mandyjw

@DrewNows Thank you! Making the video and contemplation after and how I'm speaking to myself in addition to reading this thread triggered something and re-framed my intentions. @Zigzag Idiot Thank you! That book looks AMAZING. I saved it in my amazon cart. This morning during meditation I started crying and that continued off and on throughout the day. I'm not sure if it was triggered by what I mentioned previously, not that triggers matter I guess. A week or two ago I looked at the flyer ads at the grocery store and saw an ad for "Jackabee" puppies. That's one of the last combinations of breeds (jack russel and beagle) that I want. It really stuck in my mind though. Later I had a dream about going to their house. The feelings that were involved in the dream really affected me and the next day I was looking for puppies and saw a listing for some Vizsla cross puppies. I've been hoping to rescue a dog or get a mixed breed puppy but nothing seemed right and no opportunities came up. I knew when I saw them that THAT was what I wanted. I thought that it was just an accidental litter and spent all night not sleeping great and trying to figure out how I could make the trip to get one. But when I googled the phone number the next morning I found out that the seller ran a puppy mill and sold imported puppies from God knows where. But I had clarified my desire. I found a caring Vizsla breeder closer to home with puppies expected mid-month and sent in an application and deposit. I told my Mom about it, thinking she would think I was irresponsible for wanting to take on the responsibility. Instead she was very happy about it. When I talked to my husband about it he said that he was just waiting for me to be ready to get a dog and didn't want to pressure me to take on another responsibility. I realized how irresponsible and flaky and afraid of commitment I've been since this spring, and how loving and patient everyone has been with me and cried about that. Today the breeder let me know that she accepted our application and we are second in line for a male pup. I cried when I got her message. Fingers crossed everything goes well.

For some strange reason if you post the link of a suggested video it will show as a suggested video for other people's account. For me the video is "Family Paw Patrol Captain America", because I have a three year old.

@Koyaanisqatsi Amazing thread, thank you. The "rewinds" that you mentioned have been happening to me recently, but I hadn't thought of "purposefully" using them. I'm curious if you experienced anything you'd describe in terms of integrating heart and mind. I believe that awakening could be thought of as a dramatic opening of both mind and heart. I can only assume and have ideas about what happens at the end of the path.

I want to copy Peter Ralston's facial expressions and use them randomly throughout my videos. #goals

@remember Whew. Gonna have to sleep on that one. I still feel like rather than holding up a sign saying "REPENT YOU MOTHER-FUCKERS!", the Divine feminine would seduce and enchant, and much like a magic mushroom lead a yet-to-be-integrated man on a beautiful enlightening yet terrifying trip. After all free choice was an idea that came from the snake, and the snake spoke to Eve first. This "battle" occurs in only one place, our own psyche. I have to say though, tapping into it beyond just its personal manifestation is something else. It's beyond me.

I discovered that same story/analogy studying gnostic Christianity. In the analogy I read, the feminine or creative path "ends" by giving birth to a "male" (the masculine flowering and becoming awake in the psyche) child (your life purpose), then raising that child until it becomes an independent life of its own. What's going on here is that the feminine is not "enslaved" though it appears that way, it just isn't understood, recognized or experienced. "Passion" is symbolized by red and the snake or the red dragon, it rises from below like kundalini energy. "Grace" falls from the sky, (moves down through the chakras) and is symbolized by a lightning bolt. Being filled with one without the other creates hell. Hitler was an example of someone who was full of "grace" with no feminine spiritual energy to speak of, at least after he gave up painting that is. It's the balance and free flow of power from both that we seek. The "Holy Grail" or the meaning of the miracle of turning water into wine, is becoming a vessel that is filled with "grace" and then with the addition of "passion", the water turns to wine. Everyone's spiritual journey is about opening to and balancing both powers. This is why women and creative types so often don't need psychedelics, they are full of that energy to begin with, they seek to understand and channel this power. Think about how Leo had an insight to plug DMT, and how chakras correspond with that insight, "feminine" spiritual energy rises from below. What you sense happening in this community is that many here only recognize the power of "Grace" and they don't understand why exactly they benefit from the use of psychedelics, or the power through which they work. They still think embodying the feminine is only about being sweet, accepting and motherly. The Christian church saw the spiritual power of "Passion" to be evil and demonic, and only recognized the power of Grace. In fact nearly all religions only recognize "Grace". They turn religion into a logical, hierarchical, materialist rule based thing. Naturally, only men were allowed positions of power. Pagan or Wiccan traditions lean too heavily to "Passion" and so are very connected with the earth and feminine power, yet don't often manage to channel that power or organize themselves enough to manifest change and have influence.

Infatuation is one of the most striking, unignorable forms of love that life has to offer. When you have the potential to become infatuated with the sky, a tree or a flower you may experience what a relationship without goals, survival or ego can be. You can also understand that infatuation is simply recognizing oneself in something, it is simply a spectacularly strong wave on the ocean made out of love. That doesn't mean however, that great things can't come from it. Sometimes you ride the wave, sometimes it knocks you over, sometimes you simply watch the waves crash to shore from the safety of the beach.

You can't, but you can rest in the space between the words.

She loves me, she loves me not, she loves me!!! Please elaborate. I know exactly what you're saying, but you're going about it this all wrong.

@remember The hero's journey is only one half of the journey, and half of the story. But because of that it's probably more important and powerful for women to watch that video than for men.

Was Frodo happy most of the time in The Lord of the Rings? Was Harry Potter happy through most of the seven books in the series? You didn't come to be happy, you came for an adventure. Enlightenment is realizing that you are the authors and all characters from the story, wisdom is knowing that for the story to be told it must happen from a certain perspective within the illusion of time.

@Zigzag Idiot I enjoyed the documentary, I used to talk on my cell phone a lot more often and it actually felt like it was hurting me. I assumed I was an insane hypochondriac, but who knows. I was really interested when they started talking about the pineal gland and the cells in the eyes. I'm also fascinated by what sunlight has to do with this. I feel really distracted when I'm in my house, and I'm not sure if it's because it's always a chaotic mess and I work from home and I can't relax or maybe it's because of all the electromagnetic interference and electronics. This spring and summer spending time outside has become almost compulsion like for me. I just responded in a thread about depression. It seems like the more conscious on becomes or the more conscious they are born the more sensitive they are to things. In recent years I got really interested in blue zones and wanted to figure out some way to move to one. I HATE vehicles. I love driving but I hate what they've done to our lives. Walking and having a community of walking is so important for happiness. Just being able to bump into people and have spontaneous short conversations is fundamental to happiness. I HATE the fact that families are so segregated and that we raise our kids in isolation. I hate the fact that we eat alone. Of course everyone overeats! When I had meals at my parents house I never overate because conversation was rich. Now at home I often try to get that same satisfaction from food. We are told that if we feel lonely we aren't independent enough. It's fucking bullshit. We were meant to live as a tribe and live in close connection with nature. We live in the worst sort of dark ages in so many ways. Sorry for the rant, that's been on my mind a lot lately. Ok, for years. @DrewNows Cow manure is black gold. Smells like springtime. This year I used different compost in my garden and it wasn't a good idea. Just a warning though, psilocybin, I believe, is very dangerous to try to identify yourself. Even if you were completely sure of yourself the next hurdle would be proper dosage.

I think it's really important to have an arsenal of tools for dealing with depression. Make a list of things that make you happy and raise your mood. Consciousness and sensitivity go hand in hand. It's popular to call yourself an empath nowadays, but it goes deeper than that. We are building our sensitivity by meditating, and we also need to understand what those sensations are telling us or guiding us to. Sometimes they get ahead of us, and it's important to take a step back and contemplate why. I really appreciate Abraham Hicks, and the Law of Attraction is the most recent tool I've added, and it also explains why all the other tools I've had for longer worked so well. It's important once you've stopped overthinking to bring in another element to the mix which is understanding how to think positively without it becoming dogma, fake or forced. This is the same realization that God is Love, and everything is love and made of love, that energy is the building block of the universe and so we are learning to align with it. I've noticed that on a practical day to day level, I don't get away with the same things other people around me do. If I let my diet slip it really affects my energy severely and i get depressed quickly. If it's winter I take vitamin D and also try to get sunlight whenever possible. I strictly limit sugar intake and make sure I get at least 3 servings of veggies a day, generally a lot more than that. Exercise everyday. Make time for friends or in person social interaction. Try to make sure you check all those boxes off, or find the ones that you personally need.

@DrewNows His videos are top notch and I appreciate that he lives in a climate very similar to mine. I did believe the myth that touching a poisonous mushroom was risky, so I'm glad to be rid of that fear. Some of those myths are pretty strange. His video is the one I trusted enough to identify the chanterelles. I found some yesterday at my parent's place. I'm not sure I'll venture out to identify many more. I once bought a huge load manure for my garden and it was full of what i believe are magic mushrooms. Cows ARE holy! Gave up my vision of a peaceful clean home and simple life and the hunt for a puppy is ON. Wish Shin was still here.

I had a pretty spectacular/transformational/disruptive to day to day life awakening at the start of April. I feel like I'll spend the rest of my life integrating it, and at the same time it never happened. For some reason, I feel the need to tell the story of it. I don't know if that's right or wrong but if I've learned one thing it's to follow my impulses. It will probably take me several posts. "There are no signs. They are all signs. There are no sacred places. They are all sacred places. There is no story to write. There are no stories." I must confess, I am a story teller. I invite you to come sit around the campfire, but only if you like stories. You see, stories are like psychedelics when you get properly lost in them. The classic books and the most beloved stories are full of pointers. Moby Dick, Humpty Dumpty, Sleeping Beauty... the stories of Jesus, Buddha, and the list goes on, all are pointers to nonduality. Your own life is just a story. It is very special because it happened on this physical plane, and you are the author of your life. Before you can see fully how special it really is, you have to disregard it as nothing. It is so meaningless that the meaning is profound beyond words. The stories we call fiction are downloads from Source. There is only one creative mind and so all creativity that flows through a person is a download from this mind. All tropes are from this mind. For me the duality between truth and fiction is forever lost. No biography of any person who actually lived can ever be accurate. It's only a gross account of something that happened. It's like a cop gathering witness accounts of an accident or a crime, we spin things into stories as we remember them. This is always the case. My awakening happened here on the forum in the journal section with the help of another member or two (an unknowingly the entire forum). I started having a lot of conversations with this member and had an insight/impulse to metaphorically offer him an apple. That was the start of my descent into the rabbit hole of fairytale, Biblical storyland. This is a post I saved from my now deleted journal, this post set the ball rolling. "I don't know. I don't know what's on the other side. AH, you're so compellingly frustrating, a book I can't put down as obligations I'm neglecting pile around me. I can't eat, I can't sleep, I don't know where this energy comes from. It drives me. I have no control. I have a story of something that recently happened to me that I can't let go of. I don't know why I can't let go of it. It drives me mad. Why am I so attached? I've told it to a few people as if I'm looking for something from them but no one really has anything to say. It seems more like a story I've made up rather than something that actually happened. I had a business and had a lot of success at the start and bought a house almost 10 years ago. I was only 20 and I made the decision completely on emotion. It was an old house in a ghost town and I didn't have any idea how much work would be involved. I cursed myself and the decision for years until I made peace with it and then we were finally able to finish the work on it. But when I first saw this house, driving up to it I had this feeling like I was entering another world. There was something compelling about it. Fast forward to last year and I am looking for somewhere nearby to take my kids to play. I start taking them to this spot by the river. Every single time we go I experience presence but there's this energy there too in addition. Something about the place burns itself into my mind and I keep going back and going back. Every time the river offers up something new. It is the perfect illustration to me of the saying that you cannot step into the same river twice. On a whim I take my daughter for a walk in the stroller through the cemetery. When I was a kid my parents caretook a cemetery and I had to spend every weekend and time after school helping them. It was on a hill overlooking a lake, incredibly beautiful. I love cemeteries and have no negative or spooky feelings from them. In this poor town, there was only one notable doctor resident who is buried there. He lived in the 1800's and was famous for his use of herbal medicines. His monument is massive and the entire lot is covered in beautiful stone with heavy granite urns. I put on the stroller brakes and go up to read inscriptions on the stone. I must have not been careful enough, even though I've done this thousands of times. My daughter goes flying down the hill and I sprint after her as fast as I can just barely catching her before she crashed into some other gravestones. I leave the cemetery slightly, just slightly spooked. I don't go back until fall. When I do I visit there is only one plant growing on the entire stone covered lot. It's a beautiful plant with red berries, but plant nerd that I am I recognize it as poison nightshade. Why is the only thing growing on an herbal healers grave poison nightshade? I go back to visit his grave one more time, again with my daughter. This time I don't trust the stroller and I take her out and bring her up with me to read the inscriptions on his stone. My daughter gets really unhappy and I have to leave with her. After we've gone too far to go back she realizes that she threw off her mittens somewhere and screams "MY MITTENS", over and over again all the way home. So I keep thinking about this doctor and I remember that my friend and I discovered he had written his recipes down in a book. An impulse comes to me to look for it and it feels good. I remember sitting at my computer trying to remember what exactly the impulse was because all I could remember was having one but not what it was. It came back to me and I searched for his book. I find that now a library has added it as public domain and I can read it for free, right then online. It's not just some bizarre herbal recipes. It's his entire story. He wasn't actually a doctor. He was clairvoyant. It describes his communion with nature and how his powers came about and his battle with self interest. I find the book the most compelling thing I've ever read in my life. It has so many parallels to my life and things I was thinking about. Out on a run I decide to go back to his grave. The ground is covered in a small amount of wet snow and as I finally read the inscriptions on the stone undistracted this time, I see that exactly where I stepped is one of my daughter's mittens. Later I happen upon a facebook post in an abandoned places group I'm a part of, from someone who went to see the foundation where his summer mansion once stood. I go to find it for myself and it overlooks the very spot on the river I was so drawn to. I now make a habit of sitting on the old massive granite blocks and clearing my mind. I've had three major insights there. Last week I went back to his grave and there was my daughter's other mitten directly on his grave. I sat there in the sun and meditated on the warmth and unfailing love of peace. " Shortly after this entry, insights started barraging me, and I continued to not sleep or eat except for the bare minimum I could function on. It felt like I was possessed. Synchronicity started becoming intense. Every song on the radio had a message for me. I accused the other member of being like a little boy who won't eat his Easter bunny because he doesn't want to ruin it. I had an impulse to check a free library box and in it I found a half eaten Easter bunny and a book about how you create your reality. The duality between intuition, impulses that felt good and my obsessive compulsive impulses I had had as a child dissolved. "I feel better, I did something I had negative obsessive compulsive thoughts about doing, realized it was a thwarted impulse and realized I needed to take action. Pieces of the puzzle are still coming together after the fact, my previous minor fixations of the past month, pleasures and demons both all have come together. Another amazing storyline from my life that came together so beautifully for me recently was the catalyst of all this feminine energy realization. I had recorded a video and I said that I used to be obsessive compulsive when I was a child but that's not true. I've always been obsessive compulsive. Except it's not a problem I can throw away. It's my power. " Everything I ever loved, all the symbols and my love for lions came together in beautiful realizations of nonduality. The doctor had a lion statue in front of his house. I also became conscious of the power of symbols I had paid no mind to and realized that the grave of the doctor was covered in pyramid shapes. He had been a stone mason before he awakened to his clairvoyant powers. Every painful and traumatic event in my life was seen through the eyes of an author who dreamed it up it for greater good and out of love for her character. I got reminded of the book that I always wanted to write and I realized that the idea was a prophetic analogy of my life, yet I was still learning the lessons the character was supposed to learn and so I could not actually write it. "It's been in my head for 6+ years. But writing it always seemed like work. Until now. Now it feels like it could just happen. My friend and I explored the town I lived in shortly after I moved here. I'll tell you more about her later because she's really important. She has no fear about anything, I do, and at that time was absolutely controlled by it. We drove almost all the way down a dead end road, where the river at some point stops being a river and starts being ocean and you come out to the point. As you drive the road gets narrower and less of a road and there's a sense of fear and foreboding even as you drive. There have even been more bizarre problems with domestic violence down there than you'd think for the number of people that live there. Someone got shot a few years ago. So me and my friend see this massive old abandoned house down a gated road on the river which this far down is part ocean and part river. I'm already spooked and she insists on driving in. We can't tell if the door is pitch black or wide open and we get closer and closer and are both afraid now but driven by curiosity. There was no door. We were looking at blackness inside the house. We went back to the place later and went inside. The spirit of the place. I can't even. It was vandalized. But wild roses like grow by the ocean here were growing all up the wall and wildflowers of all kinds and colors up all around as grow in a neglected field in late summer. I remember that the moon was in the sky overhead. I had a photo with it all, but I lost it. They burned the house since. That's the place I drove back to last night, but the house is gone and now there's a no trespassing sign. This is the story I had in my head. I don't have much, just a basic outline. A girl/woman, not sure of the age yet, is raised in a fundamentalist Christian home but has a wild spiritual connection regardless of her beliefs. She is thrown out of her family for something she does (this actually happened to my husband, and that something was me) and seeks solitude in this desolate abandoned house. But instead of solitude, she finds a man there who is seeking enlightenment in solitude. And together they find what they find what they seek." I didn't believe in chakras at the time, and I didn't know about kundalini energy but I started having strange and bizarre pains in my body. I kept going back and forth between the remains of the doctors house and home to write in my journal. I discovered a platform by his house with steps leading up to it and trees growing at the corners. "There's still this energy that burns through me. Then a cold that chills through my bones. We are the warmth of the sun. We are the still waters that run deep. You give me clarity. It's as if we were tennis players, so in the flow of the game that it would be silly to ask which one of us has the ball. It's moving back and forth so fast that no one can fixate on it. There is no ball. And so it is with the world of form and formless. The vibration of energy between them is moving so fast...that it stays in place because there is no time." To Be Continued.

“But I don’t want to go among mad people,” Alice remarked. “Oh, you can’t help that,” said the Cat: “we’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.” “How do you know I’m mad?” said Alice. “You must be,” said the Cat, “or you wouldn’t have come here.” “Who are YOU?” said the Caterpillar. This was not an encouraging opening for a conversation. Alice replied, rather shyly, “I–I hardly know, sir, just at present– at least I know who I WAS when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then.” Alice laughed. “There’s no use trying,” she said: “one can’t believe impossible things.” “I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”

Moby Dick.

OHHH! THAT'S the cliff from the story! I knew one of the scenes I wanted to write was when they go out on a cliff to watch the lightning, but there aren't any cliffs in the area I wanted it to take place in and I couldn't picture where it would happen. Past, future, fantasy, I don't even know anymore!!!

I tried to articulate my understanding of "my awakening". Before I would think that sharing this was a sin, but I don't think anyone cares and if some do, they are meant to. Stories are meant to be told. Confession, I still feel very odd about tsuki and his part in it and if he seemed open to it, I'd love to talk about my understanding of what happened. Do I need to do shadow work over what happened after I did shadow work and how it was done or is that a never ending distraction? Yesterday I felt very out of sorts. Eventually I settled on going for a hike by myself. It's an obscure hiking trail and it's connected with the old ghost story of the maiden on the red isle. The first time I hiked it, it was very "trippy". Yesterday I found a small animal skull set up on a fallen log. I also found where a blue jay had been killed, beautiful blue feathers all around. At the crossroads are a few old apple trees. There were strange and beautiful mushrooms everywhere. There has never been in my life a summer with more consistent rain and a better apple crop or mushroom season. When I got out to the end of the trail, I found that the trail continued onto a sort of island connected by the beach that I had never noticed. I'd never walked the whole trail. I walked out to the cliffs. It was windy and sort of gray and the mood of the afternoon was very somber. I found a group of trees that had burned partially from lightning strike. I took a piece of charcoal and drew a lightning bolt and a snake on the tree. Then a crow called and stood over me perched on an a tall tree. He looked and called and then flew two circles around me and flew off.

@Zigzag Idiot Thank you, I "listen" to youtube while I work, so I have plenty of time for videos during the week and really appreciate the suggestion. I'm looking forward to watching it. There was a strange progression of visual changes and noticing colors years before the awakening. It reminds me of the book "The Giver" when the main character sees a red apple for the first time. The apple symbolism is pervasive. Looking back I see the awakening as a speeding up of the process I've gone through my whole life rather than an event. Of course to confuse understanding even more, time is illusory. @DrewNows I was stung by a caterpillar as a kid so I learned that lesson myself.

The first insight I got at the doctor's stone foundation was that I was afraid. It was a pretty obvious insight, I was in the middle of the woods, I didn't know who or what was around or what I would find. But the significance of it the the benefits that could be on the other side of that fear really shone through. I quit drinking coffee and saw how it fueled my anxiety. The second was that, I was still afraid, but this time it presented in the way of feeling like I was unworthy to be there, trespassing on someone's property. I was exactly where I was supposed to be. I knew from the feeling of the insights that they were important. If I went back too soon for another, I wouldn't receive it. If I returned when I felt really drawn to go back, I would. The third insight was from a literal tree. It was an ash tree that was one tree until it had grown into two trees at about height of my chest. The trees were really damaged there and were splitting apart. It was a little windy and the tree actively made splitting sounds as I looked at it. Then I understand that nonduality also included duality. I've seen the same illustration from others before with the tree. I had been unconscious of how much I moralized spirituality and denied my own desires. In order to control my anger, which is the reason I found Leo's videos in the first place, I had also tried to kill the fiery passion I've always had. I had demonized and let a part of myself die. My mind had taken the present moment and made it into an ideal and a thought. The shadow work intensified and I lost the sense of doership. Revelations came in the middle of the night and strange connections were made between things. The best thing I can compare it to if you've ever read Harry Potter, it's like the conclusion of those books when this complicated interwoven story with at the time, seemingly insignificant clues from earlier in the book comes together and all makes sense in the end. It was like that with my entire life. Reality is stranger than fiction. Sometimes thinking back on my life, particularly turning points and times of major conflict, or events like how my parents met, I've thought about how it's too strange to be real. The shadow work showed me that my hunch had been right. Lots and lots of pieces came together. I realized that in a way I had always been awake. The things my kids and husband said to me were channeled and had deeper meaning. Everything fell together in a creepy magical nonduality. All this time I was just managing to hold me life together, dropping off and picking up my kids. If anyone asked why I had been crying (there was tons and tons of tears) I told them it was because my dog was dying, which was true. The dying dog was interwoven into the story. I hadn't asked for the dog, I took him as a favor for my best friend. He had always been a creepy dog, nothing like the purebreds I bought as puppies. Sometimes he would just stare and stare at me and sometimes I had the thought that he was possessed or had been human in a past life. I realized then, that he was more than just a dog. When things started getting intense he literally stared at me all day long. After the awakening, he got so sick I decided that week to have him put to sleep. I had to hire an excavator for some plumbing work, and I had the man dig a grave for me under an old apple tree. The very next morning he passed away on his own. There was a lot of shadow work dealing with the repression of my Christian upbringing. I realized that I was figuratively a whore all along regardless of how pure I had been and I realized the significance of Mary Magdalene being a whore. Verses I had always understood were understood on an even deeper level. Matthew 5:27-28 27 “You have heard that it was said to those of old, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ 28 But I say to you that whoever looks at a woman to lust for her has already committed adultery with her in his heart. I had the insights of how psychedelics are themselves a trope, a thought, an element of the story and my reasons for judging them so harshly were gone. It couldn't really be possible to take something external when everything is you. How I had benefited from other's use of psychedelics! My bizarre experience of sort of tapping into Leo's "Enlightenment Experience Happening In Real Time" live video and having been in a near bliss state for hours after made sense. Months before this I had really started disagreeing with Leo's videos. A little part of me felt guilty coming to his forum and using his website when I so disagreed with his approach. I basically came to the forum to try to help set people straight because I was concerned that he was deluding people and I was concerned that people were ruining their lives with psychedelics. Whenever I saw his picture on the homepage I was disgusted. I finally understood how incredibly valuable and integral his work had been for me, how the forum had been. I had given Eckhart Tolle all the credit, but never fully appreciated Leo. I made the connection between Leo and the symbol of a lion. My shadow work started getting religious. I fully understood what the Devil was. He was truly part of me, part of my psyche, part of oneness. Leo had made me intellectually understand and accept this fact, but you can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink. I was Voldemort, I was the White Witch in The Chronicles of Narnia, the books that made me start believing in Jesus as a lion, as a kid and helped me reconcile Christianity and my deep love of nature. There's something associated with me, an area code that is 666. As a Christian I was always horribly embarrassed about this. Now I understood how fitting and how funny it had been. Jesus came back into my life. If my own life and memories were just a story what was Jesus? I understood communion, "you must eat the body of Christ." The hamburger I had for lunch became a "holy cow" and the body of Christ. Nonduality and oneness gave this a whole new meaning. Other smaller revelations and synchronicity fell into place. Then, on my 666th post, I was awake. My third eye had opened to synchronicity and insight before the awakening. Now my heart chakra was open. It felt completely light, like it had lost its physical substance. In my sleep I felt weightless. I started manically posting on the forum, professing my love for everyone. I was literally high on life. My vision changed, literally. It was like a scene in a movie when everything is enchantingly bathed in light, that's how I saw. The picture on Leo's homepage changed and I saw the honest love in his eyes. I could scroll Facebook and love and see the beauty in every single face I saw as if it were my child's. I went to the beach where you can find fossils if you spend a lot of time looking. I would have the insight to turn a rock over and it would be covered in fossils. As a normally extremely shy person, I lost all shyness and inhibition in conversation and I became magnetic and always had the right thing to say to strangers. My balance became perfect, and I could walk across any surface without tripping as long as I was focused. I had to drive somewhere in slippery dangerous snow and spent the entire drive in a bliss state knowing that I could never die. My mind had been blown open. It felt like there was space between my eyes that didn't exist. If I looked at a tree or my baby niece I would feel the space expand or tingle. I understood hidden meanings in symbols and signs. Things people said to me often felt channeled. I realized the importance of my dreams and how dreams had shaped my entire life, including dictating who I fell in love with. Devilry set in. Everything I had been repressing for so long was coming through. I had been very tight with money for years, and I bought myself a new wardrobe, books, tarot cards, anything I wanted without a second thought. My conversations with men online weren't considerate to my husband or appropriate. I had been repressing my femininity ashamed of all the girly things I'd always loved, letting society make me think they were silly or insignificant. At the same time repressing my own feminine power. I was very confused between believing that everyone was already enlightened and just had been waiting for me to catch up to them and feeling like "the chosen one." My American patriotism I'd had as a child hit me full force and I realized that I had repressed gratitude for my country in an attempt to be politically correct. Other insights came from this. After the devilry played out, I had a religious revival. I did not want to live a life of devilry and didn't know what else to do. I was scared of myself. I realized that people like Charles Manson had also been awake. So I said "Jesus take the wheel." Like with my lack of appreciation for Leo, I had not fully appreciated how far Christianity had taken me on my spiritual path. I even started praying again. Then I discovered Ramji and his understanding of levels of enlightenment. This explained so much, it explained the stages I went through, the devilry I fell into, and it fully explained my religious revival. "if you meet Buddha on the road, kill him." It's very easy to misinterpret realizations and how they should be embodied after the fact. As the effects of the awakening died down I started meditating and found that it grounded me. I continued to return to the place where the doctor's house had been and I dug deeply into his history. His house had burned down when my Grammie was 20. He died a few months before she was born. She died days after I found the remains of his house, a month before the awakening. Visiting her had always made me incredibly sleepy. I always thought that it was because she was boring but it was uncanny how strong the effect was. Her parents were buried two lots away from his grave, not one had ever told me that they buried in that cemetery. I found a piece of glass that had been part of the highest window in his house and made it into a tear shaped necklace. To this day I find little signs there and I enter states and places where everything is channeled and fits into place of a greater story. Over the months I made many connections between his history and symbolism. I met a woman at the place by the river and she had a very old pug dog that my daughter played with. A week or so later someone donated a photo album to the historical society and it had lots of pictures of the doctor's pug. There are several old apple trees on his property and just about every old abandoned place I go around town. Years ago when I first moved here, there was an active graffiti artist around. On a telephone pole they painted the word forever and right before the telephone pole was an apple tree that had been broken off by a storm. That summer the apple tree flowered and bore apples as if nothing had ever happened to it with the word "forever" in the background. In the winter before I discovered the remains of the doctor's house, a small fox ran across my path while I was running right by there. I discovered fox holes in the woods by the cemetery later. This summer I went up the steps to the platform and on the other side feet from me was the fox. We both ran away from each other. Later, when I went back I found the remains of a white rabbit, a huge pile of fur and just one foot. The white rabbit from Alice in Wonderland comes to mind. There have been too many signs and strange connections like this to mention, strange apple trees, mushrooms, trees with eyes. Time in nature has become like a psychedelic trip for me. If I get the inclination to go somewhere, I do. I looked a lot into the history of witchcraft and the use of poisonous plants including nightshade as a hallucinogens. The nightshade plant that the crows planted on the doctor's grave was purely symbolic. To me psychedelics and poison are a trope, a symbol, a pointer. Death without physical death. The color red became very symbolic and kept coming up again and again and again since the awakening. The story "The Scarlet Ibis" that I had loved from highschool came to mind. I read it again, understanding the allegory and symbolism and in the end was stunned that Doodle's body is found under a red nightshade bush. Elements of stories that I grew up with like the poison apple in Snow White, living in the forest, falling asleep and being woken up, all came alive in my own life. Everything is channeled. There are pointers everywhere. Just examine what you really love and have always loved or have feared. Write down your deepest desires and fears. Dig up childhood memories, dreams that you haven't forgotten. Write your own story. Hone your intuition and sensitivity. That's how you enter the rabbit hole. It's all up to you, how far do you want to go? We have free will, we ate from the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil and were kicked out of paradise. It's not just a story. We were split between male and female, God and the Devil, good and bad, past and future. We gained the ability to intellectually understand, remember and plan. We gained the ability to tell stories. Instead of living life with the heart we lived split between the heart and the mind. By opening the heart, you open your mind. Open your eyes and ears and understanding to the love that makes up this phenomenon of us. We are all born with unique gifts. Some are born with hearts open and some with sharp minds. Enlightenment is about combining the potential and duality of the two. The power of love was always fully awake and alive but I didn't have wisdom and I didn't know how to control or channel it for good. I read Proverbs as a kid and ever since I always prayed to God for wisdom. Passion and wisdom are the perfect match made in heaven. But one without the other creates a sort of hell. We live and write a story that never ends. There's no rising above the drama, only seeing it in a different light. It's not personal, it's not OUR story, it's OUR story. The show must go on. Embrace it, enjoy it, become it, savor it. It's beautiful, delicious and a tiny bit poisonous. Take the apple.

I'm sorry to hear that it was disappointing. We are still pioneers, so I think going to psychotherapy is a total crap shoot but well worth trying. I mentioned in the past that my shadow work took me by surprise and happened channeled in the middle of the night in the journal section on this forum. Parts of it were probably irresponsible and inappropriate although at the time nothing was stopping that train. So it's probably not a model that can be replicated, but here's what I gleaned from the experience. I wrote out my life story, not just things that I thought were traumatic but also things that I loved my entire life and didn't really think much about. There were certain symbols that I had been attracted to. I had a barrage of insights that came with a force of energy that only allowed me to sleep in chunks of a 2 or 3 hours. My dream dissolved into LOUD insights that played through my head until I wrote them down. The key thing is that they all happened to me while I was looking from a perceptive of an outsider, hysterically laughing or crying tears of release at the absurd story of my life but at the same time with a very strong compassionate love. It was as if I was the author of my life, in fact the theme of my favorite childhood books especially Harry Potter came up quite a lot. I saw that there was no duality between my own history, or fantasy. I also really needed someone to listen. Not only did I highly respect this person to begin with, the feelings that arose in a mystical state went way deeper to dissolve the duality between him and me.

You know the cliche, "God doesn't give you more than you can handle?" I wonder if it applies to awakenings and trips. How did the ear ringing resolve, did you find a reason behind why that happened? @cle103 I'm not sure if this suggestion is helpful but I thought I would through it out there. I had an awakening without the use of psychedelics, following it I had a lot on my plate to integrate. When I felt the need to I tried on a few occasions to go on literal trips that scared me. Going into the woods in the middle of the night, that sort of thing. The whole theme before and after was dealing with fear. It presented in some pretty strange ways. If you have sort of tied together in your mind psychedelics and fear it may help to separate the two. Just be smart and stay safe.

Tim Ferriss just shared the work of this artist. Very channeled. https://www.instagram.com/danielpopper/ I made an impromptu video. It's shot on Pomroy's platform and when I got home I identified the caterpillar. It's an American Dagger moth caterpillar and it has poisonous spines. I had an impulse to go back to the little park lately and on the milkweed there were all kinds of monarch caterpillars. Me and my daughter kidnapped a couple. One made a chrysalis on the chair arm in my porch. It really has metallic gold spots. I can't believe how blind I was before to the magic of nature, how busy I was with work to see it.

WHEN I READ THE BOOK. Walt Whitman WHEN I read the book, the biography famous, And is this, then, (said I,) what the author calls a man’s life? And so will some one, when I am dead and gone, write my life? (As if any man really knew aught of my life; Why, even I myself, I often think, know little or nothing of my real life; 5 Only a few hints—a few diffused, faint clues and indirections, I seek, for my own use, to trace out here.)