mandyjw

My mom bought my kids glowsticks a long time ago and my daughters was a butterfly wand, and she liked it so much that we kept it even though it no longer glows. A few nights ago my kids fought over the wand and my son kept pointing at me and saying "dead!" and my daughter would take it and say "alive!" and I would play dead or spring back to life on command each time. Eventually they got so wound up that they started smacking me over the head with the wand and going back and forth so fast that I no longer knew if I was supposed to be playing dead or alive. Last night my daughter found my son's wolf winter hat and wore it over her head like a mask and pretended to be a wolf. I was tired and the simplistic eyes freaked me out the realization of symbolism and reality as a collapsing duality hit me and I saw the mask as real. Then she took her mask off and I realized that our faces are just masks. I remember the quote from Moby Dick that Pretom had said, when he told me in a PM to "strike through the masks." "Hark ye yet again,—the little lower layer. All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event—in the living act, the undoubted deed—there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me. Sometimes I think there’s naught beyond." Moby Dick And there's my wall.

My God, MY GOD suffering is a choice. That was what was left in the text box here from a couple days ago. It's a message I needed to see now. I seem to have hit a wall of frustration. In fact, what's really fucking frustrating is that the wall is imaginary. If there was a wall, I'd know where I was. "Oh my God, I hit a wall! What shall I do now? Perhaps I can climb over it, go around it, maybe I can dig UNDER it?" Nope. There's no wall. I just feels like there's a wall. It's like Terrence McKenna said about telling people about how this magical sand helped scrub the stuck stuff off the pots and pans, so he took someone to show and it failed to work and they looked at him like they felt sorry for him. I want to settle on something. I don't want to be groundless. I want to know the right advice to give, I want to know the right course of action, I want to have values and morals to live by. I enjoyed building the sandcastle, I enjoyed the feeling of sand slipping through my fingers. I enjoyed watching the tide come in and wash it all away. Now it's just really fucking cold, standing here on the beach all alone in the cold autumn wind. Time to pack up and go home. Don't mind my drama, it's also just imaginary with no meaning whatsoever behind it.

We are all here to help each other see those blind spots but it can only occur in a space of love. That's why I thought that Abraham Hicks quote was so powerful, we aren't here to teach one another lessons, we're here to help spark insights in one another. Sometimes those seem to be intentionally orchestrated and sometimes they are completely accidental. The hierarchy of teacher and student, intentional or unintentional has to disappear for real insight or growth to occur.

Tsuki, that's just the nature of the ego. Everyone's ego is a narcissist and our lives are lies. It isn't personal. I watch mine play out daily as I purify and love it through its fight. Loving acceptance and conciousness are the only way, just observing as if you are the author of your life, is the only way to see it and change the direction of the story. We know how to see straight through your story and what we see is brilliant and worthy of love. What we see is ourselves in you. You may have a lot of work in front of you to integrate this in your marriage and day to day life and interactions. This is when the real benefits of this work will unfold and become integrated. This is when true courage is called for. Will you take the apple?

There are no other people tsuki.

That's not true. I titled the journal "Is this journal mine or yours" because I knew we both had something that needed to be integrated and I had no idea who was teaching who. I tried to get the upper hand on a few occasions and you always pinned me down. That was a gift, a selfless sacrifice on your part. But you wouldn't fully accept or honor that I had anything to give. There were windows and openings but it was never logically acknowledged. That's why I had such a hard time feeling like I couldn't accept a gift, because I never got the full exchange I foresaw. As time passed the chasm grew wider. You wouldn't let go of the hierarchy. I played the part. Consciously, of my own free will. I was never your toy, neither was anyone else. There was never a hierarchy.

This is an interesting discussion in hindsight.

I'm not saying that you don't get permanent growth, awakening and insights from psychedelics, I'm saying that they allow you the luxury of being able to plan ahead and schedule a disruption to your life in and give you time to yourself to process it. Imagine that your perception of time, self and other is altered for days, you assume that it's going to last forever, but you have to maintain a tight schedule and are responsible for two little kids the entire time. The method that someone attributes to being responsible for "their" awakening will inevitably cause them to have biases as they struggle to understand it after the fact. There are many different circumstances that can cause someone to fully surrender and experience the truth of no self. That's one way in which this forum is so incredibly valuable, who knows what potential there is to discover ways to help others awaken no matter what their position is in life. That's why it's so important not to disregard someone based on whether they did or did not take a psychedelic or practice a specific method. Everyone wants to assume that the trajectory or path of their own evolution can be used as a map for others. It can't, but bits and pieces of direction may be gleaned from it.

Eckhart Tolle mentions various realizations that occurred before his awakening. There's a story of him following a crazy woman speaking to herself from the train onto his campus, being shocked that she was a professor and then looking in the mirror as he mumbled something to himself and realizing the insanity in himself. There are other stories like this about his life pre-awakening that he tells occasionally. The very inconvenient thing about a spontaneous awakening is that you will be left barely functioning and you will have no idea for how long. You will likely believe it will be always, you may not care of you may live a life where this has major consequences. The thing about psychedelics is that one always expects that they will eventually wear off.

It's not a particular plant or even a psychedelic itself, it's pointing to something deeper. You're on the right track though. The Bible is a book that has had an incredible amount of intention, questioning, emotion and contemplative energy poured into it over many lifetimes. Symbolism is powerful, and symbols in a way maintain power of shared emotion or intention to understand and experience God over lifetimes. Just like the moon or an apple are things that we think we experience, they are widely or universally shared experiences and they have a certain power because of that. In the same way the Bible is significant, both as a symbol itself and as a book full of symbols. The entire book of Revelations is a fun riddle. If you enjoy Christian symbolism I really suggest checking out this author, Mischa V. Alyea.

I think it's much much messier than psychedelics vs meditation. If someone without a good foundation in personal development and in life in general takes psychedelics it's game of Russian roulette. If the same person meditates, there is a good chance that they are going to have positive, albeit slow positive growth. However if you take a highly developed person, the psychedelics have a high potential of being transformational. Especially since a highly developed responsible person probably has a lot of ideas about what life is about and how it should go. There are those who desperately need structure and those who need to let the fuck go of it. Not everyone is coming from the same direction or has the same pieces of the puzzle. I had an awakening without ever having a regular meditation practice or taking a psychedelic. Looking back I spent my entire life "meditating" and searching for truth and just generally searching for feeling good, without having any idea of an end point. Ignorance was very helpful and yet in the end, had to be let go of.The more I try to understand it or credit some circumstance or choice I made with it, the more confused I get.

How could apples be compared with apples when the real work is done not during the trip or the meditation but in the space between? Maybe that's exactly why psychedelics seem to be so effective, they require so little of your time and you have something external to thank for your insights so there's less temptation to trust in your own effort.

I believe so, in moderation. I like the Lindsay naturals brand, I wouldn't buy the traditional canned black olives, there's some chemical processing that goes into producing that color and flavor.

"You are running around this planet as cooperative components to one another. Not to do bad things to each other and not to teach each other lessons, but to sift through the data to put things in your vortex to which you inner being is already aligned so that you can experience the joy of alignment." Abraham Hicks

You can't know what love is. You can become it though.

No one is saying that this is your imagination or choice of perception. Before you can treat a wound you must acknowledge that it's there. Then you treat it in whatever way is necessary based on the severity of it, but the actual healing happens on its own. Keep in mind the analogy that Leo used in his most recent video. Enlightenment is not a single mountain that you can climb, it's a whole fucking mountain range. You've been going around comparing your progress with your wife's and others here based on the high mountain you're sitting on the peak of, not realizing that others have explored different parts of the mountain range that you were ignoring as unimportant the whole time. This is not the time to throw nonduality out the window, but it is time to scan the horizon and finally come down from the peak of that single mountain you've mastered and explore the rest of the range.

I as the absence of me have had the privilege to see you for the perfect brilliant being that you are. I as Mandy have seen the other as well. I chose to see one version and not the other, because I am able to do so. You can chose to do the same. Your inner being never looks back. Focus on who it is that you are, who you are seemingly becoming, focus on the light that is revealed when what was clouding it is removed. You are brilliant after all Tsuki.

No, I haven't experienced either aliens or angels directly. I have directly experienced how crazy things can get when you try to explain a mystical experience after the fact though. What do aliens and angels in stories always represent, what is the purpose of their appearance? Communication. They are a form that the pysche/greater intelligence creates to communicate with or to explain the communication. Aliens and angels are interpretations of a shared phenomenon or experiences. Keep in mind that stories and symbols get more and more bizarre the deeper the experience was that is trying to be communicated. I have a theory that greater intelligence takes the path of least resistance to communicate with you, so it will communicate as Alan Watts or Leo, or someone else on this message board. However if you have a no self experience and are in a state of little to no resistance, then you may experience that communication as something that would normally not be capable of imagining. Of course it is all part of your psyche and therefore will be personalized to you and your desires and intentions in some way, if as a child you believed in or wondered about aliens, it will communicate as aliens. If you truly believed in a religion in the past, you may have a mystical experience with a certain deity. You are creating and imagining your reality. The implications of that can be crazy. If your entire past and your separate "self" is realized as complete and utter fiction, then aliens and angels are fiction too. But our current reality is that we are here imagining typing/reading and communicating with each other on an internet forum, so if we go on imagining this seemingly impossible reality, why close your mind to everything else?

When a sign or deity like that comes to you, study it. What is it leading you to embody in yourself?

In Christianity angels=aliens. The Gospel of Judas is a really interesting read, I'd say if you believe it's Jesus authentic words, then it definitely addresses the subject of aliens.

You in your limited state will have a personality, likes and dislikes and resonate with certain things and people. If you are open spiritually you may resonate with certain energies, and certain energies may lead you to have experiences and those experiences can have profound effects on the course of your life. Nonduality, is the reason why this can occur, and it happens where nonduality and duality merges. Remember that because of the nature of nonduality you cannot separate it from duality. That can be a tricky thing to "understand". That's why you can appear to have had past lives or to be contacted by certain nonphysical personalities. However you could say that oneness is the background through which everything is occurring.

Unconscious patterns hurt those we are closest to and love the most the worst. Your wife is you.

@tsuki