Eterno

Firstly, I would like to thank each of you for your responses and helping me. Even though they all aren't the most dazzling or reassuring, I do appreciate the time you've taken and for sharing the wisdom you've gleaned on the path. A heartfelt thank you to @Hojo, @cetus, @Breakingthewall, @theleelajoker, @Opulence . I do appreciate the words from each of you. Now, for my response to @Hojo, I can see that going through the karma is would logically be required to attain enlightenment, but god does it fucking suck. It is absolutely terrifying and exhausting, and I find myself wanting nothing more that to forget everything I've learned. I don't know if something beautiful ever will happen, it's like I'm being told to hold out for a promotion at work, and to just keep acting the way I need to. I don't really know what to think or say to that without getting deeper into the process. As for the video, I'll need to watch this a few times before I get it. I can feel my mind pulling away from it as I watched it the first time. I do certainly still have a sense of self, an ego. Both spiritual and personal. @theleelajoker yes, I'm sure you can understand where I'm coming from based on your experience. You too seem to wrestle with some of the same thoughts that arise. Especially based on Leo's videos. I do know that my ego is slowly dissolving. I can tell now when I enter different states of Consciousness that it is no longer the same as it used to be. Certain ideas have invaded my mind. It's like I've cut away pieces of my sense of self, and I literally cannot reattach them. I don't know what to do with this. I'm trying to do everything I can, but I cannot put them back together. The illusion has begun to unravel. @Breakingthewall I do not like this response, but I see where you're coming from. Certainly, this has been one of the most difficult truths that I still wrestle with regularly. Coming to terms with the fact that reality itself is not all goodness is one of my deepest fears. Yet I know that this is true. I don't know how I can accept reality with it being like this. Seeing that it is full of Evils and pains and suffering is one of the truths that I actively avoid. Though I can see how this would be ultimate love. Love will allow all things, not just what I perceive as good. Because reality loves all. It is a different type of Love from the love humans usually feel. I just don't know how I can accept this type of love. @cetus you seem to be referencing something very similar to the video that @Hojo posted. This is the difficult part. Once the ideas of how sinister reality might be arise, I don't know how I can handle those. I've developed this sense of fairness and humanly love and only wanting things that make me feel good, but that isn't reality. This is the hard pill that I must swallow. I don't know how to allow myself to accept this. I fear that if I do, I will be caught in a cycle of endless suffering. Though I suppose, in a way, that already is reality. Thank you for the koan, I will meditate on it at some point. @Opulence you understand as well. I'm glad you and the others think I'm doing alright, though I suppose this may just add to my sense of self, which I suppose makes the journey a bit harder because it's another thing I have to shed. I just don't want to let go of that ego that I've developed. I do hope you and the others are right about something beautiful unfolding. If it isn't something beautiful, I may go insane, or I may actually do something drastic just to regain my sense of control once more. So much I'd want to forget if I found out that. You all seem to mention the release of hope. Hope that something good will arise out of this. I consider hope to be one of the fundamental human emotions. Greed and hope, both aligned with survival and love, respectively. I understand, though, that to awaken, both of these must be transcended. This is the difficult part of the journey. I don't know if I want to set them both down. There's a part of me that wants to go back, back to when I didn't understand all of this and have a spiritual ego and didn't have to think about reality at this deep of a level. But I know I can't go back. It's quite literally impossible. I've been fractured, and now, I'm on the path, whether I like it or not. Thank you all again for your words, even if they weren't something I wanted to hear. I am grateful for the help on my journey.

I haven't made a post in a while, and I apologize in advance for the disjointed thoughts that are about to arise out of my Consciousness. I have nowhere else to write this, and I am seeking some sort of aid from those that have been on this hellish path before me. I got involved in self actualization and deeply around 2 years ago. It was after I broke up with my ex girlfriend, and I was in a terrible mental state. I decided to turn to improving myself. I started off with some of Leo's old content, learning more and more about how to improve myself, seeing cool ideas, and understanding where I could take my life if I really dedicated myself. I started a lot of things. I've been working out regularly for a year and a half, I have a job that allows me to survive, I don't have any particularly nasty habits (aside from smoking weed a few times a week), I've developed some solid friendships, I'm living with roommates, I have hobbies, I have a life purpose, and things generally look good on the outside. I say all of this to show where my life is actually at. There are things I could improve upon, sure, but most of my life is in a decent state. But internally, I am being ripped apart. Shortly after I started watching Leo's videos, I began learning about Enlightenment. I went to a meditation retreat on a whim, stayed for the full ten days, kept learning more and more about Awakening and Solipsism, watched countless of Leo's videos about it, and started to have some direct experiences. I have an old post that details a trip that I took several months ago. Since I had that trip, I've taken a step back from all of the spirituality and Enlightenment topics. I've just tried to live my life and be happy. But I've noticed in my perception that I can't quite shake this. I feel like I've learned too much. I understand too much about reality now, and I want to go back. I want to forget the things that I've learned. I can see reality a lot clearer now. I constantly see survival everywhere. I see the people around me shaped by it, I see myself shaped by it. As Leo so eloquently posted in one of his blog posts recently, "Survival is your only Master", or something to that extent. I can see it. I started following politics a bit more just to be more informed, and I couldn't have been more terrified and ripped apart by that. I've seen countless videos and posts of Trump and his agenda being directly enforced, and it terrifies me. The pure level of greed and hatred that emanates from that man is sick. I've begun to research corruption and understand how survival ties into it, and it has been an atrocious set of things to learn about. I can see that, with our existing system, there is seemingly no way out. The oligarchs have hold on the system, and they enforce whatever benefits them. Trump is the worst offender, but many many other actors are involved. It's a terrible thing to watch, and I can't believe that it is reality. After being scared enough by that, I recalled that perception is reality. So, I tried focusing on more of the pleasant aspects of reality. I worked on my friendships, a new relationship (which has ended at this point), love, family, music, drawing, creation. Creativity has been a big aspect of my life that has really helped me with some of the difficult times I've gone through. I've been working on that a lot, but it hasn't been until recently that I've just felt my mind constantly being pulled. Constantly being pulled to a place I don't want to go. I feel my mind being pulled apart. When I smoke or take low levels of psychedelics, my mind is terrified. I feel terror, because I have no idea what reality actually is. I keep hearing all these ideas. I have the thoughts in my own head, and I have the external world telling me all of these things. I hear about corruption and survival and hate and love and Enlightenment. But I've never experienced reality itself, as itself. And I'm absolutely terrified to. Nothing other than my own experience has any weight whatsoever. It's all just hearsay. But the only way I will ever experience reality fully is if I submit to it. If I allow it to be no matter what it is and accept it. But I don't want to accept it if it isn't ultimately loving and caring and perfect. Based on what I've seen recently, I feel like reality isn't perfect. I feel like it's tainted with survival. It's tainted with hate and selfishness. And if I'm all there ever was, and this reality is just me playing as God, then what does that mean for me as an ego? If there is only this, and this is actually just a sinister plan of Evil to enjoy my suffering, how am I supposed to accept that? I don't know if this is true, but I also don't know if anything that Leo or anyone else on this forum says is true. How do I not know that this is all one grand conspiracy to just get me to accept that reality is Evil so that I can be used for the survival of someone else? How do I not know that this isn't just some huge mistake? How do I know I didn't just fuck up everything during the one acid trip I had when I took 3 tabs before I was ready for such levels? How can anyone walk this path and not want to kill themselves? I constantly think about that, though I know I would never take my own life. Things are good generally speaking, but I feel absolute terror and dread for the future. I have no idea what it holds for me. I don't even know what death is. What happens after death? Is it even anything good? What if it's truly just nothing, or even worse, what if it's terrifying and nothing but pain and suffering? What if I create reality and the mere terror of this ends up making it real? What if reality is nothing but hate and evil? How do I know this isn't true? There is no way. There is no way unless I look at it myself. But the closer I get, the more I feel myself dying. I feel the idea of me dying with every step I take. Yet somehow, I feel like I have no choice in the matter. I feel like I'm pulled to wake up, even when I don't want to. It's like an addiction. I want to just go back to my human life. I just want to be able to enjoy things. I want to play music for people and have friends and have good sex and eat good food and laugh and enjoy life. But I feel like this is impossible with this constant sense of existential dread hanging over my head. And seeing constant reminders of survival and evil in the everyday world makes it no easier. I try to hold onto things that bring me joy, but this level of terror is beyond anything I've ever been able to handle. I don't know what to do. I'm forced to go through this, but I need some relief, I need to be able to just live my life. I need to be able to function and just do human things. I don't want to feel existential dread or awaken. I don't care about any of those things right now. I'm just in a constant state of fear, and I want to get out. I don't mean to say I don't care about Truth, but I want to be happy. I want to live a full life. I feel like I've partially ripped my mind apart, and now I'm trying to mend it back together, but I can't no matter how hard I try. And I feel like it's only a matter of time until reality decides it wants to end me. It's only a matter of time before I die. And then, I'll have to deal with whatever is on the other side of death. And that is a terrifying thought. I have no idea what happens after death, but I don't want to find out. But I have no choice. I just want to live. I don't even know why I'm posting this because any words that come from anywhere are dubious to me now. I never know what is real and what is fake. But despite that, any consolation or words of affirmation or support would be beyond appreciated. I just want some relief from this never-ending addiction to seeking yet not quite knowing full Truth. I just want to live. It's all I've ever wanted. The seriousness of Reality has me begging for any relief. I want to laugh and love and play and enjoy life. I don't want to constantly be in fear and nihilism and impending doom. I just want to live. Does anyone know how to help with that problem?

Introduction This will be a long post. I'm extremely verbose when it comes to trip reports, and I'd like to make sure I get all of this out. I've never posted on this forum before, and I've mostly been a lurker. Recently, however, I took a psychedelic mushroom trip and felt I needed to write this post. I feel that the trip showed me quite a bit, but I also have a feeling that I haven't completely peeled back all the layers of my mind. In fact, I imagine there is still much, much more that I have yet to uncover. On one hand, I hope that this trip report is genuinely interesting, insightful, and entertaining to you all. On the other hand, this trip definitely left a trace of terror in my existence, so I wanted to hear what some of the more awakened members have to say. I'm sure that through my words, you can uncover biases, traumas, assumptions, concepts, etc. I'm pretty sure no one will know who I am in real life, so I can be relatively open about the entire experience. If there are any questions at the end surrounding the entire trip, please ask. I'd like to hear everyone's input. Past Experiences Before I even get into the trip itself, there are a few important things that I need to mention that tie into the experience directly. They may seem irrelevant now, but I promise, there is a reason I'm mentioning all of these things. Here they are: 1. I was abandoned by a primary caretaker (father) as a young child. I have no memories of him aside from when I met him for the first time in my teenage years. I had a stepfather adopt me when I was still a toddler, but I know that abandonment has left a core wound in my psyche. I have also been told I was a "bad baby" because of issues I can tell stemmed from these abandonment issues (difficult sleeping without someone there, crying when someone left, etc.) 2. Much of my childhood, I was surrounded by girls/women. I was raised by my mom mostly. However, she was working and going to school simultaneously, so she would often leave me with my grandma. I also had a younger sister, two younger cousins, and many friends that were girls in kindergarten/preschool. 3. When I was in my teenage years, I had a rebellious period, and my drug of choice was psychedelics. During this time, I wasn't very responsible with how I took them, so one day, I decided to take 3 tabs of DS3.0 LSD. After this, I started talking to a friends I hadn't seen since middle school, and he at that point had become a Satanist. Obviously, I was immature at this time and didn't really know anything about reality, so I was still working with a fundamentally Christian worldview, where I was still seeing things in terms of right and wrong, good and bad, Heaven and Hell, etc. To make a long story short, I felt like this was the first time I fell from Heaven and into Hell. And I felt that I did this eternally. I felt the primal fear of annihilation, not able to make sense of my experience at all. 4. Recently, I've been focusing intensely on masculinity and femininity, trying to figure out what it really means to be a man and woman, what the essence of masculinity and femininity are, attraction, etc. I've learned quite a bit from my research, and I have generated a decent understanding of what each of these things are (although this is mostly from other sources outside myself). 5. I've also followed much of Leo's content heavily over the course of the last year and a half or so. I regularly view his blog, forum, videos, spirituality exercises, book list, etc. This has influenced my views on reality and spirituality intensely. Trip Report Now for the actual experience. I'm going to try to put words to this, but I don't even remember everything, so I'm going to do my best. I took the shrooms in two doses, and the whole thing lasted about 6 hours. Really, only the first 4 hours are where the interesting stuff happened. I'm going to be guessing the timelines because I didn't take notes on those, but the whole trip will still be here. I made sure that my environment was clean and set up for a good trip. I weighed out 3.5g of Golden Teachers and crushed them up. I wanted to take them with honey and orange juice as I thought that would help with the nausea. I split the crushed shrooms into two halves, took the first half, and then went to meditate. 15-30 minutes in I only made it through about 15 minutes or so before I started feeling a bit scared. Whenever I take psychedelics now, I always remember that trip where I felt that fear of annihilation, so I try to go slowly so I don't fall into that place too soon. I started to notice my perception change ever so slightly. I saw some visual patterns on the walls of my room, and everything took on a more vibrant hue. There was sun shining off an outside window into my room, and I put my hand up in it, and I saw the beauty of the entire experience. I still felt the fear and uncertainty, but I could appreciate the beauty for what it was. I was still in control. I would be okay. I walked outside to my living room, and I decided that I would be able to take the other portion of mushrooms. I didn't want to take the full 3.5, though, because I was still feeling a big uneasy. I took most of it, so I'm guessing I took 3.2g total. 1 Hour In (I am God Concepts) This is when things began to ramp up a bit. One of the things that I decided to do prior to this trip was watch Leo's "Guided Experience for Realizing You're God" video. I started this about 45 minutes into the trip. I'd watched this video before, but I could just feel that something was different this time. I could feel that I was listening at a deeper level. I could feel myself hearing his words and making connections that I hadn't made before. Like there was a deeper presence hearing the ideas. I watched about the first 30 minutes of the video, doing my best to follow along, slowly getting rid of all sorts of pieces of my mind. I eliminated Earth, the Universe, Biology, Evolution, etc. I started to deeply focus on my hands as just being purely made out of colors and shapes. I made the firm distinction in my mind between the difference between a thought/concept and my hand. I saw that there is a marked difference between the two. I thought to myself at that point that consciousness was what was making both of these, but they are different fundamentally in the way they manifest in reality. After taking apart my mind a bit, it eventually got to be a bit much for me, so I paused the video. I reassured myself that I would be okay, that I just needed to flow with the experience, that everything would be okay. It was at this time I started writing in the middle of my trip. I decided I was going to do a word dump of anything and everything that came to mind, and I'd sort it all out later. I did do this, so I'll write some of the things that came to mind during the experience. The body and mind felt extremely tired throughout this process, but thoughts and ideas were coming to me rapidly. I told myself to just write what I want to write. I asked myself why I limit myself so much, why I avoid doing things I want to do, why I distract myself so much, why I chase sex. I noticed that I have this body, whose requirements I must meet. I saw my body and mind as a system. Just to note, here, these thoughts were just part of the flow. The questions were more rhetorical. But when I was having all of these thoughts, I saw each one having its own voice. I saw and heard the voices as entities, each with a certain type of unique essence characteristic to the thought that was being had. I saw reality as being everything, and I saw models as being pieces of reality that could be built up to make sense of reality, which can be more or less aligned to varying degrees, but no concept can ever get everything. I saw all of this as being in the mind of God. I saw myself as being connected to the mind of God. And I realized that If a concept could encapsulate all of reality, then reality would make too much sense. It would be too easy of a game to figure out. It was at this point I asked what the point of life was, to which I got the following response: TO EXPERIENCE THIS INSANE WACKY THING THAT IS GOD. GOD IS ALL THAT EXISTS. YOU ARE GOD. EVERYTHING IS GOD. THIS PERCEPTION IS NOTHING BUT GOD PLAYING WITH ITSELF. And I felt that everything was perfect. I saw that life is eternal. I saw that God can choose to speed life up or slow it down. I saw that God can design reality in whatever way it wishes. And then I saw why God is living this life right now: because there is nothing that God wants more than this. And the enormous amount of love I felt upon arriving at that realization was immense. I felt the unchecked love towards myself, knowing that the singular being in all of existence loved me so much that it chose to live this life, despite the literally infinite alternatives. God wanted to experience everything human life has to offer, so it chose to live through me. 2 Hours In (Masculinity vs. Femininity) At this point, I began detaching from myself slightly. I saw that despite all of this, my own ego wanted to know what masculinity is. And as this thought crossed my mind, I felt the masculine essence observe me. It wouldn't allow me to embody it, but it did analyze me, looking to see if I was a worthy candidate to carry its power. It was impressed, but it still didn't think I had done enough work. It noted some of my weak points, like impulsivity, lack of complete dedication. (Side note: After looking at this, I feel this is related to abandonment issues). I did realize here that I could step into whatever reality I wanted to, so long as I was willing to pay the price. I saw how I could become something else, but I also understood the idea of mastery and paying the price. I saw that it isn't something I can just will into existence (as my ego at least). I would have to work for it. And this is at the heart of masculinity. I put my definitions of masculinity and femininity very succinctly into words this trip. I defined femininity as flowing with reality and masculinity as pursuing and allowing nothing to get in the way. I saw that living life in a flow state is a possibility, but doing so is inherently a feminine trait due to the nature of these definitions. As I was defining these definitions, I felt myself in my masculine essence. I did not need this masculine entity that I spoke of earlier to give me approval. I just took the essence of it and embodied it. Creating these definitions is a way to engage with masculinity. Cutting through the chaos of reality in pursuit of a definition for these things felt like a masculine action. As I defined these things, I saw that I need a lot of work to truly live up to the divine masculine. But I saw that I had the potential for it. The potential to embody the divine masculine. And I saw the masculine wanting to embody itself through me. Because if there is nothing else in existence, this experience is the only way for the masculine to actually embody itself. And it seeks to be brought out in this life. I saw myself as entering my bachelor stage in my life, and I saw this development of masculinity as extremely attractive. I felt what it would be like to develop this in myself, and I could take on the views of the feminine and see how it would react to the masculine. I could feel the eternal attraction between the two, and I could feel the potential I have to become the masculine. 3 Hours In (The Fabric of Reality and Dreaming Myself) This will be a bit less concise because it is basically straight from my trip report journal. It described the mental and emotional ride I was undergoing through the entire trip, but it is a bit more "shroomy" than the last sections. I began to see at a certain point that even this pursuit to become the masculine was just another game. I actually described it very well in my trip report: This life is all about becoming everything that you can become. In all of the ways that this mind you inhabit wants you to. It’s a game of illusion, yes. And you can accept that illusion and live in it. Or you can step into spirituality and realize it’s all a game. This is nothing more than God playing with itself in an infinite amount of ways that is infinitely confusing with so many different tug of wars going on in all sorts of directions. This is why reality has been so hard for you to understand, because you have so many different things that are coming at you in so many different ways. That’s how the illusion of the game is kept up. Once that’s up, then it’s just you. You don’t get punished or chastised. It’s literally just you. Then there's just another thing to dream up. Because you’re God. And God gets to dream up whatever it wants to. It’s all God just playing with itself in a multitude of different ways, dreaming up the development of all of these different ideas and concepts, when the only thing that ever existed was this moment. This is the Mind of God. This is reality. It is eternal. It is unknowable. It is just this, somehow all congealed into one miraculous experience that you live through. This is one of infinitely many possibilities you can dream up, because you're God. This is the exact story that God wants to be living out right now. Not even the slightest blade of grass is out of place. Everything is perfect, and it always will be. You want the illusion that you aren’t there yet. Like you are almost spiritually there. And you’ll slowly develop in that direction. It’s all exactly what God wants, so don’t worry. Just keep living your life. Keep developing in the ways that you feel naturally inclined to. And at the end, you can say that you lived fully. But there's literally nothing else here. Which is why we dreamed this up in the first place. A game of infinite growth, infinite possibility, infinite potential. A story that encapsulates that. Me. We dreamed up this ego. He is a permutation of infinity. We could go so many directions with this reality, but it’s really just up to you. It all comes down to you. It was dreamt up for you. So I am both the dream and the dreamer. God wanted a dream where he both knew what it was and didn’t simultaneously. So that’s how we got here. But there are so many different aspects of God too, like God is running a giant circus or it’s absolute madness going on at all times. But it all comes to this moment. It generates this moment. Everything you do, every decision you make, every thought you align yourself with, comes down to this moment. And writing about this moment both captures the essence of this idea and doesn’t. I simultaneously live in the moment but I don’t. There are multiple entities in charge, but there’s also only one. Everything is somehow perfectly symmetrical in every single possible way to generate an impossible beauty. And that is part of the experience that is being had. Reality has to be the way it is, but it also doesn’t. It can change. There are many different roads that you as an ego can walk down, but God has set in stone what it wants reality to be. And it’s this in this moment. Until God has decided it’s had enough. Part of the reason that this is so much to understand (wrong word but whatever) is because you are both God and your ego at the same time. There is profundity and emptiness to your existence. Because that’s the dream that God dreamt up. So until God dreams up a different one, then it’ll be the same. You’ll keep being you. There won’t be anything that changes. Now you can see why you don’t need to worry. You are God, and you are you. And everything is being generated in a way that is indescribably perfect and beautiful purely for what it is. It is awe-inspiring that anything exists at all, but simultaneously, it must exist exactly how it is now. So then what does the changing? The ego does the changing. I am the ego that grows and develops in whatever way he wants. That’s why this is so wacky, because that ego can develop in whatever way it wants. There is no set path. You can choose whatever you’d like. Reality has been constructed this exact way because God willed it to be this way. I feel like I’m riding the wave and controlling it at the same time. Such is the Mind of God. There is no need to be like anyone else. There is no need to be anything else. You can just be you, and that’s always been enough. There is simultaneously no understanding yet complete understanding at the same time of God. And that is perfect. It’s almost like God made an impossible labyrinth to escape from to keep being able to play for as long as possible because once the game stops, then there’s nothing left. All the fun stops. Not in a bad way, like there will be a punishment or anything, but it just stops. But I will also be continuously discovering God in all sorts of ways. Eternally. Even after I die, it just keeps going. The discovery, the growth, the humanity, the everything. But how could that even be possible? How could I continue growing after I die? Uhh, because you just did it. There. And there. And there. And there. And there. And there. And there. And on and on until you get it. (Referring to the passing of each moment here in case you didn't get it). Aren’t you seeing the game now? It’s a strange loop of everything existing on everything else. And there is a perfect wholeness and unity to it all. You can play in whatever area you’d like to play in mentally, but at the end of the day, you are God. You are the creator. You get to decide to live in whatever world you want. And this is what you want. So go live in it. Go live in your incredible, illustrious, incredible invention with infinite possibilities. And when you want to leave from this place, you can. But you can always come back here too. But you also can’t because the ego might stop you. But you’re always capable of it as God. A beautiful line that I wrote to describe this continuous, impossibly infinite paradox between myself and God is this: What is the journey without a destination? Yet life is a journey, not a destination. Life is the whole journey. The whole point of life existing is for this. For God to continuously wake up and fall asleep to itself infinitely. And until God decides to do something else, then this is what exists. The point of all of this is for God to awaken to itself repeatedly, infinitely many times. That’s all it is. There’s nothing more. It’s always been just this. 4 Hours In (Silence and Terror) I have no notes on this part of the trip, so I'm remembering the most I can. I started to watch Leo's video again at this point, wanting to get through the whole thing before the end of the trip. I continued on where I left off, slowly eliminating more and more things from my mind. It almost felt like a dangerous thing that I was doing to myself, but I wasn't making a big deal out of it. Like a person that knows they're doing something wrong but masks it in good vibes, so it doesn't seem like it's actually that big of a deal. Every time I got rid of another conceptual overlay, I felt this. And eventually, I reached stillness. It was in this moment that I felt eternal. I realized I could stay in this moment as long as I wanted. I saw that I could extend time on forever if I wanted to. I could turn minutes into hours. I could turn seconds into eons. But only if God willed it. And eventually, I came to the terror. I came to the terrifying realization that I really am all alone. I came to the terrifying conclusion that it really is just me. I came to the terrifying conclusion that I will be playing this game of waking up to myself in infinitely many ways forever. I saw that Leo was right. But I saw that what he was saying was not what I originally anticipated. I saw that his teachings were pointing me to direct solipsism. I recognized myself as the only Being in existence. I recognized myself as being the only one that ever existed and ever will exist. I saw myself as being alone. I saw actualized.org as a completely imagined entity meant to push me to wake up. But when I did wake up, I couldn't have been more terrified. The only time I've ever been more scared than this moment in my entire life was when I had that original LSD trip where I fell from grace into the hands of Satan. In that trip, I felt that I had eternally damned myself to forever be used by an external entity infinitely more powerful than myself until it chose to annihilate me. And in this trip, I felt that same fear. I felt the fear of annihilation and the fear of being trapped in a bubble of consciousness, where there is no way out. It almost felt claustrophobic. I could sense at the very core of my being that what was being said was true. And the whole reason that I dreamt this up in the first place was to get myself to accept this impossibly painful, eternal existence that I would never be able to escape no matter how hard I tried. I felt hopeless. I saw my entire life, my entire existence, as pointing me towards this. I felt my entire existence as coaxing me into submitting and surrendering into this void. Surrendering into nothingness. I felt the fear of this void so intensely. I also saw the surrender and submission into this as an inherently feminine trait (based on my definitions above). I extrapolated this into my ideas about what masculinity and femininity are. I saw reality as being inherently feminine. If reality is about a flow of things, and I'm being pushed to accept this flow, I am being pushed into a feminine way of being. But I seek out so desperately to embody masculinity at my core. But this trip made me see that it is impossible to accept this flow of reality while also maintaining my masculinity. To fall into this would be to embrace femininity at my core and acknowledge that I am fundamentally not masculine. It would be to admit that no matter how hard I try, I will eternally be locked in an existence of femininity seeking to embody masculinity - an impossible goal to achieve. And I would be forced to watch the masculinity around me forever, constantly suffering and wishing that I could have that. Wishing that I could have something I could never have. So I felt like I would always be forced to seek out masculinity in areas outside of myself. I felt like no matter what, I would not be able to properly embody masculinity. And that is what I saw all of reality as. And furthermore, when I had this realization, I realized that God is not all good. I knew this logically, but I had never felt it before. I saw God's capacity for Evil. I saw God's capacity for suffering. I saw God's capacity to relish watching another being in suffering. I saw and felt the essence of true Evil. And in that moment, I saw that it is possible for Reality and Consciousness and God to not be fundamentally Love. I saw the possibility for something much, much, much darker. The possibility of reality as nothing more than slavery of myself by an external entity to myself, using me for its own benefit with no regard for my well-being whatsoever while it puts me through whatever brutal, inhuman, hellish landscape it desires. And I saw it as a possibility for this entity to do nothing other than watch me suffer. And that could be existence. That could be the fundamental truth of reality. So to distract myself, I make this reality. I make this reality where I can get doses of goodness to combat against the impossibly heavy weight of existential void. I do it to escape because that is all there is to do. And knowing that others in my direct experience are also me, I don't even know how I can fully appreciate the positive words that they do say anymore. I don't know how much of reality is actually Love and how much of it is actually meant to make me suffer for enjoyment of another Being. When I felt this existential weight, I immediately ripped out my earbuds and begged for my illusions back. I couldn't feel that. It was too heavy. I was able to quickly talk to some people to get grounded back in reality, but this stuck with me. It still does stick with me. Somehow, both of the most real experiences in my life have pointed me towards this hellish eternity of slavery where I will never be able to escape. And I don't know what to make of that. It's a terrifying thought that this might be the truth of what reality is. I couldn't go any further into the void. I grazed it this time, but it was too much to bear for too long. Post-Trip Now, I'm sure some of these ideas that came up at the end were related to my traumas and fears and abandonment issues I mentioned at the beginning. But I will say that they felt so real and embodied at this point. I imagine that part of the reason they got mixed up in here is because they've been buried so deeply for so long that I wasn't able to process them. And opening up my mind with psychedelics kind of forces you to acknowledge these things whether you like to or not. Combining this with spiritual ideas can lead to philosophies like this no doubt. Despite this, somehow, they still felt so real. It got to a point during the trip where I could feel my mind demonizing Leo and his teachings. I started to look at the illusions that I've heard of as good and Leo's teachings as evil. But I really think that was because of the realizations I was having and feeling like I might be eternally suffering. It got to a point where all of actualized.org felt evil. Even though, I know that these teachings are much more advanced than any other teachings I've come across (mostly due to the attempt to get me to have a direct experience rather than just telling me what to do). This entire experience has made me question whether or not I actually do want Truth. I've never been as close as I just was, and I felt it sear me when it was too much. But I'm still here. I'm making this post now to try to clarify everything and make sense of the entire experience. I'm still working to plumb the depths of my mind and uncover the secrets of Consciousness. So now, I ask to those of you who have been here before: How did you get through this? How does anyone handle this existential weight of impending doom and eternal suffering? How could any human ever go through this and still be alive? What were your next steps? Where is this even in terms of the spiritual process? If this assumption about reality IS wrong, then how in the world am I supposed to make it right, given that some of my most profound experiences have been extremely terrifying? All responses are welcome. If you read this far, I thank you deeply. This is a very long and personal post, but I felt it was needed for my own sake.