Arthur

That's an interesting question. I think it's hard to pinpoint each layer of the pyramid onto the SD model. There is a lot of similarities, but fundamentally the models are different. Spiral Dynamics is a trend of social psychological development. Whereas Maslow's Hierarchy of need encapsulates an individual drive. With that being said, I can still trace common patterns. Here is my personal interpretation (from the bottom up): Layer 1 - Physiological needs: food, sleep, shelter, and sex. Sounds like stage Beige and Purple on the Spiral. Layer 2 -Safety needs: personal, emotional, financial and health security. I would map this to stage Red. This stage is all about exerting physical force in order to achieve status and material means. There is a big disregard for other's emotions and well being. Life is seen as a zero-sum game where one can win only by force. Layer 3 -Social belonging: friendships, intimacy, family This one is a bit tricky. It might be a fit for stage Green, but considering that we are moving up the Spiral and can't skip stages, I will map this one to Blue. Actually, It's not so far-fetched. Stage Blue people value their families highly, relationship with parents appears very sacred. There is also a big need for social groups in Blue - Republican party, religious groups, sports teams, ethnic communities etc. Layer 4 -Esteem: Individuality, recognition, status, importance To me, this one looks clearly as stage Orange. It's about working on yourself to get praises for your individuality. All about standing out - how hot your body is, how much money you have, how scientific you are, or in any other way. I think this tendency can manifest to some extent in stage Green as well. Layer 5 -Self-Actualization: utilizing abilities and talents, seeking happiness, connecting with the higher self, life purpose. I can see this one starting at stage Green but fully blossom at stage Yellow. Yellow is not motivated by social appraisal, material wealth or shallow success. Thus, only Yellow can truly pursue meaningful life purpose. Yellow knows himself very well and is able to tap into his strengths. Layer 6 - Transcendence: self transcendence. I see this layer fitting stage Turquoise. It is the desire to reach the infinite. At this layer, there is a deeper drive for self-realization. Taking self-actualization to its ultimate degree and discovering the emptiness of the Self.

@Adilbek I salute you for trying 5-meo. This is definitely no joke and requires great bravery. I think you got the same scale as I did, the cheap one from Amazon. Mine is reasonably accurate, within +-2mg. If your readings jump around, you can always try taking an average of a bunch of readings. Your substance definitely works. What you have described are the beginning phases. Keep going deeper and see where it will take you. Breakthrough reactions vary largely between individuals. How you react to it will depend on many factors - your personality, maturity, previous exposure to psychedelics, and so on. There is always an outlier report with loud shouting, breaking stuff and running around, but the majority of reactions are gentle on the outside. You are right to be prepared and take everything into account. Ideally, you need to set aside at least 4 hours where you are undisturbed. Also, try to approach the breakthrough doses slowly and build up to it. Personally, my 5-meo trips are very chill and peaceful on the outside. If I was to record myself, all that would be seen is my body twisting around the bed in weird poses. Even on my breakthrough, I didn't have an urge to scream or run-around. You are basically floored with such great intensity, that there isn't much your body can do.

I think you're using meditation as a distraction from starting your software projects. Meditation / spiritual work is its own thing. Mastering a subject and building life purpose is another. Everybody experience serious resistance in face of a large undertaking. Half of the willpower goest just to get something started. I notice this a lot in myself. Because I'm usually good at envisioning and planning a project, I get miserable before the rubber meets the road. I guess there is really no way around it. We need to have a vision and take baby steps. Unfortunately, no amount of theoretical knowledge will give you the skills needed to provide value. If you really want to be a good programmer, you need to go beyond your school curriculum and build your own projects. That means you need to work twice as much as typical CS student. On the bright side, once you have mastered this skill, you can apply it anywhere. The nice thing about programming is that it is generic enough that you can apply it in almost area. You can be the person building the infrastructure for the next Actualized.org and changing countless people's lives! I'd recommend cutting out distractions (if you haven't already) like TV, video games etc. Doing meditation for 30-60 minutes daily, no need for other fancy techniques and teachings. Committing at least one hour a day to build projects, or acquiring the skill necessary to start a project.

Very interesting post. Thanks for sharing. I think you definitely went deep with Spiritual work and psychedelics. And especially at such a young age. I had a similar mind meld down experience after my 5-meo-dmt breakthrough. I felt pressure in my head as if my brain re-wired was physically rewired. My understanding of people and situations became much deeper and broader. It would have been a real struggle to continue with a 9-5 routine every day, luckily I wasn't in that situation. I can think of a few possible explanations for this brain meltdown: Reason 1: Through psychedelics and other practices, you've tapped into great wisdom. You are developing into Spiral Dynamics stage Yellow thinker. With that being the case, your mind will naturally resist old patterns and ventures. You need to find new meaningful activities and discover your Life Purpose. Once you do that, waking up every day will be a blessing. Reason 2: You are going through a natural process of maturation. Between the ages of 18-22, your body/mind goes into very radical changes. You are just starting to form as an adult and discover your identity. In a way, big paradigm shifts are actually normal and expected. It is a transition phase that will not last for much longer. Reason 3: You have an Introverted psychological type. For you, the normal mode of operation is going inwards and being isolated. You need to purposefully, by making effort, be more Extraverted. Try to do more physical activity, get more sleep, more quality food, and spend time with other people. Your lifestyle will largely reflect how you feel inside. Try to give your mind a break by changing your activities. Reason 4: You have done a lot of Spiritual growth and now you experience an Ego Backlash. This Ego reaction is not necessarily a short-term phenomenon. I've experienced 2 years of extremely fast growth, followed by a full year and a half of slacking off. It could be a long phase of falling apart, followed by a new phase of growth.

Name: Arthur Bondar Age: 25 Gender: Male Location: Halifax, Canada (Lived in Ukraine and Israel) Occupation: Electronics Engineering Marital Status: In a relationship Kids: No Hobbies: meditation, books, programming, movies, this forum. I got into personal development in 2014. I found Actualized.org at a time of a big personal struggle, and from that moment, my life was never the same. I came to a cross-road and made a significant life decision. It wasn't easy, but I was rewarded with a teacher like Leo to guide me. I immediately recognized the deep wisdom of Actualized.org. It's been a very bumpy ride, but today, I'm reaping the benefits. I first started by improving my social skills, like any other young male. Here, Personal development opened my eyes to how much we care about what others think. I found what women are actually attracted too, and how the whole dynamic works. Many of my naive beliefs got crushed, and from the fire, a more mature understanding emerged. The quality of my life improved dramatically when I started Meditating. Every experience became infused with awareness. My mind is able to stay focused, sharp and clear. I'm can shift out of negative thought loops and destructive emotions. I consider Meditation to be the most important activity of all. 12 years of formal education is not as important as a meditation habit. Practicing meditation got me deeper into Spiritual work. Here, my life was changed once again by self-inquiry and psychedelics. I've experienced deep mystical states - Samadhi, ego death, and pure awareness. Today I know myself as empty consciousness that is aware of everything. All things come out of nothingness to the spotlight (me) for a brief moment, then disappear into the void. Personal challenges I've overcome: Playing video games and wasting time Moving to a new country to start a new life Problems with shyness and caring what others think Co-dependent relationships Unhealthy diet and lifestyle Attachment and ego-clinging What I'm working on now: Helping others and contributing to the world Gaining more practical skills Working on my Life Purpose Self-realization - Enlightenment

I'll share my interpretation of love = consciousness. Of course, I don't equate awareness to love that is commonly experienced by humans. To me, this statement refers to an existential love. It is really something of an experience, rather than a thing that you can get conceptually. I didn't get it for a long time after Leo's "What Is Love" episode. But now, I think I got a few glimpses. Actually, it is something we all experience. It is a type of transpersonal love. A love for existence itself. You can get in touch with that in moments of deep connection with reality. Maybe it's a loving memory you have of your childhood or a beautiful place that you remember. Regardless of the content, there is always something that you deeply love. Is it really love for a place, memory or a person? Not really, it's a love of the existence of that place, memory or person. From the big picture, it's a love of existence itself. And our existence is consciousness because there is no other way we perceive reality. Really it's a love for reality as it is. And even, as you mentioned before, ISIS comes and beheads you. You say - "my life was still worth it". Imagine non-existence as a deep infinite void with nothing in it. A dark place with no you, no colors, no thoughts, no sensations, no anything. And compare that to the existence we have as conscious beings. Of course, all the bad stuff is here too, including death, but from the point of view of consciousness, it's all fair game. Love is the existence of all that.

I agree with what was said previously on this topic. You are jumping way ahead of yourself. The vision you have is too huge to start implementing. Start with something small and concrete, like finding your own living place. Also, what you are going through is very important. It is your "Hero's Journey" happening right now at this moment. You see the tough road that lays ahead and it makes you feel like shit. Just keep going despite the challenges, you will emerge a Hero! Good luck on your journey.

I know talking about stuff is inevitable and it's what the mind does. But, I would still try to discuss more practical matters. I feel like writing about practices, techniques, retreats, psychedelics, self-inquiry, different teachings, and mature discussions, are much more useful. Spilling out the Monkey chatter in the mind, or showing off your conceptual understanding of Enlightenment, isn't very productive.

Please stop with mental masturbation. It's not getting you, or anybody else, closer to the Truth.

What a great post! Very inspiring to read that. Thank you for sharing!

I think it happens when consciousness dissociates from the body. Your body awareness disassembles into its raw form. It happens when you are in a state of flow, concentration, sleep, or sometimes just watching a movie. In general when you are absorbed in an activity. This raw form is pure experience without an experiencer. It's what we all are up to about the age of 2 when body awareness begins to develop. You can catch this state in action when you are transitioning between the waking awareness into a deep sleep. But generally, you can not recall a lot from this state, because there was no human present. It is said that you can disassemble your body awareness permanently with Mahasamadhi.

In the big picture, none of us are doing this. Not the act of seeking, nor the act of surrendering. You are not in control of either one. Its easy to prove if you try to imagine the thought you're going to have in the next 10 seconds. In a sense, I'm not writing this, and you are not reading this. It's all being played and it's all karma. Circumstances are infinitely complex and destiny is inevitble. As the awareness watching the movie, we have zero influence over the plot. "You're not doing it, it's doing you" - Alan Watts. Awesome post man! very profound insights.

Recently, I started to get a glimpse of how profound Quantum Mechanics is. I've heard about the famous Double Slit Experiment when I was in high school. I even did some basic calculations of the interference pattern in my college physics class. Yet, it never occurred to anybody just how counter-intuitive, profound, and outright bizarre that experiment is. Brief description Imagine you have a loaded gun pointed at a wall with two slit openings. Behind it is another one, where every bullet entry can be clearly seen. The first wall acts as a sieve for all the bullets fired at the second wall. Common sense suggests that only the bullets fired at a specific angle will go through. After hundreds of rounds fired from different angles, you should expect two lines on the second wall. Those lines are a projection of the two primary slits. After a good number of rounds, the emerging pattern was very counter-intuitive. The marks suggested that a bullet was not following a straight path. There were bullet holes found in spots that were physically un-reachable without curving the bullet direction. The marks appeared in an Interference pattern, which is a phenomenon of waves. It can be observed at a beach when ocean waves encounter rocks. Still, bullets - electrons, are not waves, they are real physical particles. Your body and everything around us is made out of them... or so it seems. This result was basically the stuff of science fiction. It suggested that when a bullet was shot, it immediately transformed into a soup of all possible positions. It collapsed back into a bullet again when it reached the second wall. And then it got even weirder... When scientists put a measuring device that catches the bullet's exact position. They stopped transforming into a wave and acted just as regular physical entities! There was no Interference pattern, and the results were predictable. When they removed the measuring devices, the pattern appeared again. So what the hell is going on? The conclusion was that the act of observation collapses this wave of infinite possibilities into a single point of outcome. Yet when you are not looking, it all exists as a primordial singularity, infinite potential or a probability function. Although this function (Bell curve distribution) favors certain outcomes, there is never a 0% chance for any outcome. This result caused credible scientists to consider that we truly live in a simulation. We are in a game engine that and only renders things we actually need to see. Like a game character uncovering dark areas on the map, except that dark areas are non-existent prior to discovery. I'd like to hear your conclusion. Here is mine: Aside from quotes like "when you are not looking at the moon, it isn't there". What this seems to suggest is that consciousness is not separate from the "outside" events. In fact, there are is no external reality. Everything exists as nothingness, void, and infinite potential until consciousness is introduced. That stoplight awareness gives rise to the 10,000 things we see around us. Like an old movie projector with a tape running through it. The tape images become visible only through the light of the projector. The present moment manifests itself only because of awareness. There is no outside reality to present experiences. We are the raw experience that collapses the emptiness and manifests reality every single moment.

That's very profound. But if non-duality includes duality. Then non-duality is literally duality. They are one and the same thing. If that's the case, this post is meaningless. This post describes how they are one, assuming they are separate entities 1 & 0. What I'm saying is that 10 is still a distinction.

@Fairy 10 means the number 2 in Binary. two = duality. how do you explain that?

@peqkno Ultimately I don't know if cellphone frequency does or doesn't have any effect. I haven't conducted experiments. I'm only stating my personal conclusion, based on what I've learned. Can you elaborate on what you mean by pulsed? If you are talking about frequency, then everything is frequency. Just by standing in the middle of a street, you have thousands of frequencies passing through your body. For example, you have bands like AM/FM, GSM, Satellite TV, 4G, WiFi, GPS, and many others that I'm not aware of. These communication bands often operate with much more power than a tiny battery in your phone can output. If someone is really worried about electromagnetic interference, living in the suburbs will probably be a better choice. I don't deny the effect on electromagnetic wave on the brain. In my courses, our instructor, who has a lot of experience in the field, mentioned that he personally knows people who have a headache as soon as they are in the proximity of a transmitter. But again, cellphones transmitting power is exponentially smaller than that of a tower. Also, I would make a distinction between Radiation and Electromagnetic waves. Radiation is an emission of a particle from the nucleus of an atom. This particle can travel to healthy human cells, knock things out of place, and cause cancer. Electromagnetic waves, on the other hand, are vibrations of electrons everywhere around us. When this vibration reaches a certain frequency, you can observe radioactive effects, but we are talking about 300GHz and up. This high frequency can only travel a short distance and will be blocked by concrete walls, like in nuclear reactors or Xray rooms. Not to mention it will be completely illegal to put something like that in a cellphone device.

When I studied wireless communications, our instructor said that is it mostly a myth. Cellphones operate on a much lower frequency than any X-ray or Gamma rays. Also, the transmission power of a cellphone is minuscule. It is a different story with transmission towers though. He said he would be worried living next to a radio tower, because of the high power output that they produce. If you climb on a transmitter while it's operational, it will literally cook you up, like in a microwave.

@Mikael89 That's awesome, I love this channel, but haven't heard of Quantum Eraser before. At 14:12 they mention precisely the point I was making in my previous post. Thanks for sharing.

Leo has a specific style of teaching. His approach is direct, masculine, left-brained, analytical and logical. Hence, Actualized.org attracts and resonates with those kinds of people. I agree that there has to be a balance, but this is not a Green forum. Leo's compassion and sacrifices manifest through his teachings and the wisdom he shares with the world. Maybe he never held anybody's hand, but he transformed countless people's lives in a very profound way. I have tears just from the fact that a person like him does what he does. He followed up with his passion, through countless struggles, to give you the deepest wisdom that is available today. It's a huuuuuge privilege to even know about actualized.org. So sorry if Leo came off a bit rude. This approach can definitely come off crude and lacking compassion. However, Actualized.org is not promoting emotional connection and empathy to begin with. This is a hard and tough place where ego's work hard for self-realization. With that being said, you still have awesome Moderators who will shower you with understanding and love regardless of where you are coming from. Arrogance and cockiness are definitely here too. But you have to separate the teaching form the community. Leo's teaching attracts different people at different stages of development. He can't supervise everything that is going on here, nor can his teaching be appropriate for everybody. If an emotional connection, love, and acceptance are what you are looking for. You will have to wait until Actualized.org transforms into a Turquoise teaching. But I wouldn't worry about that too much and focus on my own transcendence through stage Green.

@Amun So you are suggesting that "dead matter" in fact collapses the wave function and not consciousness? I hear you. But how would the Scientist know that the measurement did or did not affect the experiment? He would have to look at it. Maybe not directly, but at the measurement device that was present during the experiment. Yet, that looking, even after a certain period of time, will collapse the function of the result itself. The result might prove indeed that electron wave collapsed during the experiment, but he looked at at the result nonetheless! even if it happened after the experiment. I'm trying to apply the principle of this experiment to the one doing the experiment. If a particle can exist in multiple states at once, I don't see why the result of the experiment can and can not show the collapse of the wave at the same time. What I'm saying is that the experiment, the result, and everything exists only as a "probability wave" without consciousness.

Nope. Actually, every time you have sex - your full Enlightenment is postponed for another year. truth be told .. sorry fellas...

From my experience, language gets fused with a way of thinking and attitude people have. It might be different if you are learning the language without ever living in the country. But if you pick up a language from everyday practice, and become fluent in it, the language becomes much more than a means of conveying information. When language penetrates into your thought process, when you start thinking in a specific language, it carries with it a subliminal weight. A sort of noncommunicable attitude. When you hear other people use certain words, they always have their own perspectives and attitude fused in their speech. When you mimic that to learn a language, the mind picks that meta-speech/meaning automatically. I am talking about a sort of deep cultural appropriation and attitude. I think you can't really be fluent in a language without living in the country it is used. To be fluent, your mind will have to start thinking in that language, which can take quite a bit of time. You can't talk freely when if you have to do a mental pause to translate every single word. Also, at least for me, I find that I can't really think in more than 1 language. Thus, other languages are going in the background. I can still be fluent when I'm concentrating, but it is not as effortless.

@Jed Vassallo I think you have a high tolerance like I do. Don't worry about not getting results from your first retreat. I had 4/5 trips and wasted quite a bit of substance until I got better with it. On day 4, you actually came close to your real dose. The experience you've described is exactly what I feel before every peek. I have a strong body load, throwing up, primal fear - fight/flight instinct, shivering, anxiety etc. There isn't really a way around it, you just have to push through. When those sensations settle down, you are rewarded with the deepest experience of your life. Plugging should work for you too, not unless your bowels made out of steel. I think you didn't felt any effect because your doses were too small. Try 30mg with snorting, and watch your response. If you have similar experiences to day 4, you need more substance. Past 30mg, I recommend you switch back to plugging. To me, it seems like higher doses have more difficult to absorb in the nose, but I might be wrong. After 30mg snorted, go back to plugging and do 35, 40, 45 and so on. If you really feel no substantial difference between 30 and 35, go with 10mg increments. Each individual brain reacts differently to the substance, sometimes your relationship with the substance might be outside of the norm. You will definitely know when you have a breakthrough. The negative sensations will overwhelm you, as they always do before the peak. Then suddenly your brain will say "fuck it, I'm out, whatever happens, happens". You fall down and surrender completely. What happens next can not and should not be described. Wish you all the best!

I think everybody has their own point of view and can interpret this experiment differently. I happen to look at it through the spiritual lense. To me, it dovetails nicely with mysticism. I enjoy scientific results that brake the material notions of reality and take consciousness into account. Like for example the Quantum Gravity research theory, which proposes that reality is a pattern of a unified 8-dimensional crystal. In the end, it's all speculations and attempts to caricature some aspects of existence.. but its fun.

@SQAAD I had a somewhat similar experience. After my death on a 5-MeO breakthrough trip, I came back a bit different. I looked through people as though there was nobody there. It came off a bit creepy, I barely even blinked. I noticed other strange sensations, like euphoria and long meditative trances. For me, the sensations subsided after about two weeks. But I know an Enlightenment guy who remained in a similar state pretty much permanently. I hope you can manage and integrate this state more. And if not, that's alright too. Maybe "going crazy" is what awareness want's to experience through you. Judgments and labels, like "crazy", don't really matter. You know who you are, and you are always who you are, what else is there.