Adrian colby

@Leo Gura Love and hate are distinctions that arise at the relative level from an originally undifferentiated unity. In that sense, hate is not separate from the absolute, but a conditioned expression emerging within multiplicity. Love can be understood as the absolute itself when resting simply in being, whereas hate appears when consciousness moves from pure being into identification, division, and reactive doing contrasting against itself. i watch people come back from trips. Their ego Co opts the experience, then they struggle to hold both absolute and relative simultaneously mistaking their ‘I’ for the absolute.

I always take these ideas as contemplation fodder so I’m thankful for the answer. there’s probably some truth in what you’re pointing toward regarding identity formation like social mirroring and autistic differences in social processing. But I’d be careful about reducing autism to simply ‘weak theory of mind’ because modern understanding is moving away from that idea as a blanket explanation. Many autistic individuals can understand others deeply…sometimes excessively deeply through analysis but may struggle with rapid implicit social interpretation in real time. That’s different from lacking empathy or lacking a theory of minds altogether. I’d also be cautious with the idea that identity mainly comes from copying others. Social mirroring certainly contributes, but identity appears to emerge from many layers like biology, temperament, nervous system structure, endocrine influences, embodiment, attachment, memory, social interaction, and self-reflection. Ironically, many autistic people report not a weak identity, but an unusually persistent internal sense of self combined with exhaustion from masking and performing social expectations that feel unnatural. That has certainly been part of my own experience and the phase of exhaustion I’m currently at. Where I think discussions like this become dangerous is when a leap is made from ‘autistic people process identity differently’ to ‘therefore trans identity is simply confusion or imitation.’ That doesn’t logically follow.Autistic individuals are often less socially conformist, more introspective, and more likely to question imposed roles rather than automatically absorb them. So the same observations could support the opposite interpretation: that some autistic people are less capable of suppressing internal incongruence for the sake of social harmony. In my own case, having a DSD complicates things further because we’re not talking about a purely social or conceptual phenomenon. There are biological developmental variables involved from the outset. I think these ideas are worth contemplating carefully, but I’d avoid collapsing a very complex interaction of biology, neurology, embodiment, and social development into a single explanatory mechanism. A lot of the problem I find is A lack of understandable communication between divergent ways of processing and one trying to pathologies the other. my wife is very good at interacting with me. She does a lot of animal behaviour work so is clued into highly sensitive nervous systems ( she communicates with that, not my intellect) Humans are constantly faster, bigger, louder, overstimulating, desensitised, short attention etc so when someone like myself goes into an environment where there’s so much change, it interruptes the hyper focus I have my baseline in, it becomes very overwhelming very quickly. I tend to remove myself and enjoy the quiet and subtle nuances of natural environments instead. I'm going to stop yhere cause I realise I’m diverging away from topic.

I’ve Deffinately come across that before, many times. If someone’s neuroendocrine pathway development is divergent from the reproductive sex it’s certainly in line with a type of neurodivergence. there must be some truth to it because I’m trans and also have a DSD… and just today I started the proper assessment process for an autism and adhd diagnosis. ( age 40+, the typical collapse of masking revealing all the sensitivities). my sexual variation had a part to play in triggering my awakening but my awakening triggered the slow collapse of my personality. first time was an intellectual deconstruction, the second time was the exhaustion of an unfit adaptation. No more being inauthentic. others have suggested following his authenticity and I second that. Be what you are, whatever that is and you know, when you start to function better. … and definitely integrate both masculine and feminine aspects. For me that had nothing to do with being a man but a balanced human being.

I think the cult documentaries are going to be timely and interesting. im currently watching a friend ( ceremony facilitator/druid/shaman/healer etc blah blah) claim to have gone through a transformation and become his true self ( again!) and this time “shits getting real”. after a lengthy speech to ‘headhunted’, ‘special’ helpers, my red flags are flying in all directions as I can clearly see a tragectory ( not yet a cult) but with serious potential to turn into one. i think I might start a journal in the journal section with my analysis of the ‘problem’ but I’m expecting to see similarities in the documentaries Leo is sharing.

I have a friend coming over tomorrow who sent me a video of JFK ‘making a speech’ ten days before his assassination. ive told him before to stop jumping in with assumptions based on the framework other people sell to him that is highly reactionary and emotionally provocative. He claims he knows it’s nonsense but it’s telling that he would send me the speech because a part of him is not sure still. the speech obviously goes on about ‘secret society’ and ‘control over American citizens’ but in this decade it can sound like he’s talking about the ‘current’ conspiracy narrative Maga, Qanon and a lot of spiritual people have fallen into “the great awakening”. A lot of spiritual/ceremony community spaces have that print map by the artist “champ parinya“ draped across the wall like some kind of prophetic bible.a concoction of narratives by conspiratorial groups with no connection… tomorrow I’ve to sit him down and explain ‘context’ who was the audience JFK was addressing?( journalists) what year was this speech made?(1961) what was going on globally at the time?( Cold War, covert operations , information control, espionage, communism etc) Was he talking about the evil satanic cabal? No! He was talking about the culture of secrecy and lack of trust between nations. The tension between national security and transparency, freedom of the press v state secrecy. the interpretation is constrained by… ’context!’ it’s the difference in a narrative driven cognition and a detail driven cognition. If the narrative takes priority, it tends to make a person fit the details into it by picking some and ignoring others rather than looking at evidence and allowing those details ( all of them) to form the basis for any real conclusion. if you go with narrative first, it reduces complexity, gives something a quick ‘meaning’ and sense of orientation which is great as a stabilisation mechanism for the mind ( albeit a deception). Someone who is automatically reactionary is going to look to stabilise something that is chaotically senseless by making it ‘feel’ like it is internally coherent. part of human survival is ‘pattern recognition’ like recognising faces, finding threats and finding meaning so for the most part ‘fear based’. This is a normal and valid human function but it overextends itself when linking things that have no causal connection to create that ‘certainty’ to alleviate the fear and claim to be ‘in the know.’ It’s not irrational but a misuse or overreaching of a valid survival function. it’s not about challenging someone but illuminating the ‘structure’ of how meaning is constructed. ( a projection on reality not a constraint from acceptance of reality) my friends repeated exposure to being sent these stories or it being brought up in new age communities can make it start to feel plausible because it becomes familiar. He doesn’t ‘beleive’ it but doesn’t know how to dismiss it either… enter epistemic responsibility… to look at how you think, not ‘what’ you are thinking about. Examine the method rather than defending the beleif. It’s not whether it is true or false but rather what kind of thinking produced this? Then moving into discernment: are you noticing patterns that are actually there or are you building a pattern by connecting incomplete pieces? One is properly grounded. If the connection isn’t solid then you need to learn to tolerate “I don’t know”. That’s the antidote to conspiracy thinking. I’ve noticed some spiritual spaces can drift into this because once you start questioning surface reality, it’s easy to keep going and start questioning everything without always grounding it again.So instead of dissolving illusion, it can turn into building new ones that just feel more meaningful. ( delusional) and naive psychedelic users in these spaces are highly susceptible to it. Way too many facilitators peddle this as a true worldview connected to being spiritual. a lot of conspiratorial narratives use language that is conflated with spiritual language like ‘awakening’ and ‘seeing behind the veil’, ‘good v evil’ etc. so rather than deconstructing reality to get a glimpse of the source, they get caught in narrative within the illusion. most people in spiritual spaces don’t know what spirituality is and are actually there for trauma resolution, personal development and ways to figure the improvement of their health/life. If you think there is a conspiracy against you, it can certainly redirect your attention and bypass understanding your own mental mechanisms, conditioning and emotions … that would otherwise lead to improving your life.

blog post Beyond insanity part 1: when not using psychedelics, this is what my yoga nidra or astral practice looks like. Not much different than meditating sitting or lying down, beyond the no self state, another reality will form. one session I decided to allow literally anything horrific that I could imagine. I let my mind let rip and instead of disgust or horror, I loved. That broke a boundary and love entered insanity. I go through phases where the darkest realms are the most beautiful and I actually prefer them.

I’m a man ( trans/DSD containing both male and female). I like women ( sorry that’s boring and traditional). also a field of awareness that is neither a man or woman ( sorry again but this is the actualised forum and I have experienced god realisation and nondual awareness). I can say I like all women but it wouldn’t be true because I have preferences/biases. I have preferences for certain types of women and that can be cut down again into specific women I find attractive. Would I with a trans woman? It completely depends on the person. I have come across one I was attracted to. ive had a rigid preference for women shorter than me but I fell for someone taller than me and that prior ‘dealbreaker’ flew out the window, so it’s completely dependent on the person. It’s my preference, and a preference is not something prescribed for others and not for others to judge me over ( that’s stepping over someone else's boundary implying moral superiority… not ok!) It’s not “Im not attracted to a person because they are trans”, I’m not attracted to them because I don’t find them to be an attractive person. I can’t fake that but I personally wouldn’t use being trans as an excuse because I wouldn’t just be rejecting them but invalidating their identity as well and that’s stepping over a line. I wouldn’t want it done to me so I wouldn’t do it.

I’m trans. I don’t identify as such but I’m aware of the biological incoherence in my own system even though I had no external influences. There’s a difference between biologically emergent identity and symbolic level identity regardless of symbolic level influence, a biological system will always have an inherent identity. ( incoherence within a system becomes part of that innate identity.) I had no internet growing up. I wasn’t exposed to any lgbt culture, I’d never heard the word trans and I don’t think there was anything other than binary biology at school. There were no doctors in my country at the time who knew anything about it or treated it. my identity was persistent and sustained from 4-5 years old and it became a severe problem at 14. I stayed away from the lgbt or any activism. I did go to check out that scene when I was part the way into my treatment but I was not impressed with the behaviour. I didn’t gel with anyone in that community and figured it was just another culture to conform to. it was more the case for me, get treated correctly and reintegrate back into society as normal so I’m straight male and the condition once treated no longer exists…when I was treated by a competent team, I was diagnosed with a DSD and gender incongruency. No one knows about the condition. I didn’t talk about it, kept up with healthchecks at the doctors but just got on with my life. I see others making a show of themselves, shouting at people and demanding respect ( I understand the anger and frustration in them, I’ve been there…but) you’re heading for a punch in the face behaving like that. being prior to 1990’s when I started having problems, it wouldn't have made a difference in my case, what timeline widespread education happened. I was treated incorrectly in the beginning so the only benefit to growing up post ‘90s is that I would have had access to the proper healthcare and not suffered a rake of issues that could have been avoided. I think I would agree that educating about the different types of people in our species reduces marginalisation but telling kids they can do whatever they want without undersranding complex biological systems is playing into symbolic identity which can fragment someone from innate identity. That’s not a good thing for a regular kid or trans kid either.

I’m in the fellowship of isis. its mixed pseudo Egyptian /celtic druidry but a lot of spiritual circles in my community tend to be mixed culture like Native American, Buddhist, Druid, Christian etc but on the mysticism side. unfortunately on my travels through them, very few people actually know what spirituality or esotericism is. its mostly aging women who dress up in new age robes, do ceremony at the years symbolic quarter cycles and then stroke my hair and feed me cake cause I’m the only ‘young’ man there besides being the only one they’ve ever met to have a god awakening ( not induced by psychedelics)

I’m in the middle of writing a fuller piece on this, but briefly: I understand the issue with ideology, social pressure, and conformity but those operate at the level of symbolic identity (labels, roles, narratives). Conflating that with pre-symbolic identity( what emerges from underlying biological organisation) is a category error. Biological systems can form stable patterns we recognise as identity while still containing internal incoherence. When a system moves to resolve that and become more functionally aligned and efficient increasing its potential, that’s not avoiding reality…it’s responding to it and taking appropriate action. Telling someone with that predicament to just sit there and accept themselves, misunderstands that is exactly what they are doing! Reducing this to delusion or lack of self-acceptance collapses distinct layers into one, and overlooks how biological systems actually work: dynamic, adaptive, and not fixed. The comparison to animals “just accepting reality” also misses the point. Non-human animals do not possess the same level of self-reflective cognition or the capacity to analyse and intervene in their own biological and psychological processes despite having inate intelligent emergent identity. Humans can recognise internal incoherence and respond to it. sometimes medically, sometimes behaviourally which is precisely what makes this discussion possible in the first place. The same confusion shows up in the “trans in sports” debate. It treats sex as a single, fixed property, when it’s actually a cluster of interacting developmental processes shaped by signalling and environment. Puberty does create meaningful differences but it is not the whole system. The relevant question isn’t what category someone is placed in, but whether specific performance-related traits developed, and whether they persist. Individuals who do not undergo their originally assigned puberty and instead develop under a different hormonal environment, do not acquire many of the traits typically cited as unfair advantage so why implement generalised ban? We already see that biology does not follow rigid categories. Conditions like 5-alpha reductase deficiency (guevedoces) show how developmental pathways can shift, leading to male-typical outcomes despite earlier female classification. Other conditions prevent male-typical development entirely, resulting in individuals who remain within female physiological ranges and sometimes completely unaware of the condition ( but those individuals mostly have coherent systems where trans do not. Some are actually trans as well) So reducing the issue to fixed labels like “male” and “female” misses how biological systems actually function as dynamic processes producing a coherent outcome ( recognisable pattern) Because ultimately, you are not just a set of signals or components. you are the integrated result of them: a biological system organising itself toward coherence over time. And it’s also worth being mindful of how this is discussed especially dismissive and invalidating language. For people actually living this as their direct experience, hostile imposition has real consequences. Social pressure can lead to suppression, adaptation over prolonged internal conflict, and eventual deterioration into mental illness. You don’t have to agree or be supportive. But contributing to an environment that increases harm to people already navigating this reality is something we should at least be conscious of.

Yes I’ve seen this too. It’s the ego holding onto an idea as an identity instead of integrating back into the relative experience. It’s a claim of being absolute while in a relative state which is a misunderstanding and bypassing of the relative state. it’s fine when someone is deconstructing and getting excited about non dual understanding or direct experience but it turns into a big problem when that is where it stops as an absolute instead of completing the circle and integrating everything that was deconstructed back into a lived experience, gaining wisdom as a result. Of course I’m just assuming that is what you mean or in some way similar.

Ecstatic dance, singing, paddle boarding and taking psychedelics for pure expression.

It’s interesting what happens when you get language to start self referencing. Nothing ever touches what everyone is talking about so it’s interesting when the words start to turn back on themselves they diminish till you get paradoxical statement that circles forever until it’s realised this is an infinite paradox. Language falls appart and then we step into what lies beyond that. Like a heavy conversation with someone that goes nowhere or heavy, noisy thoughts in contemplation that go nowhere and then suddenly it stops, attention stops focus on the language communicating something and the something comes forward and completely envelops the field of attention like a deafening silence. the direct reality connection happens.

The resting light is only half way after turning away from the objective. Once it’s realised, reintegrate into the experience to develop a harmony with everything. You don’t perpetuate turning away from the objective unless you’re trying to dissolve it. Being able to adapt to situations is part of the balance and harmony with everything. Absolute peace is only when you go back to that state. Being more fluid in the mind allows going into that state more accessible but also being at peace in varying degrees, dissolving is not always necessary. Even when you dissolve the body and world to sleep, the mind creates another body and world to experienced through. It does not always stay in an absolute state of peace. Like a vibrating string, the still string is still it but not it while ‘doing’. Plenty of people walk around claiming enlightenment and ‘floating’ through life not actually engaging but avoiding it.

We know all of this and have moved past it and reintegrated back into reality ( capable of relating to other). They are not claims. They are descriptions using ‘things’, ’terms’, ‘concepts’, ‘metaphors’ and ‘analogies’ from within lived experience ( tangeable) to express and communicate a thought about an ‘intangeable’ being ( not A being but being as a state of inertia/potential that cannot be known due to its indescript and undefined nature. Not a concept derived from contemplation but an actual experience of reality dissolving till it is all that is left at the foundation ) no longer playing games with others about absolutism that cannot be applied at the relative level nor can non duality be used to gaslight the dualistic experience. accepting the human experience is happening ‘now’. All the other layers are there at the same moment but while human interacting normally can point to an experience and understanding of absolute, it doesn’t speak from there even though it’s a part of and encapsulated by it. if you are not interested in communicating or discussing ‘it’ then you are simply creating ‘content’ to draw people into discussion with no other purpose but to flatten and terminate the conversation. What’s the point of that?