prefer Mahasi Vipassana retreats for insights. It’s more effective for me and more enjoyable. Peter’s workshop is basically reading your you his books from morning to evening without much time to actually contemplate, except the CI’s. There you contemplate more. I think if I had more time for contemplation in the workshop it would have been a totally different experiance. I think other people enjoyed it more than me so don’t just base your conclusion on my testimonial. There are also other amazing retreats like darkroom, solo, etc.

I have the opportunity to ask Peter Ralston a question for you. Ask your question, if it’s appropriate I will ask him for you and report back his answer. Keep in mind that he is easily dismissive of most questions so if it’s conceptual he probably will not answer. Questions relevant to practice/contemplation are more likely to be answered. But you never know, so feel free to ask whatever interesting question you got.

If you have a full God Realization on 5MeO and on the peak got anesthesia would you lose consciousness? And would that prove that materialism/consciousness is dependent on the brain? IF NOT, how do you explain this dependency? Am I as God just tricking myself to make the illusion more real?

Essentially, you want to stop engaging in thoughts about it and simply allow the emotion to be experienced. This is very simple but easier said than done because our default mode is to 'do something' or look away. It's also a balance between being aware of it while also not focussing to hard on it. If you try too hard to feel and focus on it, it's actually a form of resistance, and the emotions tend to disappear or contract. There's a lot more I could say. I like to recommend this video because it's the best introduction I found online on 'how to do it': I will say, that it's a lot easier if you have someone with experience guide you through the process live or on a call. For me, a good chunk of the work was my guide clarifying misunderstandings that were preventing me from simply relaxing and feeling. The mind is super tricky and it's next to impossible to see ones own blind spots. I would recommend my German guide but his English isn't great. You could try to find a guide online or we can have a call, I don't charge for it.

@UnbornTao @Natasha Tori Maru @inFlow Appreciate the kind words & feedback! 🙏🏽

I had groceries delivered to my door and either cooked fresh food or stocked up ready to eat food in the freezer. There’s also various healthy option with meal delivery. I was not paying rent because I did TrustedHousesitters for that time. Could you make examples of what needs & what kind of lack you mean? Generally I would say yes. It’s almost miraculous how deep this goes.

Last year I spent a month alone, meditating. Around week 2, I came up against a huge wall of dissatisfaction, impatience, and rage. This whole path seemed to lose all meaning and it seemed like there was no difference between continuing vs just living like a degenerate. Theoretically, I could explain to myself that this was a huge ego backlash but practically, I realized how much of our understanding hinges on feelings to support that conviction. All that was zapped so logic didn’t help. It was really tough. Then I decided to stop fighting with it and fully allow those emotions, anger, dissatisfaction, etc. to be experienced interally and expressed through screaming, etc. This is when my energy and vigor came back. Once I dropped resisting, and started to grok what it means to actually do nothing ‘just being an open space for internal experiences to arise’ something surprising happend: fully being in touch with sadness, rage, fear, loneliness felt amazing! I cherished them equally or almost even more than joy or love. It was like: ‘OMG I no longer have to push this away’. It’s just beautiful, alive energy! It cannot harm. What harms is the resistance to it. For the first time in years I felt fulfilled. I realized that emotional fulfillment is only possible when all is allowed and felt. WEEK 4 I started noticing micro tensions all over my body, old traumas surfacing and releasing. Towards the end of the retreat there was so much clarity and insight that I couldn’t keep up taking notes. It was like fireworks of energy erupting out of deeply helt pains in the body, releasing through my heart and spine. Every time I surrendered to simply doing nothing about my discomfort, I came out clearer, freer, and MORE ALIVE. This vitality and power peaked to a point where I was laughing about how easy the retreat had become. It felt like easy mode and I secretly knew that retreating wasn’t necessary if you know how to feel pain. It’s only our resistance to the triggers of daily life that clarity and energy close down. If we can process pain, we stay open. In fact, we will become even more open and energetic as we learn to not only hold space for ourselves but others. Some of the essential insights: We merely pretend to be limited. Nothing is enforced upon us, no disease, no suffering, etc. Everything is voluntary, on a deep level. Without exception. It's impossible for God to truly limit itself, so God can only pretend and voluntarily act as though he isn’t Himself. And that's actually the only way God could have fooled himself into a first-person POV dream. We are consciously or unconsciously upholding our limitations through resistance. And there’s only one thing we essentially resist: pain. The more we drop resistance to pain, the more we remember how we created our entire life as God. Below every thought & tension there is an emotion. Below every emotion there is a pain. Thoughts, tension, and emotions are resistance to pain. Pain liberates energy and opens up clarity. Pain is the motivating factor behind everything we do. Samskaras (deep stored traumas) feel like there’s “no space left.” No watcher consciousness. You just get thrown back into the fire. Life never gives you more than you can handle, but it will bring you right up to the edge and it will be your choice to be with that or refuse/resist/decline the challenge. Full liberation isn’t escaping into endless retreats. It’s being aware of your resistance to pain in every moment so that you can be free, at peace, and in love in the midst of your daily life. This is the challenge. This is the real work. Not just awakening, but integration. If you’d like to hear more, I recorded a video about my experience: AFTER THE RETREAT All that being said, I had a lot of resistance to leaving the retreat because I strongly felt that it was TOO SHORT & incomplete. I could see the insights slipping through my fingers and clarity slowly diminishing. I thought that it would have taken another 2-3 months of dissolving the micro tensions/traumas throughout my body IN SECLUSION to ‘get over the hill’ so it'd be much easier to stay in touch with ground truth and remain in that silent stillness. This, however, was a great challange to surrendering to where life was carrying me. And it turned out that only because I left the retreat, I met a guide who helped me recognize things that would have taken years to realize - or never. TECHNIQUE & SCHEDULE: There was no schedule. I mostly did nothing (with a bit of emphasiz on opening ever more deeply to feeling) as it’s very easy to not actually do nothing but subconsciously suppress emotions. For the first half, I also did a bit of work and then gradually transitioned into silence. This was extremely powerful as it helped me face a lot of the ‘inbetween phase’ between our normal state and deep meditation. Usually, meditation retreats dive straight in, minimizing the agony to just a few days. For me however, it was stretched out, I lingered in it and worked with it for 1-2 weeks until I got so comfortable with it, that it gave me unshakable confidence to be with difficult emotions. I only did mahasi vipassana noting, breathing, yoga, etc., sometimes/rarely to help settle into meditation if I was restless. Otherwise, I kept on returning to doing nothing and just feeling. I think the retreat became so effortless to be on retreat towards the end because the underlying root cause of distraction and discomfort was addressed: pain. Most other techniques utilize the mind to effort. This is unsustainable for many as it is fuled by willpower and ones own vital energy. Whereas when we ‘do nothing’ we can focus all of our energy on simply doing nothing while being aware of what emotions/pains we feel, without doing/focussing/efforting, etc. This awareness of emotions and pain liberates incredible amounts of energy so it becomes extremely easy to sustain.

Love that! 😂

Fair enough! Another way of questioning it is: what’s your guiding compass/principle/goal?

What happens when you put true happiness/fulfillment as your highest value and use truth as an effective tool towards that end? I would choose to live in self deception if it made me truly happy & fulfilled. But it doesn’t. It turns out, that true happiness is in alignment with wholistic & appropriate dosing of truth as you grow up into more and more truth. It’s been my compass for 8+ years and worked pretty well up to this point. It helps balance and ground. Leo’s video opened me more towards prioritizing truth for its own sake but I’m still curious to hear more about the limitations of fulfillment as the top value.