axiom

Great wisdom here.

All love comes from God, from the collapse of apparent distinctions. Absolute love is the death of all distinctions. You could say that love and death are really the same thing. If you think about when your illusory self "falls in love" with another illusory self (say another human, but could also be a thing), the love you feel is a function of the collapse of apparent distinctions. For example, feeling like you have a lot in common with someone. Or feeling like they really get you, that they're on your wavelength. So in this way, all love is self love. It is the extent to which you recognise yourself as the other. It is the extent to which you have approached God / oneness. At the level of God consciousness, it is the recognition that there is no other to begin with, and there never was. It is all God. There are no distinctions, no separations. There is only the appearance of such. Have you ever noticed how seeking (anything) always leaves you unfulfilled? Finding something or getting something provides a breadcrumb of satisfaction, but seeking begins again shortly thereafter. As a person, there is no end to seeking. Seeking keeps the illusion alive that there is something to seek, that there is something outside of yourself. This never works to one's ultimate satisfaction because there is only, in reality, one. Seeking enlightenment, for example, is an oxymoron. Maybe the ultimate oxymoron. The whole search is a lot like looking past your own nose.

I'm not so sure that dream characters have agency. The dream universe appears to be comprised of deterministic cause and effect relationships; and dream characters, being part of the substance of the dreamworld, appear to follow these same mechanics of Determinism. I certainly would agree that within the dream your avatar can plug some dreamed 5-MEO DMT, and it may shock you (as God) enough to wake you up. A bit like how getting stabbed in a dream can sometimes wake you up. But that says nothing as to the involvement of any degree of agency in that process. There is the illusion of agency, sure. There is the illusion of being able to act independently of all the cause and effect relationships of the apparent universe. But in reality, like everything that seems to exist here, we seem to be bound by the same dreamed physical laws. P.S. I'm open minded about this. I'm just not sure what agency looks like in what appears to be an entirely deterministic dream universe.

It seems ironic to me, because a dream character cannot pull itself up by its own bootstraps. Any effort expended by the dream character (or seemingly expended by the dream character) keeps the illusion of the dream character going. It feeds the finite energy of that character. In order for God to wake up to itself, the dream character must be suspended. Any and all "effort" must be entirely stopped. This typically takes the form of death, ego death, or spontaneous lucidity with no apparent cause (as God, you can become lucid in the dream). It seems to me that as such, there is nothing that can be "done" to wake up, barring in-dream lucidity as God. The dream characters have no agency, so cannot in themselves affect the dream nor the waking up from the dream. Events seem to occur in a certain order.... but ultimately it either happens or it does not.

And yet, ironically, they are experiencing it right now. I'm not sure "effort" as such works. Things appear, but there is no separate individual there to be able to do anything or become anything.

Striving hard to achieve something "important" to you, or planning your life around the avoidance of pain. Strongly identifying with yourself as an individual. BUT... On the relative level, up to a point, you could say exactly the reverse. The spiritual path is uncompromising and not for everyone.

I tend to think it's something to do with God / Infinity being engaged in a game of infinite self-improvement. Infinite purification of perfect love. Anti-fragility.

At the relative level such as you currently imagine it and describe it, there appears to be more than one mind, to you.

Suffering is simply to be separated from God / infinity. Humans spend their lives trying to reclaim that sense of absolute completeness and oneness with God, because the memory of what we truly are is buried deep within us. Believing ourselves to be discreet individual entities, we do this in finite ways which will always fall short. We kid ourselves we'd be 100% happy if we only had the latest iphone, that job we applied for, or if that new cancer treatment "cures" us of terminal disease. While we are human, this playing with finitude keeps us yearning for more, more, more. This is suffering. The only way to satiate this desire completely and finally is to become everything, or rather, to remember that you are everything experientially. This is enlightenment. It is not possible to embody this realisation for any length of time without dying as a human, or without the dream of your human life ending (which is the same thing).

There is no past nor future, so there are no past nor future lives. God is the eternal present. God is everything in the moment. "You" are everyone and everything. Sometimes we might notice this directly, but it's very rare. Think of an X and Y axis (time being 'X'). In our natural state, we are all travelling along X (i.e. travelling in time). We are thus always passing by eternity, and don't generally ever notice it. Perfect focus on the present moment (Y) allows us to dive into the infinite rabbit hole of eternity. In this state (achievable with meditation or with psychedelics) we become infinite. By way of a cliched (yet pretty good) visual metaphor, here's a Mandelbrot Zoom: So, it's not that we reincarnate. It's that we already are everyone and everything. Sometimes the door of perception opens just enough to remind us.

i had a small epiphany the other day relating to romantic love: The recognition that others are you = love. Thus, the extent to which you recognise yourself in "others" is the same thing as your love for them. Think about any time you've ever felt a true love-connection with anyone. It's literally all self-love. The more awake you are, the more of yourself you will see. This may seem obvious to some of you, but I think it's worth a thought next time you're pondering your relationship.

They're both English and well-spoken. But Alan Watts was first. He was a master at distilling the essence of Eastern philosophy, and has never really been matched in this regard as far as I'm aware.

I thought it would be interesting to hear some feedback from people here. This trip was actually 8 months ago. I wrote it all down the following day, as soon as I was able to function again. The after-effects are still with me in the sense that I see God in things sometimes now when completely sober. When this happens, I experience anxiety due to the sheer enormity of it all... but it's an amazing feeling at the same time. Hard to explain. Anyway, here goes: __________ I finally got the guts together to take a high dose of mushrooms. My goal was healing intense trauma from the past, overcoming depression etc. I lay down on my bed with an eyemask and headphones listening to the ICL psilocybin playlist. My original plan was to eat 2.75g (dry weight), and work my way up to a higher dose if it seemed to be unfolding positively. I set my intentions out - healing, love, asked to be helped etc. I specifically asked to be reconnected with my soul. About 40 minutes in, the euphoria was taking hold. Everything was feeling great, so I ate another .75g. I found myself in a sort of forest clearing. Weird little goblin creatures / elves with pale green skin - some with eyes on stalks - were playing peekaboo with me, as they were hiding amongst the trees, vines and bushes. Very playful. They were all welcoming me and giving me the thumbs-up. It felt like they knew me, and I knew them from somewhere too. The euphoria kept building. I'm not sure whether these creatures led me there - I think they did - but the words "the kingdom of heaven" came to my mind fairly quickly. Words utterly defy description of this place... but it dawned on me that I was a soul... that everyone was a soul. This wasn't merely an idea but a directly experienced reality. I saw millions of other souls and what might have been angels, all reaching out their arms to welcome me. The euphoria kept building and I couldn't stop laughing. The laugh started relatively slow, but it grew and it kept growing. The "joke" being unveiled to me was so profound, so ridiculously enormous in its implications that I could barely handle it. It was as if God himself / itself was laughing through me. I was being shown - with absolutely no room for doubt - that God and heaven were 100% real. I felt like I might die of astonishment. I opened my eyes, and with what was left of my human faculties (almost nothing) I somehow managed to fumble with the shroom jar. I picked a few out and started eating them like candy. I was excited by the experience so far and I wanted to prolong it. I don't know how many I ate exactly, but some of them had pretty big caps. I think I must have been approaching around 6g by then. I closed my eyes again and right away I was back in "heaven". I saw some religious iconography and remember thinking it was unbelievable how the actual kingdom of heaven has such similar iconography to that depicted in religious paintings, in churches etc. Our earthly depictions of heaven make a pretty decent job of it. Again, this was a profound joke. It was suddenly so obvious where ecclesiastical imagery comes from - sacred geometry like stained glass. I was being swept along, hanging out with all the other souls and angels. I felt that I was part of them and they were part of me. Everything seemed to be in a higher resolution and in more dimensions than our typical three. The immensity of the power and love of the place was almost impossible to handle. At some point I felt like I had seen the very face of God, and it was looking directly at me. I was writhing around. I felt so unbelievably insignificant and humbled, but I also knew with profound conviction that I was more loved and more understood than I could ever have imagined. I realised that as souls, all of us are children, and we are loved as unconditionally as any parent loves their child. My partner had come in to check on me at this point, and was holding my hand. She was worried I'd been laughing too loud and was disturbing the neighbours. I loudly proclaimed "I don't care about the neighbours", and "you don't understand, I've seen the face of God... it's almost too much to take...you're just a soul... we're all just souls..." I was so overwhelmed that I was in tears. At some point I had fallen on the floor and she was trying to get me to drink a glass of water. I only know this because “I” (my soul?) was actually standing up. Or it seemed that way. An out-of-body experience. I clearly saw my body lying on the floor and I saw her leaning over me, trying to help me. I exclaimed "Oh my God... you won't believe what I'm seeing..." or at least, that's what I thought I said. But all that actually came out of mouth was a long groan. She confirmed this all later. As the trip began to wear off, I intermittently found myself standing up leaning on the chest of drawers in the bedroom with my head resting on my arms. My whole body felt like it was made of jelly, and I kept repositioning my head over and over. How I got there in the first place I have absolutely no idea. My body must have got up from the bed and walked over there without any conscious input. After the trip ended I wondered if I’d imagined that part of it, but my partner confirmed that I had indeed been standing there, leaning on the chest, and moving my legs back and forth restlessly for two hours. During that time, in my experience, I was remembering that I was a human being. I had completely forgotten that I had ever been a human being for what seemed like millions of years. I remember muttering to myself “I’m... I'm a human being...” over and over as I stumbled around, shaking, feeling intense shock at the revelation. I tried to remember how a human body actually worked - arms and legs in particular seemed like very strange appendages. I felt my soul trying to reinhabit my body. This almost-impossible process seemed to take another few thousand years as the room - and time itself - warped and shifted accompanied by waves of nausea. Even with my eyes open I could still see countless angels and souls reaching out to me. They were trying to comfort me perhaps. It seemed they knew I was going back into my human form, so it was as if they were saying goodbye. I felt sad to leave. As my mind reassembled itself I started to panic that I had fucked myself permanently. I felt incredibly sick at this point. "Reality" kept almost coming into focus, but then slipping away again. It seemed like there were several instances of different realities, all equally real, and it could be pot luck which one I ended up in. In one such reality, I had taken an overdose and was lying in a hospital bed. I suddenly realised that I had been so traumatised by my break up ten years ago that I had tried to kill myself (this never happened), and my impression of life ever since had been completely concocted to cope with it all. This meant that the partner I thought I had today was simply a figment of my imagination, which made me sad. “That’s a shame” I thought to myself. “She was really nice.” I was stuck in this superposition-like state for an agonisingly long time. There were brief flashes of full awareness, but they would soon disappear again like a cruel joke. Reality kept shifting from one, to another, to another. I couldn't hold on to my thoughts for long... only enough to consider that I might be stuck in this nightmare forever, and maybe I had destroyed my mind. My partner was lying down next to me at this point holding my hand. I kept asking who was holding my hand every few minutes - as far as I was concerned it might have been anyone from one of the other realities. It was a very bumpy ride to say the least, but the moments where this reality dropped into sharp focus ultimately became longer and more reassuringly crystallised. Eventually I regained full sanity. To say I was relieved would be an understatement. I had never been more grateful to simply be alive, and to be human.

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...