Flyboy

I really used to think this. If you go back and look at my old posts, I was once a strong defender of Leo; I used to say he was misunderstood, but that his heart was in the right place. I no longer think so. I did a ton of work myself, and read a ton, many books beyond Leo's list. It was sparked by a noted incongruency between Leo and some clearly pretty enlightened people. I set out on an honest quest to understand the differences. My inescapable conclusion is that Leo is wildly wrong and misled, and his unhappiness and ego speak for themselves. I've tried many times and in many different ways to communicate this, and it isn't coming from me just buying into a dogma or wanting to be right. I've read everything by everyone, listened to everyone. Enlightenment is real, but Leo is highly deluded by his experiences and has missed "IT" entirely. You need to be able to see with your heart to see the truth, it is found at the end of surrender, not in some kind of understanding. The mind cannot get there, no matter what drugs you take.

Yes! This! Retire! It's pretty telling how unhappy and angry you are. If your body-mind is what the "highest truth" leads to, I think everyone here would be wise to steer clear. Gosh man... feel into the contraction you have in your body every time you say ME and I. It oozes out of your communication that you think you are the wisest smartest most bestest person in the world. Every retort from you is always to re-solidify yourself as some authority, some teacher of incredible caliber. Your ego is off the charts, hell bent on being this "great man." Yet, you aren't dude. You just aren't. You aren't the most enlightened person ever, you're not even a little enlightened. You are a person that let a very deep hurt, probably that of being bullied and laughed at and not taken seriously, create a knot inside you that is so deep and painful that you will do anything in the universe to create an ego around it that makes you feel better. But the real path is feeling and accepting the hurt, all the way down, until you see that innocence and helplessness belies absolutely everything. All this contraction in you would be gone if you had done the real work, but it's only gotten worse (and from my perspective, it really accelerated getting worse about the time you gave up on doing the work thanks to nose-diving into psychedelics). You are not awake Leo. You don't even know what awake means, ironically, despite all the trips. You're looking through a window and think you're the only person to see the frame, but don't realize there is no window and there is no frame. Seriously, please, retire to a cave and sit there as long as it takes. Your twisted maniacal spiritual shitshow is really causing a lot of people a lot of suffering, from what I can see. @The Mystical Man has it right, this community is suffering from Narcissistic Abuse, plain and simple. I wish you healing, but stop hurting people.

My girlfriend told me it was like the universe took a wrecking ball to my ego. For me, it was facing death, truly. There were a handful of nights that were so bad that I simply closed my eyes in surrender, not knowing if I would ever open them again. I am very grateful that I had already found spirituality before this happened, as I did my best to bring deeper and deeper levels of equanimity to the extreme pain and suffering... But it still overwhelmed me. It crushed me like a tidal wave, taking me to my limit and beyond. At some point there is only surrender. I am still here somehow, and I continue to bring this surrender to my journey day after day, and it continues to progress, though "I" am certainly not the one doing it. But I have tried to channel all the love in my heart into a single intention: to come Home, no matter if the cost is all the pain in the universe, no matter if the cost is my life. Love is the heart of truth, but the road to it is the embracing of every single moment, and the letting go of every single trace of resistance no matter the cost. And the cost is everything. I offer you my deepest compassion for what you're going through. Something that has helped me is to ask the universe for 3 things: wisdom, courage, and grace. The wisdom to find the next step, the courage to take it and face my fear, and most importantly, grace to do what I CANNOT DO. It is not in your power to truly let go. You must be taken. <3

@Leo Gura LOL, you're entire response boils down to a hilariously contracted "yes huh!", like an angry child. It would be an honor to be banned by you for telling people to listen to their deepest heart. Please, do so. I feel very sorry for you. May all beings be happy and free, even you <3

Okay, let's look at that. Realization (enlightenment, etc) is about what is TRUE in direct experience, in this moment. That is like the entire game. It is a radical and uncompromising commitment to authenticity and to seeing clearly. Concepts like "nonduality" and "no-self" and "dependent origination" emerge FROM that investigation, they are not dogma going into it, and they are never considered TRUE of themselves. They are pointers to what is true, guides to deepening the investigation. Once completed, self-deception literally isn't even possible, because there is no "room" between this and that, between a self and a truth, between experience and someone to judge experience. Pure seamlessness. Your psychedelic "truth" is a joke for several reasons. It is never NOW, but always in the past, a memory, an experience, and always seen THROUGH the contractions and conditionings you retain as "you" in this moment. The memory occurs now, but it is only a simulacrum, a reconstruction. It is not IT any more than a photograph of London IS London. Your only defense against this is a ludicrous one, in which you ASSUME the so-called "truth" you got from the trip and apply it circularly (e.g. you'll say shit like: You're just God imagining that he remembered the trip"). This is epistemological BS and you know it. What is true MUST be true NOW, or it isn't fucking true. It's not about brain chemistry or no-mind or any of that crap. If it IS TRUE, it is true now/always (and not in concept! in experience!!!). All of your remembered trips is nothing more than concept, period. And I call you schizophrenic because that is the delusive state in which concept is taken to BE reality, which in your case is pretty fucking accurate. "The work" as you say leads to THIS. It is the only thing it can lead to, because it is right here and right now regardless of the content, regardless of what is perceived or thought. But see, you don't seem to understand how this actually progresses at all because you literally didn't make it out the gate. You don't understand that sensory clarity deepens, and eventually allows one to see the finest grains of experience, and you don't understand what happens when you bring equanimity to ever more subtle gradations of "selfness". You don't understand how self and resistance arise together, mutually dependent, to precipitate out of Nothing "everything", in a sense, even consciousness itself. Boundaries are just more distinctions, more resistance, and they CAN be dissolved with equanimity and surrender. The agent/doer is more resistance, the watcher or observer is more resistance, even Being God/omniscient or Being Nothing is more resistance. This isn't seen in a mystical flash, but in a microscopic AND macroscopic examination simultaneously that is clearer and clearer until even clarity gets sucked into the black hole that collapses all dualities. Being and non-being, existence and non-existence, God and nothing at all... all collapse, but not into "emptiness" (which the buddhists are not using in the way it sounds in English), but into THISNESS, which is just a way of saying there IS this dance happening, but that in it the divine and mundane are unified utterly. A piece of dog shit is as divine as the most incredible alien god-realization you could ever dream up. Literally, there is nothing "outside" of THIS because it is itself without a self. The tongue twists and fails in describing the collapse of duality, yet it can be KNOWN literally as true Unknowing (what do you think Ralston's title really means?!). But this realization is achieved only through this radical journey of acceptance and love at deep and subtle levels. Loving a criminal is a walk in the park compared to loving the subtle horrifyingly painful vibration that you feel to be you in your deepest existential being. It must be done until "done is what needed to be done." You, sir, have no ability to imagine or understand this, no matter how many trips you do. Someone being able to "talk" about the nature of God is only a disqualification, never a qualification. THIS cannot be spoken of, and disregarding that as folly IS folly. You probably won't hear any of this, being the dishonest narcissist that you are. But to anyone with whom this resonates, I sincerely encourage you to look to your heart for truth, not to Leo.

Rescinded. Simply, I pity you. If anyone is interested in why, happy to PM further. I hope you find peace one day, and I hope others learn to find their own way.

@UnbornTao You didn't even read my post then. For what it's worth, I've watched almost all of his 500 videos and read dozens of his books, and done many psychedelics, so I'd say I have an idea. I've also meditated for thousands of hours, nearly died from a major illness, and read and explored far beyond Leo AFTER having understood the body of his work. I once believed him, but eventually came to my own conclusions, and I only offer them here because I believe many people desperately need to hear them.

As someone that understands both Frank and Leo deeply, I can just say one thing: Leo is the one that is full of shit. Sorry dude, you have gone way off the deep end into a narcissistic rabbit hole centered around your own deepest conditioning, the desire to know. And of course the irony is that the desire to know is why you cannot know. The desire to understand is why you don't understand. The way you talk about Frank and the rest of spirituality betrays a deep ignorance of what any of it is about or how any of it works. You did so fucking little of the work yourself that you never even got a taste of what is even being pointed to before you took psychedelic easy street. Like your 10 day retreats? Such a joke. You checked your phone and cooked yourself big meals and filmed birds and made videos. That is not a meditation retreat. You constantly berate people to "do the work" when it has always been YOU that can't do the work, it has always been YOU that is stuck in concepts and contractions. You are lazy and selfish, and always have been. The sad part is that you are too inauthentic to truly admit this to yourself, which you have avoided by generating up this massive scaffolding of "work" that is really just a giant pile of bullshit that you hide behind. You are very nearly schizophrenic in the way that you are disconnected from life, other people, embodied reality, and the sheer presence of being... lost in a web of concepts and "trust me I tripped hard" beliefs, none of which are even close to the Truth. Every post you make is fraught with contraction, anger, pettiness, and this shriveled sniveling ego that sucks itself off with every word. I see your suffering. You suffer deeply, and the harder into this you go the worse it gets. Were you not the cult leader of this unfortunate gang, I'd feel really sorry and compassionate for you. But it deeply saddens me to see the harm you do to some of these people who are honestly searching. Friends, have the courage to see beyond this framework of concepts and ideas to see that there is a deep and real truth here that is beyond any understanding, any knowing, any experience. The heart of this is simple, profound, and beyond any words, but it requires first and foremost love for yourself beyond all limits. A love so strong it unifies you in a way YOU could never do, but that can only happen through grace and surrender. Frank Yang did this, for real. So have many others. Listen to them, open your heart, and follow that feeling inside you that resists. The feeling of resistance will lead you deeper and deeper. Follow it, accept it, allow it, love it and surrender, again and again. Look, and truly see <3

@vibv And this attitude is why you are not free. Ask yourself why. Are you afraid of doing what I described? Do you want it to be easier? Do you just want shortcuts? Leo is leading you to schizophrenia, not freedom. Choose wisely.

It is accepting every single experience, appearance, emotion, thought, feeling, sound, and even raw emptiness itself with all of your being and all of your love. Over and over, through the deepest resistance inside you, through despair, through hell itself. Choosing to love that which is utterly unlovable, utterly painful, utterly damning and unconquerable and unbreachable, even if it kills you (and it will). Accepting that total acceptance will leave nothing behind, no trace of you or a world, no trace of existence or non-existence, of reality or unreality. Accepting that YOU CANNOT DO THIS. That a pure trust, from the center of your heart, is required. True openness to no control, no knowledge, no understanding... a surrender to the totally impossible. Put your entire being into this until it is finished. That is the real work.

Well, first of all, doing some mushrooms is not an "awakening." Yes I've done heavy mushrooms, yes I've had that experience. It's not it, nor is even DMT or 5-MEO "it." Nothing will be "it" while it is even possible for "you" to experience a "you", regardless of state. Which is why psychedelics will never awaken you. The problem is that your self-structure is still intact, and at subtle levels remained intact even at the peak of your "awakening". But especially now, sober, you perceive everything through that filter, and of course the "I" does not like being lonely, and certainly doesn't like not being special. Psychedelics can give you a taste, or a flavor, but it's still just not it. 5-Meo is like wrapping yourself in plastic and jumping in a pool. It might really FEEL wet but you are still fucking dry. There's no way to get wet through the plastic. Enlightenment is being wet, and to take the analogy to an absurdity, it's actually like being the water itself. The difference between BEING THE WATER and experiencing water through plastic is the difference between enlightenment and psychedelic "awakening". This forum desperately needs to understand this, and Leo is not a good guide here. Long story short: do the real work if you want to be free. You're going to do it eventually, so why not just do it?

Highly recommend you read McGilchrist's "The Matter With Things" (and/or the Master and his Emissary) for an extremely interesting examination of schizophrenia and its relationship to your way of relating to the world. While he doesn't explicitly say it, I personally believe that the extreme-left-brain dominance that is characteristic of schizophrenia can be directionally reversed by deliberately engaging with the world in a right-brain way as much as possible (read the book, this is deep and nuanced). This kind of understanding may be of far more benefit to your experience of life than a brief psychedelic experience. Maybe once you've regained a degree of balance and groundedness, consider light psychedelic experiences to test your integration. That said, bipolar disorder is actually more characteristic of right-brain imbalance... if you have both, it's quite possible the connection between them is the problem (the corpus callosum - which functions to balance and regulate the cooperation of hemispheres). Tread carefully, you are a unique case. Still, I think understanding the left/right brain ways of seeing the world and being able to recognize them in action is extremely useful and will help you make sense of your sanity or apparent lack thereof. Ultimately, it is equanimity with ALL appearances that will bring you peace, regardless of the degree of neurotypicality you exhibit.

Now read MCTB, and then read a bunch of other books because MCTB is very left-brained and a bit neurotic, and can lead certain personality types astray. Then do at least one 10 day retreat. Then you will start to understand the path, just a little.

This idea of "baseline" consciousness vs "elevated" consciousness is one of Leo's most dangerous abstractions, and is fundamentally incorrect. Consciousness is NOT a scale of lower states and higher states, despite the way it can appear like that during mystical experiences. The only thing that is meaningful to say is that there is delusion, and lack of delusion, but EVEN DELUSION is lack of delusion, in an ultimate sense. That last part usually isn't helpful though, because that isn't seen until delusion is very very thin. Focus on seeing clearly, on releasing resistance to what IS. Enlightenment is not a state of consciousness, but a seeing that is deeper than mind and deeper than even experience. Leo completely misses this, as he is so in love with this idea that he just keeps climbing higher on this imaginary scale (and hence the narcissism).

Keep it sealed, out of the light, and ideally in something made of glass, & should be fine indefinitely I think.