Dorje Chang

I trust this comes from a good place, pursuit of Truth and perhaps a very nuanced spiritual insight, but consider that this type of thing can only alienate the rest of the world and make this forum look like a dangerous cult. Even if you are absolutely sure this is true, isn't it better to meet people where they are instead of getting yourself burned at the stake? This is why Buddhist traditions insist so much on getting people to cultivate compassion, even though this may keep them "asleep in the dreamstate" for longer or perhaps forever.

I've taken magic truffles and Ayahuasca many times, including high doses, and never had any visuals beyond mental images. It's even hard to imagine what is like to experience the visual effects that people talk about. This kind of thing is totally outside my experience. I've always wondered how rare or common that was.

Rob Burbea, the author of Seeing That Frees, is one the most profound and likable spiritual teachers that I've come across. Before his untimely death, he developed an original set of teachings he called Soulmaking Dharma. Does anyone else here do his practices? How do you implement them? Have you experimented with Soulmaking? A vast collection of his talks is available here: https://dharmaseed.org/teacher/210/ And transcripts here: https://airtable.com/shr9OS6jqmWvWTG5g/tblHlCKWIIhZzEFMk/viw3k0IfSo0Dve9ZJ

That's a good point, that's exactly why I'm trying to understand in what ways Leo departs from and goes beyond Buddhism in terms of deconstruction and epistemology. He already clarified some things: he believes that his destination is much higher, higher than even Buddhahood, rainbow body, and whatnot.

If you recognize yourself as God, then God is not a thing. For anyone who doesn't recognize themselves as God, God inevitably becomes a thing. That's a serious problem for God realization. Liberating one's mind completely of all fabrications is exactly the goal of Buddhist emptiness practices. I neither identify as Buddhist nor wish to argue that it's better or worse than your teachings or other traditions. In fact, I started making much more progress once I went beyond doing Buddhist meditation only. Still, it's interesting to try to understand how your teachings differ from later Buddhism. Buddhist teachings on emptiness (e.g., Seeing that Frees by Rob Burbea) can be so profound that it's hard to imagine how to go beyond them in terms of deconstruction. After all, they've been trying to figure this stuff out for over 2,000 years.

I'm open-minded towards what you say in your videos and understand that from your point of view you became fully conscious of reality and that's it for you. I will not try to argue that you're right or wrong. Here's my perspective, just for fun. Your teachings on deconstruction have a lot in common with Buddhist Madhyamaka philosophy. This philosophy says that all phenomena are "empty" of essence or substantiality and only exist in relation to other causes, conditions and conceptual designation. Applying this in meditation and contemplation ultimately leads to a complete deconstruction of conventional reality, which becomes "like a dream". Here's where things get interesting because there is a long-standing debate about the meaning of "emptiness". Some schools will say that if you deconstruct relative reality in this way, a truly existing ultimate reality shines forth. Dzogchen is one example of this approach. Your teachings come across like this, except that you made your discoveries independently. Other schools will say that even emptiness is empty. Everything is relative. In other words, you deconstruct even deconstruction, and the ultimate truth is emptiness. Instead of taking one philosophical position or the other, one can try to apply emptiness/deconstruction wisely. If you deconstruct too much, you may end up like Jed McKenna, nihilistic and closed off from the most wonderful possibilities. His books come across as fictional but perfectly exemplify this extreme. Opening up to a transcendental reality sounds much more appealing, but it brings a serious disadvantage to the practice. Paradoxically, making awakened awareness (infinite consciousness, God, whatever one calls it) into a thing in any way reintroduces a duality that gets in the way of ultimate realization. Here's my most optimistic theory about Leo's discoveries: maybe even the most advanced meditators cannot completely avoid the tiniest residual duality as above. However, it might be possible to quiet down the conceptual mind so completely with a combination of psychedelics and hardcore spiritual work in preparation that there is nothing to get in the way of ultimate reality. I don't have any reason to believe this is true, but it's the most charitable theory I can come up with for Leo's claims of unprecedented realization.