Davino

Try Salvia is the backdoor of death. Psychedelics gave me the insight of death being imaginary or that I was never born. What you see for the most part being explained here. Salvia on the other hand, made me go through the actual process of dying. It feels like you are taking out the heaviest and tighest sock you can imagine. Layer after layer, a energetic onion being peeled, till there is nothing left, and you find yourself being consciousness devoided of content. An extremely traumatic experience, crossing the threshold is the most difficult part, afterwards you'll be fine. It's extremely intense and you cry for your mum, for God to save you, whatever you can imagine to try to hold onto something, yet you are dying, there is nothing to do, nothing at all. You ask yourself what have I been doing all my life, now I am dying and for the first time I'm alive and I'm here, really here, but what is the point I'm dying this it. This feeling still hammers inside me, the unavoidable, unescapable feeling of this is death, I'm dying, this is it...

Leo's booklist will help

If someone is two years into this work and you don't expect them to behave like a human I don't know who is more confused about the workings of reality, that person or yourself. I respect your high level posts but you don't seem to be aware of where is everyone here and usually just talk from the absolutist awakening you've ever had. That's your style and I respect it but just read again your post and think if it would really help anyone in the begginings or the mid part of their path. The answer is clear, no. If you want to have skillfull communications with other individuals in this forum you must take into consideration very seriously what I'm telling you. Otherwise, you might get into territory of those which understand already understand and those which not, will never have a ladder in you communication to do so. This is very well explained in the core teachings of the buddha from Daniel Ingram, in the chapter of teachers. It is explained that spirituality is like a funnel, a part which is wide in the beggining appeling to many people and then gets tight as more advanced the work gets. Different masters teach at different levels. Once may be better at the wider and other at the narrow, some teachers cannot teach the narrow because they haven't even gone there. It's like a university professor vs a kindergarden math teacher. Different strategies work at different moments of the evolutionary process. I'm just saying you that advanced calculus will most likely disgust a child although being more accurate than kindergarden maths. You cannot be teaching advanced calculus to everyone and just expect people to understand it and rise to your level and go on with your speech of how human people are when approaching truth, I mean well yes what do you expect a child to be at? Be more efficient in your communications and talk to each person in a way you will connect and make the message cross his own metal maze. Each mind is like a decoding machine that distorts reality. Sometimes a more inaccurate message will be decoded by a mind into a more congruent message than a more accurate one which will just be distorted in inconprehensible ways for the listener. Just telling you this because I have been there, the approach you are taking will lead you to many frustration and misunderstanding with other people in the forum. I'm as human as I am God. The whole and the part makes perfection. Get this infinite iterative paradox and you will live peacefully.

I hope one day to make sense of Salvia. It's the wildest substance I have ever encountered.

@Princess Arabia A property of infinity. We agree in most things but it's just not funny to talk about what we agree, hence the discussions to push our limits and find truth. Intelligence, understanding or Jnana is not the only path to God but is the one that most people in this forum stick to. Love and surrendering is another path. Industrial yoga and meditation another. One could say that they get the same taste of icecream with a different flavour. They will defenitely won't get the pure mental grasping of reality but they would get other facets of the same oneness. The most insane individuals are those that have mastered many paths to their final end. Which will get them to taste more flavours of the same ice cream. Most of such individuals are just naturally talented like RamaKrishna or Sri Anandamayi Ma. How many flavours are there? Infinite. This is a little analogy, don't get too attached to it but I do consider that in your current progress in the path will serve you right and give you some clarity. Maybe I would give another answer to another person. What helps some people in one point in their paths can destroy people in a different stage. I invite people in the forum to be more aware of this fact. We don't make the rules, we just abide by them.

Of course, how could I forget this! LSD is more electric than mushrooms, they don't have such active energy. This is one of the main differences by far

There are powers out of siddhi and out of shakti. Siddhis are the fruits of spiritual practice that lock into every day reality. For example, decades of intense yoga can produce the body to be substantially more evolved and conscious. New dimensions open up that are not accesible to most people. Shaktis are direct manifestations of the state of consciousness you find yourself in. There is no limit here, anything can literally happen. You really need to have had both experiences to make this distinction and really appreciate it for yourself. Although, theoretical understanding helps. Other traditions may call it: God has given him a some particular grace. (Siddhi) A miracle has happened through this saint. Or as Saints say: I have not done anything but God has done it or it has been done out of itself. (Shakti) In psychedelic tribes the difference between every day shamanic and energetic mastery vs healing while tripping. Both find each other, it's like a kiss from relative and absolute, the same coin, two sides. Equal yet opposites. Direct experience is key. Although, theoretical understanding helps.

This is it

Mind blowing states of consciousness manifesting sponteniously from Ma out of no prior knowledge.

My main difference is on how clean the experience is. LSD seems for me much more pure in the noise to signal ratio. I probably think it may be due to it being chemically produced without impurities. Mushrooms are good but I feel there are more things going on into my body than the raw psychoactive substance. LSD is extremely yogic for me, while mushrooms not at all. In LSD, I manifest yogic asanas, kundalini wakes up, I heal myself in many planes of my life. However, LSD seems to have no guide behind but your own consciousness being expanded by the experience. On the other hand, mushrooms feel more entity like. They have a body of wisdom and guidance for the trip. Something which I have both loved and hated. In the sense that you are very often "forced" to take the best path of action despite your will but you now is the higher good. This has hardly ever happened me on LSD, which is more open world. These are a few distinctions. What I do know is that the higher the dosages the bigger the difference becomes. 20g+ of mushrooms and 1000µg reports seem very different

Self-Deception is how God created this game for himself. You are not a human deceiving itself and awakening. You are God deceiving itself to play with itself. Honestly, I am not aware of exactly why it is the case of this play but I know that the mechanism by which it functions is God deceiving itself. In Hinduism, it is said that God performs 5 main actions: Creating, Preserving, Destructing, Putting in delusion, Taking out of delusion and Liberation. Using this paradigm, we could say that deceiption belongs to putting in delusion and is one of the chief actions of God. All actions are said to be infinite and all contain all in themselves.

Consciousness is not different from its content. Screen and film are one in action, indistinguishable. First you recognize, then you merge back. In understanding this, one unites absolute and relative reality. However, one must have mastered both and cannot jump to the end directly.

It reminds me to some Indian literature that explains how reality is a celebration and manifestation of Love.

@Water by the River Everything is in everything. The same as a trees make flowers and then fruits with seeds but the whole tree is contained again in the seed, which contains the tree and so on. It's the same with Reality, in one way you can say that all arises within the absolute but in another way even the absolute is just a figment of the absolute, one possibility out of the absolute. The same way one ramification of absolute infinity is absolute infinite, it's one thing it could be and is. Maybe I get you wrong but it seems that you say that the absolute is the absolute and is always the case. Maybe we are splitting hairs but the absolute must also not be the absolute for it to be the absolute. We are getting into paradox territory here. The same as God also needs not to be God in order to be totally God. The ultimate reality is indistinguishable from all that arises, it is nothing but that arising, like extreme empiricism. Yet nothing is grounded in anything, it's an infinite ungraspability with an unmisable taste that finds itself in all planes with the same personality pattern expressed in diferent flflavours.

It's a conclusion that getting rid of conclusions leads to Reality and that Reality is not conclusions or models. In the beggining one is lost in models. Then one realizes the profound limitations of models. Finally one accepts and uses models skillfully understanding their limits and extreme usefullness, without making an identity out of them or confusing them for reality. Even though that's the case, you have not realized that models are unavoidable and intrinsic to your mind. Reality in a way is a gigantic and perfect model running itself. Your mind is gonna fill in the blanks and make poor models if you throw the baby out with the bathwater. Upon some point of doing this, you will realize this. That's why it's useful to read Ken Wilber or Susanne Cook-Greuter's research because they precisely point out this traps and evolutionary stages, mapping thousand of individuals in the path. Which is itself a clear example of contruct-aware system making that is extremely useful for sense making of how reality works. Lol, can't your mind do both? Can't you just experience pure red and then afterwards give the best explanation you can, while being perfectly aware of the limitation of descriptions? I'm not negating your point, I'm including and transcending it. What you say is True but there is a more mature way of going about it.

@Leo Gura I would love to understand what love is. When question are rised about any profound topic, like Consciousness, Truth, Love or God; you say that we don't get it and you do, end of the process. What is the meaning of this forum then Leo? If I'm interested to go as profound into Love as you have gone, how could you guide me to have that awakening? Within the unavoidable limitations of communication what could you tell me of the deepest love you have yet reached? I'm happy to be humbled if I finally get what Love is but give some tools, give me some methods, that I can use to realize Love. If you have done it, I surely also can, the same as any user that really feels the calling of Love. In this way, I suggest you to move from the closed position of I understand and you don't -> end of the investigation. We cannot walk together from there, it's not you vs us, it's supposed to be all together walking towards God. That's how I see it. What is LOVE?

This philosophical position cannot hold itself. The point of long development is not to discard all systems and conclusions, because that is itself a conclusion. From a deep contemplation of the impossibility of having a mind and a sense of reality without models, you become construct aware or paradigm aware. You work within models, systems and paradigms, you accept that you are trapped in this reality but now your are conscious. Your mind grasps the inner workings that construct your world view. You take ownership of the very fabric of sense making and become aware of it's limitations and boundaries, what it can do and what it can't do. You are flexible and can change your mind skillfully. This is a much more mature position than just saying, oh the limitations of models, descriptions, answers and systems, what can we do. Ken Wilber in his book Sex, Ecology, Spirituality makes a great job in highlighting this blind spot, if you are interested in researching deeper what I have just said. It's also explained in Susanne Cook-Greuter's research in the stage of Construct-Aware / Magician

@SQAAD I'm probably more sensitive to that combo then. Last night I smoked and didn't rest well and I was totally out of balance next day. For me it's very taxing on my body, to not sleep and take drugs. I thought that could be the case for you in this specific situation. Weird things happen on drugs when you don't sleep, it's something to pay attention to and not take lightly, but maybe I'm exaggerating and you'll be just fine. Your own experience will tell you.

God Yes I call the Absolute God but there is not much to say about it... Thats why we talk about it's workings and distinctions, it's play and nature. However, if you wanna be strict, we'll say God and shut up for eternity.

@OBEler Am I overthinking too much or is it you that is trying to project onto Ralston something which upon most evidence seems to not be the case. It's not about the specific interview, in fact the interview just reflects what we are talking about. What do you thing sourcred Leo's question back then? Ralston has realized Love to a certain degree, he is so awake that he must have encoutered it, in one way or the other. All I'm saying is that in the infinite pool of realizations not all infinites are as infinite, but consciousness, truth and love are (while God is the whole spectrum) and if you have gone deep enough in the Love you must talk about it, there's no way arround. Leo does not talk about solipsism explicitly but he does implicitly, Ralston seems to be quite obscure if he is trying to lead people to realize existential Love. If he then wants to keep that to himself, why so? And I would think Love would permeate his teachings in a way they don't now. However, that's fine Ralston is great in other domains. Like Body Consciousness, he's like light years ahead from any spiritual teacher in that domain. Learn what you need to learn about each person, but don't push english literature onto your math teacher. One teacher cannot teach all subjects.

@OBEler I understand your point but if you truly have realized Love I don't think you cannot talk about it. Being the case that you are an enlightenment teacher and it's your job. It's like being physicist discovering einsten law and then not speaking about it because you don't want to mislead people from the newtonian paradigm. It has common sense in the beggining but upon further investigation that argument doesn't hold itself. If Ralston knew what Love and God are (at a significant level, it's all about degrees), he would stress it in his work. As he does with literally everything else he teaches.

That are concentration practices not meditation but anyway. Classic meditation is about becoming conscious of sensation as they arise in your consciousness, being it the world, your thoughts or body. In such meditation thought or thoughtlessness are just mere vibrations of the same empty field or groundless ground, as they like to say it. Concentration practices can get you into extraordinary states as that is their purpose. Meditation is an excercise in infinite trascendence of all phenomena and state, flowing with beingness and shapeshifting with it. Don't confuse them, they are indeed extremely different and both necessary. Concentration and Meditation are such a gigantic practices with so many ramifications that I'm lately being humbled of how little I understood them.

Consciousness is Love. Love is Consciousness. Consciousness loves itself fully that's what makes it free, trascendental and independent of state. Love is itself an endless flowering of infinity and consciousness is identical to infinity. It is from God that Consciousness, Truth and Love are innate properties. Like light and colour, fire and heat, water and wet. We can divide this One Reality (God) in infinite distinctions and the first distinctions are Consciousness, Truth and Love.

The Good News: It's just Consciousness The Bad News: It's Infinite