Pure Imagination

Johann Sebastian Bach performed on saxophone

Compared to the rest of human history, we are going through a mass awakening right now.

Thank you for sharing - I love Matt Kahn. Be careful with how you define yourself and other as an empath. At the deepest level, you are the only conscious being in existence, there is no other. You may be feeling intense energies you perceive coming from others, but in actuality it is only you who is projecting what you think they are feeling through your own body. You can never truly feel other beings' emotions because there is no other! Matt Kahn's method of saying to yourself "I respect your sovereignty" is useful for dropping intense energies you perceive that come from others, but only if you believe others exist.

Parts work by Teal Swan is an excellent process for learning emotional mastery: Mediating between the parts of yourself that are in conflict creates inner peace, and ultimately emotional mastery if you take the process that far. Do parts work as often as you like, the more you do the faster the process will work for you. Perhaps 30-60 minutes daily.

Would you say that a God realized, active mind would have more elevated thought patterns of questioning and insight, rather than something egoic? For instance, I could have an active mind in one moment that focuses on my social anxiety and that could create a web of negative, ultimately untrue thought patterns. But perhaps a God realized mind would look at that and see those same negative patterns for what they are? A way to awaken rather than believing self destructive thoughts. I guess I’m just wondering where the line is between an egoic active mind, and a God realized active mind. Wouldn’t any content of the mind count as being suppressive, separate, limiting, or restrictive? Even the most elevated, awakened, true thoughts generated from a God realized mind?

You are a character I am dreaming up so that I can tell myself I helped someone with their metaphysical question.

@Leo Gura I recall from your video a point you made that with the upward movement of consciousness, an active mind can be a good thing rather than bad. Can you go into more detail about that? As someone with a very active mind, I am curious. Is it if God’s mind is more active, God’s mind can learn, understand, and comprehend more about itself? Is achieving cessation not helpful in realizing God?

You can reach a similar realization about your supposed waking state. Those people you think are real are just as fake as the dream characters, with a little more appearance of physicality to them.

They don’t seem so fake while you’re dreaming though do they?

How different are the dream and waking states really? The important difference is that you take one of them much more seriously than the other. Regardless they’re both stories you made up.

If you try 5-meo (or any psychedelic), don’t underestimate how much it WILL change your consciousness. Even if you don’t realize it after coming down. You can’t unsee source after you have experienced it. You can convince yourself you’re the same person, but you’re not. So don’t take the decision to use psychedelics lightly, they will radically change you in ways that you can only pretend to understand.

Back in November of 2016, I had my breakthrough 5-MeO-DMT experience. Now that I have had a few months to contemplate and integrate what I experienced, I think I am finally ready to share what I saw. All I can say is that I still have no idea what to make of that experience. I do know that it was the most profound experience of my life. I also know that I was certainly not ready to see what I saw. Having said that, I’ll go ahead and describe my spiritual background prior to this trip. I started meditating on and off since the summer of 2015. Looking back on that first year of spiritual exploration, I can now see I had no idea what I was even supposed to be looking for (beginning a DAILY practice probably would have helped). I had a pretty solid intellectual understanding of what enlightenment is back then (thanks Leo), but I even knew back then that I was missing the point of my meditation practice. I wasn’t experiencing what meditation was “supposed” to be showing me. Enter my psychedelic exploration. Over this past year I began experimenting with psilocybin mushrooms and LSD. I have had many insightful and meaningful experiences on these substances. They have radically changed my life and how I see that world. I could also tell that I had stared to experience the beginning stages of what I “should” be experiencing with meditation. I guess I could say that before my psychedelic exploration I wasn’t even on the correct path toward enlightenment, but now I’m at least facing in the correct direction I then learned about 5-MeO-DMT from Leo’s video and I was instantly fascinated. A substance that would create an instant ego death…..sign me up! I finally acquired some 5-meo and I had two initial trips on it before my breakthrough experience. These experiences were profound for sure, but they both were not nearly as deep as I thought they would be (I probably wasn’t sniffing it correctly). One Thursday night around 11:30 PM, I decided to go for it again on a dime (this was a bad idea). I weighed out 30mg, put it in a straw, and snorted that beautiful gold powder up my nose. I could instantly tell that more of it was being absorbed than my previous experiences; my nose was stinging substantially more. I sat back in my bed and waited for the effects to kick in. And boy did they – I was completely blindsided. The come up was incredibly fast as I started to lose my ego at an exponential rate. This is also when the intense feelings of anxiety began to set in. Normally while sober, I have a few different methods of settling back into the present moment and gaining mindfulness over my emotions. These techniques went out the window. I couldn’t even remember how to think at this point; there was no “me” that could manipulate thought. “I” was totally at the mercy of the experience. (From here through the rest of the trip, if I use the words “I” or “me,” it is specifically for ease of language purposes. There was no “me” at this point). There was then a disconnect in time; I don’t remember even arriving at the peak but I do remember parts of what the peak itself was like. I experienced little to no visuals, everything looked “normal”. But the content of my visual field all became one. I could no longer tell the difference between the wall, the blanket, the clock, or the door. It was all one singular point of infinite possibilities the visual field could exist as. It was as if someone had pulled the rug out from under the “me” who experiences reality and there was just pure reality. I couldn’t even remember what I had done a few hours earlier in the evening. Nor did it even occur to me that there was an evening that happened. Despite my ego completely disappearing, the intense feelings of anxiety were still present. It was my thought at the time that if I didn’t do something about the anxiety, this experience was going to cause long term damage to my psyche. At that point, all I could do was open up my body and try my best to surrender. That was difficult because I couldn’t even perceive the me that needed to surrender! I began reciting the word “surrender” over and over as some sort of a mantra. Maybe at the very least my subconscious could pick up on what that word meant. “Surrender. Surrender. Surrender. Surrender. Surrender.” That’s the only word I could perceive for what I assume was several minutes. It was as if my ego was stuck in this perceived Hell for an eternity, and it was trying to get me to identify with it so I would suffer as well. The stress built up so much to the point where I ended up vomiting up the Taco Bell I had for dinner (award winning diet, I know). I was not prepared for this in the slightest, so it all ended up on my hard wood floor. Thank goodness I don’t have carpet in my room I lay back in my bed feeling like I had just purged much of the negative energy from my body. I could then feel my ego settling back into my body slowly as everything was turning back to “normal.” It was in that moment I realized that I truly experienced God and what it was like to be God. I was it. I was (and still am) the one who creates all of reality. My life story was total bullshit. I actually believed that I was a human being going through some life destined to die…..ha! I realized how foolish I was for falling for the same delusion most human beings on this planet are brainwashed into believing. It’s totally ridiculous that more people cannot see through this illusion! Through this experience, I learned to never underestimate God ever again. It was without question the most terrifying, yet humbling experience of my life. The next day I woke and my perspective on reality was completely different, for better or for worse. My short-term memory since this experience has been noticeably reduced. I’ll often think of things, get distracted for a few seconds, then completely forget what I was thinking about. I was already a pretty spacey person, but now it takes even more work if I need to remember something for a short period of time. Occasionally, I also get some feelings of anxiety towards the present moment as well. I like to think that this is my ego reacting to the truth of no self that I experienced. If I am mindful enough I can usually see this anxiety for what it is causing it to dissipate reasonably fast. My perspective towards anxiety is completely different now as well. Many of the things that used to make me nervous don’t so much anymore. Instead my anxiety is now much more sporadic, appearing at seemingly random times for no apparent reason. It can be unpleasant to deal with at times, but it has become a very useful spiritual practice for me. Overall I am happy that I had this experience. I disposed of the rest of the 5-MeO-DMT I had afterwards. I may revisit it sometime in the distant future, but I can already tell I need to integrate this experience for many more months or even years. It was like going through years of contemplative meditation all in just a one hour sitting. I now know that I am at least headed in the correct direction with enlightenment now and I am excited to see what new realizations are to be had! Thank you for reading and let me know what you think!

In my experience, there is no distinction between physical and spiritual realities. It’s more like they are intimately connected and are always affecting one another. So paradoxically, go deeper into the physical and you’ll see how it is interconnected to the spiritual. Don’t separate the two. They are both subjective aspects of the absolute; ultimately they are the same without distinction.

I follow Secular Talk featuring Kyle Kulinski on YouTube, and he recently posted a video criticizing Marianne Williamson over a tweet she posted about prayer. I found this to be a perfect example of how Spiral Dynamics Stage Orange confuses the religion of Stage Blue with the spiritual teachings of Stage Green. I mainly wanted to comment on this video to show the dangers of demonizing spiritual concepts of Green as bullshit. There are many valid spiritual principles Marianne touches that I have experienced for myself as true. Please note that I am not demonizing Kyle or Marianne here. Kyle produces a fantastic show that pushes for great policy proposals that will greatly benefit America, and he does so in a convincing way. Voices like his are important for advancing America’s political discourse. I would just like to clear up any confusion that Kyle’s line of thinking in this video may cause. Likewise, Marianne is an important voice in opening Americans up to Stage Green spiritual principles, but that doesn’t mean she always presents them in a realistic, pragmatic way that resonates with Stage Blue/Orange people. Please watch the video before reading so I can avoid restating the video’s content. Here are my comments and critiques: In her first tweet, Marianne talks about how the power of the mind can influence external events, such as altering the path of Hurricane Dorian. Kyle dismisses this claim as religious, spiritual, new-age nonsense. Now many of you may reject this concept as Kyle does, but that would be a huge misunderstanding about how universal mind (aka God, reality, your true nature, etc.) works. Our beliefs create our entire reality; most people in the west hold the belief that our mind is separate from reality and it doesn’t have any influence on the so-called external world. This is simply not the case. Your mind created the idea of Hurricanes, along with the notion that we are helpless to them and that they cannot be altered by our minds. The fact is that if society at large believed thoughts can change their reality, then that would become our new truth. But we hold ourselves back and tell ourselves the story that our minds of no control over the external world, preventing us from tapping into our true creative potential. This is part of humanity’s innate sense of separateness. Kyle conflates Marianne’s claims with other unhealthy instances of religion/spirituality in politics. He puts her claims at the same level as sharia law and the Republic Party’s exploitation of Christianity to garner votes. Marianne’s claims are not the “left wing version” of religion. She is not preaching a doctrine meant to be taken on faith, and she is not weaponizing these truths for political gain. If anything, these claims hurt her chances with the Democratic electorate. She is speaking of principles that have been verified by many and are taught in many spiritual schools of thought. Kyle explains that Dorian destroyed the Bahamas and missed Florida. He says that if prayer worked, then that means that Bahamians didn’t pray hard enough to dodge the storm. This is a gross mischaracterization of how universal mind works. It is difficult to explain why certain things manifest physically in relation to thoughts because there are so many factors that play into manifestation. The Law of Attraction is misunderstood by most, even in spiritual communities. There are an infinite number of reasons why thoughts do or do not manifest physically, and I would love to flesh this out more with all of you and hear your perspective regarding manifestation. While I personally cannot pinpoint exactly why Dorian took the path it did, I can posit a couple possibilities: The predominant belief of most who were impacted is that we are helpless to natural disasters, and that prayer won’t do anything anyways. This automatically disables almost any possibility of change through the mind. Perhaps people more impacted by Dorian were hoping it would miss them, but they may have resisted getting hit so much that they manifested the reality they were trying to avoid. This is the concept of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Marianne mentions that prayer is a power of the mind. Kyle responds by saying it is not, and it is just something that one does in the mind, and that things one thinks aren’t guaranteed to manifest. It’s true that thoughts aren’t guaranteed to manifest, but that isn’t because mind has no effect on the so-called physical world. Our mind creates all of reality; there is nothing external to consciousness. If something prayed for fails to manifest, it can be due to a variety of factors (see the point above). Marianne claims to have seen first-hand the power of prayer working with altering something like a hurricane. Now she may be right, but I get the sense she is believing this on faith rather than experience. Like I have said, manifestation is very nuanced and virtually no human has a good understanding of how it works. Marianne seems to be taking a Stage Green approach in understanding prayer, rather than a Stage Turquoise approach. I don’t sense humbleness in how she treats manifestation; rather, it sounds like overconfidence in beliefs she holds. Marianne claims the “overly secularized Left” are losing voters by shutting out religious/spiritual people. I strongly disagree. The Left by and large are accepting of most people. I am not convinced the Democratic Party is losing voters because of secularism; the vast majority of elected Democrats are Christians. Kyle more or less makes this point and I completely agree with him. Kyle claims Marianne’s comments are dangerous because people may avoid evacuating and just try to pray the hurricane away. This is ridiculous. No one is just going to change their safety plans because Marianne advocated for prayer. Almost no one believes prayer has that kind of power, even most devout religious people. That’s about it. Let me know what you think and I am excited to hear y’all’s take on this!

Thank you for this! I’m personally very triggered by movies/shows where a character suffers immense physical pain. So much so that I pass out sometimes. I’ll give this a shot and maybe I’ll be able to work through those fears ❤️

Answer your prepared questions during the trip, and feel free to have a free-write section where you can write down various insights. For journaling the next day, use that to gather your thoughts about what you learned. The goal is to retain what you saw in the higher state of consciousness. Perhaps write about what your life would look like without caffeine. That is your time to bring the abstract ideas into concrete reality. It’s difficult to give specific instructions on how to do this because every trip is different. Follow your intuition; if you find another way to integrate what you learn then trust your gut

One more thing! Dedicate your entire trip to this intention. I have found if I try to accomplish many different goals in a trip, none of them ever happen

I would stick to a low to moderate dose. Perhaps 100-200ug. I wouldn’t recommend going much higher than that; it’s hard to fix an earthly problem when you’re dimension hopping Go into it with a clear intention. Write down questions such as: Why do I feel the need to ingest caffeine regularly? What would my life look like without it? What am I trying to avoid when I crave it? Observe your thought patterns and catch why the cravings happen. Most importantly, take time the next day or more to integrate what you learned. Journal about it. See if you can retain what you saw during the trip. It’s great you have a week dedicated to this - the more time the better. Good luck ❤️

Countless! It’s highly dependent on your intention. They can help you become more conscious and expand your awareness, essentially inducing an enlightenment experience (to various degrees, depending on dose). This can give you a clearer picture of what you are searching for with enlightenment work. They’re also great for gaining general life insights. They can help resolve deep emotional issues, help relationships, help with work projects, etc.. There are countless things that higher consciousness can assist you with. Choose your dose wisely as well. I found that lower doses (~.5-1.5g) are great for general life insights and shadow work. Doses above 2.5g are great for enlightenment work, but make sure to incrementally increase dosages; definitely don’t pop 5g if you haven’t taken them before.

This past week or so I’ve started to get pretty doubtful of spirituality. It feels like all of this is one big lie and that we’re all trying to pursue something that isn’t even there. I’ve had (so called) mystical experiences in the past - while sober and through psychedelics. But I can’t help but think that all that was just either a drug experience, or my mind playing tricks on me. Now I’m not saying I’m ready to give up the spiritual path, but I just don’t feel a reason to pursue it right now. What’s the point? All I see in front of me is the seemingly physical world, nothing more nothing less. Where is this apparent God? It sounds just like a fantastical idea to me. And I know people are gonna say that all this is really real, and that I just have to experience it for myself. Well I don’t find that particularly convincing. I’ve been on this spiritual journey for four years now and I basically feel like the same person as I was when I started. Am I gonna kill another three decades to pursue something that’s not there and get nothing out of it? I would rather not. So question time - what should I do? I don’t feel passionate about spirituality right now at all. What have y’all done if/when you have gone through a doubt phase like this?

Who is the I that is not directly conscious of God? Deceptive thoughts that aren't actually pointing to a real self? I like this a lot. Dropping the concept of becoming enlightened resonates and stops the spiritual ego in its tracks. I guess that's the name of the game! Feeling bad about being deluded is just more false self Thank you, this really resonates with me! I'll work on detaching from the content of my experience (or rather detach from the one who thinks he needs to be detached ) Thank you so much for your numerous replies; it's amazing how valuable it is to hear other people's perspectives. It helps a lot with getting unstuck

Then why is the supposed physical world even here? All I know is true is the content I'm observing right now. Why should I assume there's a stateless state to go along with it? I have a basic understanding of what I'm shooting for - I have experiences aspects of it (or so I think). Perhaps I may be more deluded about what I am looking for, because I'm failing to find it at all lately.

Isn't it already true that we are all enlightened? I feel like "trying" to become enlightened is trying to manipulate the content of our experience rather than investigating our supposed true nature of nothingness. Thank you for the rest of the post though, there's a lot of gems in what you said and helps clarify a lot for me. I do have a basic understanding that this current experience isn't physical like it seems to be. I do frequently fall back into the illusion when I get consumed in mind; it happens more times than others. So far the primary focus of my journey has been embodying complete authenticity. When I'm fully present, I hesitate less to authentically express how I feel rather than the ego coming in saying I have to people please instead.

Shadow work, concentration, and contemplative journaling. I'll continue to hack away at it, but I can't help but think that concept is a wild goose chase right now.

@The Don You made the right choice deciding not to support him. If someone is emotionally hostile to you that often then they aren’t worth your time. Your brother’s friends are going to believe what they’re going to believe. Same with people at large. Just explain what actually happened and that’s all you need to do. The only people you really need to be concerned about are your close friends and family. Hopefully they’ll be well enough judges of character to know that you are telling the truth. Don’t feel like you need to! It is perfectly valid to feel the way you do about this. Maybe try to find some empathy for your brother - he acted at the level of consciousness he was at at the time. “Forgive them Father for they know not what they do”