axiom

Thanks Leo, I hear you. The proof is in the eating. The glimpse of God that I’ve had thus far has already been life changing, but I hope to try the above at some point over the next year or two. Takes a bit of mental preparation though. Like a skydive from the edge of space.

I think to a reasonable extent, the merits of this substance or that substance are a factor of the baseline level of one's consciousness, how integrated they already are, how high they are in trait openness etc. I would not discard mushrooms necessarily as being "too twisted". I think there is some nuance here that may be useful to explore. The specific boiling temperature of anything becomes irrelevant if you hurl it into the sun. It sounds like the 5MEO type substances propel most people to a particular place regardless of their pre-existing spiritual "level", but - and I'm just speculating here - cooking one's mind at 27 million degrees celsius might not allow for nuance. What if we consider that, for some people, mushrooms or LSD or even meditation on its own can facilitate full God realisation just like 5MEO - as well as deliver more nuanced, more interesting experiences - where other comparably valuable, or even more valuable, realisations may be had? I would not discard this possibility by immediately postulating, for example, that "nuance is inherently dualistic". I can understand the temptation here, but that seems like a Wittgensteinian language game. Now, I'm very open to the idea that seeing God as oneself is the "most advanced" or "highest" state. But I also think that suggesting one knows this to be the case (due to direct experience) may be unwise. Infinity, after all, must have infinite capacity to deceive experientially. Mandelbrot fractals come to mind. When we zoom in to a fractal, there are times when things seem relatively empty. If we keep zooming in, we encounter areas of high complexity. After a while we begin to realise that there is a perpetual vacillation of sorts between highly complex and simple / elementary states. I see this as a parallel to notions of non duality and duality. Is one "a higher state" or "more real" state than the other? Or, when dealing with infinity must we also deal with an infinite number of infinitely convincing misapprehensions? Essentially I think that all substances, and all states of mind, have things to teach us about reality. I think the "highest state" may itself turn out to be illusory. ... Disclaimer: I have yet to try 5MEO...

I think that you can take some of the wisdom imparted by direct experience of God and use it to improve your life at the relative human level, absolutely. For example, striving to embody love and compassion as much as you possibly can as a human; or completely forgiving everyone who has ever hurt you, no matter what they've done - because you realise that their actions were borne out of not truly knowing love. What you can't do, in my opinion, is circumscribe God itself using words. And that's what you've asked for here. This is like trying to paint something white using only black paint (you seem to know this in any case). If you had asked instead what the biggest lessons were that people have learned from their revelations of God (I think this might actually be your question, in fact) then I reckon you'd have had some more satisfying responses.

I think you're wrong about this, personally.

As Leo has suggested, 'infinity' may be the closest word we have. Other words or phrases that would be equally true: "God is everything" "God is love". This one is not only true, it looks better on those signs you get outside churches. It's more tangible to many to say "God is love" than "God is infinity". "God is a glass of water" (I'm picturing Michael Craig Martin's famous 'Oak Tree' artwork here with the different title, "God") But the thing is, you know already that words are not IT. You might as well ask yourself instead what smell best approximates God, or what sound best approximates God. For some reason I've always quite liked the smell of petrol, but I'm under no illusions there. The ego's efforts to circumscribe reality are always doomed to fail. As Godel discovered, any self-referential system of logic at some point encounters its own shortcomings, or its own finitude. There always exists a bigger system which better encapsulates the truth. Forever. Buzz Lightyear puts it pretty well: "To infinity and beyond!" I'm not sure what happened to Buzz Lightyear. But remember, Godel starved himself to death.

Thank you very much for the tips, sincerely appreciated. I've been sceptical in the past regarding tea eliminating the nausea, but I've heard it enough now that I'll definitely make tea next time... if I ever get the guts to go so deep again. For clarity, it was a 6g trip though: 2.75 + .75 + probably 2.5 or so later (when I was irresponsibly munching them like candy). I think my spacing-out of dosages probably didn't help with the loopiness or the sense of madness. But I certainly had a complete breakthrough at some point - in that I lost all memory of being human for a long while and just became mind or experience itself. I sometimes wonder if I was literally there for a million years... but when you're extruded across dimensions of unfathomable scale I guess the notion of "time" becomes irrelevant.

For a good while after the trip I felt completely healed... it definitely did something at a very deep level. Essentially I realised that all of the pain and trauma in my life stemmed from a lack of love. A lack of feeling loved in particular, and probably a lack of giving love. Once God showers you with infinite love, such that it's filling your entire being, such that it burns you up completely in its intensity... such that you can be left in zero doubt that you are LOVED, this destroys the very root of all the pain. Knowing via revelation that someone or something (God) cares deeply about you no matter how much you fuck up / have fucked up in life, helps you to characterise the past very differently. It also leads to making very different decisions in life. In a nutshell, you're able to recognise that all of the misery and apparent evil or wrong-doing in the world stems from a lack of knowing love on some level. This makes you want to give others the same gift of unbridled compassion, forgiveness and love, whatever the circumstances may be, and to the best of your ability as a human. Love is liberation, and it has become clear to me that this idea goes deeper than anyone can imagine.

The intensity of the 6g experience was truly terrifying, but not in a sinister way - more in the sense that it's just terrifying to feel the sheer infinite power of God's love and compassion. This can be "felt" probably irrespective of whether you reach the stage of recognising God as yourself. I imagine that particular (final?) revelation might be enough to destroy some people... as in, it could be too much to take on board. I think I would like to take the step, but I'm not completely sure. In any case the decision has been made for me to some extent, as it's very difficult to find any of the relevant 5MEOs where I live.

And yet, I'm not sure. I think they revealed something to me that other psychedelics might not. Amidst all that madness were some truly profound revelations. Even if the souls I met there are essentially me, I actually miss them. I miss the place. I feel it deep down and sometimes it can make me quite emotional. I believe it's possible that I directly witnessed the creation of souls in the mind of God... forms, duality itself, at the moment of inception. Whatever it was, it was more "real" than real.

The question is, would you prefer to be a relatively comfortable, relatively boring but at least sane human, or strive to embody this God-realisation? God created the illusion of otherness for a reason. Knowing the truth doesn't remove the conditioning of the human body and human mind. You ask what you should do with "all your love"? Give it. Give it to yourself. Truth can't really be embodied in its entirety for long without feeling like you've gone insane. Your ability to relate to "others" (in ways that might be emotionally important to you) can be fairly diminished if you achieve permanent insanity Our appetite for truth is perverse, yet insatiable. Be careful with this gift.

It's pretty hard to gauge success. In absolute terms, true success is complete acceptance of God (or of oneself as God), complete embodiment of love. In relative terms, everything falls short of this, naturally. So we search endlessly for the closest approximations of pure love that we can find. Of course, our materialistic efforts can't ever give us absolute fulfilment in this respect. so we keep on searching, searching, searching. I would be considered very wealthy even by western standards. But a lot of what got me to that point has also been the cause of much suffering in my life; namely developing an extremely analytical mind (i.e. a mind focused on finding errors and problems), along with an attitude that I need to somehow prove myself to be worthy of admiration... or love, ultimately. A total awakening experience on 6g psilocybin showed me that all the seeking, yearning and craving was entirely due to this lack of feeling loved in my life - in my childhood in particular. For most of my life, I sought to fill this emptiness by trying to become wealthy, or trying to get respect from peers, or going through an endless number of meaningless relationships. The 20-year-old me would have looked at the 35-year-old me and thought "wow, he's a success!". The 35-year-old me didn't feel like that at all. Meeting God and directly experiencing the agony / ecstasy of infinite love has changed all that. It has actually burned away a lot of ephemeral, unfulfilling desires. The moral of the story is... be careful how you gauge success. In some cases that means don't underestimate yourself. In others - and I'm thinking mostly of those people who are ignorant of God here - it means don't count your chickens. Ask yourself how much love you embody in your life, and that right there is your starting point.

A lot of this can come naturally with practice over time. The visual stuff will probably melt away as you approach more subtle states of mind. Frustration due to slow progress will itself hinder your progress, unfortunately. Remember that Vipassana is the art of equanimity - that means no biases, no frustrations. Perfect equanimity allows you to transcend the body. God, or God consciousness, is a state of no biases. You can't really force it, since this is the opposite of equanimity. In any case, here are some things to consider: 1. How is your diet? Eating as cleanly as possible can improve focus, and helps to move attention away from the gross sensations of the body. 2. Once you've mastered keeping your eyes still (this will happen unintentionally at first), try to nudge things in this direction a little more when you are scanning. Moving your eyes around during Vipassana keeps reinstating the idea of the body, or a map of the body, in your mind. 3. If you're sitting very comfortably during Vipassana to the extent you are perfectly comfortable for the entire hour, try to get a little less comfortable. It can help with practicing equanimity. 4. If over the course of the hour, you find that you move slightly, even if it's just a finger twitching, then that's definitely something worth trying to improve. The idea is to completely lose awareness of the body because you haven't moved it *at all*. You probably know that already if you practice Vipassana, but it's one of the most difficult parts of the practice. Just mastering this alone can give you some amazing results. Hope that's of some use...

Moreover, all measurements (of reality / infinity) are incorrect because a) they are measurements; and b) all measurements are reductionist in nature. Georg Cantor essentially proved this - it is what drove him insane. The same with Godel. It turns out that infinity cannot ever be circumscribed by the finite. It's a fruitless task. You cannot package and constrain infinity within any finite logical system. This is also illustrated in Zeno's paradoxes. In Godel Escher Bach, Douglas Hofstadter refers to Achilles and the Tortoise. If the tortoise is given a head-start of 50% of the race, Achilles must first cover that distance. By the time he reaches the tortoise's starting position, the tortoise has moved on. Achilles must then cover that distance as well. He never actually catches the tortoise because all distances are, in reality, infinite. You can zoom in and keep subdividing distances forever. So it is with time. So it is with everything we try to measure. In the relative human form, measurements are useful tools. Just don't take them literally if your goal is apprehending reality or truth.

As Thomas Campbell says in MBT (I'm paraphrasing here to make it more comprehensible): Time organises and optimises the flow of imagination, in that it allows it to operate with improved low-entropy efficiency. In much the same way, ordering a library alphabetically makes it easier to find and/or replace books. As consciousness / God / or AUO (Absolute Unbounded Oneness) evolves, it continually hunts for the lowest entropy state to maximise its own efficiency. Thus, time is a construct of mind which is always making efforts towards self-preservation / low entropy states. As far as notions of causality and/or creation being "impossible" without time, tell that to an entangled photon.

I will never know if I came back to the same reality. It feels like I did, but I think it would feel that way whichever reality I returned to. No, I didn’t miss human life while I was gone. While I was there, I had no memory of ever being human. No memory of Earth, no memory of people. At least, as far as I can remember..!

@Muhammad Jawad Yes, I completely forgot I was a human. I mean, it’s very hard to describe this stuff. But essentially I discovered that I was never really a human to begin with. Ego death = complete destruction of your reality and you in that reality. So yeah, I was gone. I was something else entirely. I wasn’t even “I”. Yes, it literally felt like thousands of years… but this is difficult to answer. Time in the infinite realm and time in the relative realm work very differently. There isn’t really any linear time in the infinite realm. It’s more like the y axis of the present moment is extended to infinity. It didn’t take me days to recover use of my arms and legs etc. It took probably a couple of hours (of relative time) to fully regain control, although I was able to wobble around on jelly legs with some level of control after 20 minutes or so. My legs were actually moving without any conscious input whatsoever from me for a while. When I came around I was pacing in the corner of the room. At that point I was watching my human body doing it’s thing, but as a passive observer - not consciously connected to the body at all. As far as recreating reality on my return, there were actually three distinct realities it felt like I could have returned to. In one, I was in a hospital bed having tried to commit suicide (this never happened) after a very traumatic breakup (this did happen) ten years ago. In that reality, I was coming around from a coma and a family member was holding my hand. It felt real, but I was very disorientated at this point. As I lay in the hospital bed, other potential realities presented themselves. Through all of the different realities, the one consistency was that *someone* was holding my hand. I kept asking who was holding my hand as it kept changing every five minutes or so. Ultimately the reality I came back to was this one. The one where I’m now typing this Maybe I could have ended up somewhere else. I don’t really know. I can’t pinpoint any moment of choosing.

Meister Eckhart is also a very interesting European figure in this respect.

It sounds like it... but hard to say. There are variables to consider. So for example, as a 6ft / 185cm male with a very traumatic past (somewhat well integrated these days) who weighs 168 lbs / 76.2 kilos, I experienced profound ego death, truly infinite love (an absolutely terrifying and humbling but also deeply healing experience) and the mandala of "heaven" by taking approx 5.5 grams of cracker-dry Golden Teacher mushrooms on an empty stomach, wearing a blindfold and listening to the ICL psilocybin playlist. I remember distinctly approaching it from the outset with a sort of "take me, I'm ready" mindset. That might have helped a bit too. I met millions of other souls... we were all part of the mandala. I became fused with all of them... I became the mandala. I also saw how distinct souls and humans are imagined / created in the mind of God. On leaving that place - it really felt like my true home - I was left with a sense of profound sadness. In our relative and finite form we have been specifically designed to forget (i.e. infinity cannot be circumscribed by the finite). It was like saying goodbye to my true family... the source of all love, infinite encouragement and compassion... knowing that amnesia will kick in because I'm not supposed to remember. And it has. I only remember scant details. I remember the feelings more than anything else. But I also know that that place is always there, waiting. I definitely experienced the madness and disorientation on the return. Actually I was deeply shocked to remember that I was a human being as I had been away for what felt like thousands of years. It took a while to figure out how to use my arms and legs etc as I had forgotten what they were. Hope that helps.

Not being scared of death in the first place of course helps... but it can take many decades of meditative practice, or severe trauma, to reach that level of consciousness. Noone asks for severe trauma of course, but it has enormous capacity to raise one's baseline level of consciousness (easily as well as decades of meditation imo) when / if the lessons become well integrated. That said... in terms of psychedelics, you can get pretty practical about ego death by considering your substance and dosage relative to your baseline level of consciousness. The dosage of mushrooms required to instantiate ego death may often lead to feelings of madness and terror later in the trip. This is pretty normal for mushrooms in particular... they speak to you in an alien language. You can pretty much sidestep any of the fighting and terror on the come-up by taking a large enough dose. The come-down is another matter... It might be considered the price of entry. There isn't really any way around feeling some level of shock, madness and disorientation when you remember that you're a human being. This is why trip sitters on mushrooms are a good idea.

It's not illegal to possess 5MEO DMT in the UK AFAIK, but suppliers are rightly wary of the UK. it is illegal (as of fairly recently) to import any psychoactive substances (including research chemicals that are later found to be psychoactive) into the UK. Whatever you're thinking of doing, bear in mind there is up to a 6-12 month prison sentence for importing.

As I see it, "Who am I?" has the ultimate goal of pointing individuals to the realisation that "they" have as much personal agency as any other imagined atom in the imagined universe.

1. By all means you might do this, but it would not be a choice. God's will supersedes notions of human free will. Something that does not really exist cannot have its own will. 2. Law of attraction: What's really going on here is heightened awareness, not some manipulation of outcomes at the human level. You might think "you" are doing something, but you are merely witnessing.

Efforts to circumscribe truth using language can be taken quite seriously. Yet no expressed insights can ever really be true, since language is symbolic and finite. The best we can ever do is muddle along expressing varying degrees of falsehood.

I think the real answers are: What? God. Why? God (try it, you might like it)

Are you familiar with the "Maybe" Zen parable? I think that relates to this quite nicely. I've included it below: The infinite mind of God cannot be understood from the relative level. Perfection unfolding will often look pretty messy from down here. We cannot circumscribe infinity within a finite boundary. So to return to your question: "Why is God dreaming of itself in this particular way?" - This must be directly experienced (God consciousness) to be understood... and this complete understanding (the infinite) can never be brought back to ordinary human-level consciousness (the finite).