impulse9

When it happens, you won't have that question. The question itself is born from ignorance and the desire to separate things into categories. You're trying to imagine what enlightenment is like from an unenlightened vantage point.

You tell them what they want to hear.

Not to take away from your insights - which seem genuine - but my default position on this is aligned with one of my favorite quotes from Castaneda books: "The world is incomprehensible. We won’t ever understand it; we won’t ever unravel its secrets. Thus we must treat the world as it is: a sheer mystery."

I've thought about this as a kid. It was, and still is, perfectly logical to me that without an observer the universe can't exist, because who would verify its existence? Saying "the universe doesn't exist" and "the universe exists, but there's no observers" are actually semantically the same exact sentence, it's just that our syntax is playing games on us. Obviously a universe without an observer is the same as a non-existing universe.? Basically, there is no good way to internalize this logically. The universe didn't start, nor will it end, because the universe has no use for such concepts as beginnings and ends. It exists now, and this now is eternal, and there's no beginnings, no ends, and no past and no future, those are pure fiction that we were programmed with over the course of our lives.

Beautifully put.

A decade or so ago I had a very potent mushroom trip where I basically got the information that they're both true, which mindfucks me to this day but it also makes perfect sense. Both are true, everything in your life is calculated and predetermined down to the last fine detail to the point where everything is perfectly known, you have no free will and you're guided through life by a force. And at the very same time, everything in your life is perfectly random, you're the one making decisions and nothing about your life will or can ever be known. The two sides go together like the in and out. It's extraordinarily paradoxical but I accepted this as a resolution then and it hasn't bothered me since.

Sounds about right.

Most people just aren't at the stage that's necessary to prioritize spiritual development over anything else.

Chess is a great example of the dance between simplicity and complexity. It's a deeply philosophical game and can teach us many things if we open ourselves to it.

I wonder what your thoughts are on satori, or sudden awakening. It seems counterintuitive that one should be able to zoom right past all the work straight into the enlightened state, yet there's many accounts where this exact occurrence took place.

When an enlightened person walks through the forest, the grass makes way.

I've been on a vegetarian diet for nearly two decades, and have been experimenting with veganism from time to time, sometimes for a few months, other times for a few weeks. On the basis of how incredibly good I feel after vegan food, I'd say veganism is an extremely good diet and I would likely fully commit to it if I ate alone 100% of the time. You should probably take B12 supplements if you're doing vegan diet though. I haven't really read the full thread but my take on it is that an extremely advanced civilization would have no need for meat. That said, I don't really argue about it because it never leads anywhere. I think people should eat what they think is best for them.

I would try escaping this type of mindset by being grateful. For anything. If you have a table, great, be grateful for that table and try to feel and meditate on this feeling of gratitude. Then move to anything else that you have that you can be grateful for, whether it's physical or otherwise. I know it sounds cliche. But it is actually very helpful. Might jolt you out of that corrosive mindset. Best of luck

One thing I can criticize is his insistence that enlightened masters who don't tell you literally all of everything haven't reached "full enlightenment" yet, and therefore don't understand reality on a sufficient level to be noteworthy. Just because a master doesn't tell you about machine elves, strange loops and you being god, that doesn't mean they're not fully aware of the true scope of things and the true depth of reality. The reason for staying silent on these issues is twofold, first, you don't want to disturb quote unquote normal people, because everyone on the unenlightened side of things is doing a very delicate dance and balancing it out perfectly. If you fill their minds with esoteric knowledge they are liable to misunderstand it or misuse it which can knock them off balance. They need to be gently and correctly guided to truth instead by removing concepts instead of adding them. And second, they are perfectly aware that this knowledge cannot be simply downloaded into English or some other human language, so what would be the point of discussing it anyway? Experiencing it is the way, and the only way. There's a reason why this knowledge is often called "hidden knowledge". It's because no matter how much you describe it, you can't do it justice. Truth of reality is subtle and extraordinary, and while talking about the most potent truths can be engaging and fun, it can never lead to truth. Each master, if they're a real master, has a certain game they play and I have no doubt that some can influence you just by being close to you physically and if their game is subtlety, then that should be respected. After all the truth of reality is subtle and often read between the lines. That's not to say there's not a lot of phony gurus out there, I just think everyone who doesn't teach the highest esoteric knowledge should be immediately discarded as one. You can recognize a great master when they teach in such a way that their teaching is relevant on both the lowest and the highest level of student's spiritual development. Same words with different contexts can have drastically different effects. Don't get me wrong though, have been a fan for years. Much love

I think one zen koan is about flowers and how even the gods don't know who made them.

The funniest trips I ever had were where the world morphed into an over-caricatured cartoon, so maybe there's something to it. ;-)

@acidgoofy He repeatedly mentions in his talks that at some point he was giving his guru doses that would flatten out a normal human and incapacitate him for 2 days, and he wasn't affected. If you believe this story it's up to you though. @Rilles Well, if you don't believe in these so-called guru superpowers, I don't blame you. It sound goofy to an extent. However based on my own experiences I believe that very strange things can and do happen and I don't find a guru with a superpower or two to be outside of things that are possible in this world.

@DLH I like this explanation. Don Juan in Castaneda books repeatedly refers to the whole point of the practice being "speeding up" your awareness so that you can See with a capital S. In my view, psychedelics are a VERY good starting point for most people, because they will show you, rather than tell you, how wrong everything you essentially believe in, is. However I firmly believe that past a certain point they shouldn't be used because you are essentially using a tool rather than mastering yourself. The overpowering feeling I get when pondering all this is that enlightenment comes when it wants to, and not when you want it.

Every movie is high consciousness when viewed with a high perspective. :-)

@Someone here Alan Watts also said that the reason you want to be improved is that you aren't. How is the self that is not improved going to do the improvement?

I often get into very strange states of mind by pondering on the idea that I exist at all. It is incalculably weird that I, or anything else, exists.

I don't know what the way is, lady Salvia wasn't specific LOL. And I'm not criticizing psychedelics, I'm criticizing the idea that they can be used as a vehicle for enlightenment. It is literally just another form of attachment, therefore it will lead to suffering.

Language really messes us up. Consider a world without language of any kind. In this world "meaning of life" is a useless mouth noise, or a bunch of irrelevant symbols. The reason you ask is because you don't know. Knowing is when you don't need the question.

Your reality and everything you consider to be "real", is you. "What you think, you become" isn't a metaphor, it's the fundamental principle. Placebo is simply becoming what you think, in action.

He is correct, you will never find enlightenment using any sort of substance. You may find glimpses of enlightenment, and you will definitely widen your perspective significantly, but the ego will always come back to haunt you, make your life miserable, and make you forget who you are. This is inevitable because the power that you borrow when you take psychedelics is temporary. This becomes immediately evident when no matter how deep your insights on psychedelics are, you will forget 100% of everything the second you come off, and only the residual feeling will linger on, but you will forget the actual insight because you can't humanize it, you can't English it, and you can't fit it into human logic, so the ego has no ground to stand on. The best use for psychedelic is as a tool to break down egos that are so solidified and so cemented in place that any other method of trying to probe them will fail. This is what Don Juan did to Castaneda. At some point he stopped using psychedelics and literally said "from here on, those are useless". With enough power, you can enter those worlds and beyond, on your own with your own power. I typically love your content Leo but when you say "these gurus are full of bullshit and high on their own dogmas" you fail to realize that the same holds for you. Ram Dass mentioned in a lot of his talks how he gave his guru ridiculous doses of LSD to see what happens, and nothing ever did. His guru supposedly just said "oh, these give you siddhis, right?", smiled and went on about his business. This baffled Ram Dass to no end but in the end he settled for the simple explanation "if you're in Cleveland, you don't need to take a bus to Cleveland". The fundamental truth of psychedelics is they are powerful entities which you can -borrow- power from to have essentially power experiences, in other words magic experiences. If this power isn't yours, then the experience is a passing phase and you will never get the point. If you over-do it, all that is liable to happen is it will make you mad by tearing your sense of identity apart. But this isn't enlightenment, enlightenment is out of this world, quite literally. And the reason these gurus don't talk about truths you find with psychedelics is because gurus have to treat everyone as kids. I've smoked a potent Salvia extract a number of times in my life, and by far the most insightful experience was when lady Salvia whispered into my ear that "this isn't the way". It is a good light show though.