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@Raptorsin7 There are many facets including peace, joy, fulfillment but if it could be said in a word......Bliss.

Thanks for bringing up this topic. I also observe a lot of spirituality with a goal and destination of abiding warm fuzzy feelings. Maybe there is such a destination, yet that's not my experience and not something I am seeking. I resonate strongly with that which is unconditional. When I see spiritual retreats promoting transcendence into conditional states of love and bliss, part of me is turned off. Some of my lessons have been things like the absolute peace in relative terror. Yet these are hard lessons that don't sell well. I've never seen a retreat with themes like "Surrender to your deepest fears", "The peace of anxiety", "Embrace your inner rapist". . . A couple years ago, a doctor in my area got caught sexually abusing young teenage girls. He got away with it for a long time. He was able to quiet the girls and parents didn't suspect a well-renowned doctor could behave like this (he was also a doctor for an olympic team). . . When he got caught, people were outraged. Some people were extremely upset and wanted him to suffer. I met many people that wanted him to go to a filthy prison where he would repeatedly get raped. The gal I was dating at the time held this view. It was like a choice had to be made: you either had compassion for the children or compassion for the rapist. Having compassion for both was impossible. As soon as I wondered if he had been abused as a child, she flipped out and started yelling at me that I was supporting a child rapist. I asked her if it was possible to have compassion for both the abused and the abuser and she vehemently said no and wanted me to decide which side I was on. . . Yet all dualities collapse with enough scrutiny. . . I then asked her "You have compassion for a child that has been abused. Ok, when does your compassion for that child end? What does that child need to do to no longer be deserving of your compassion?". She paused like this was a trick question. . , She replied "Never. I would always have compassion for them". . . . This is a common dilemma, the mind likes the idea of "unconditional love" or "unconditional compassion" until they find out what "unconditional" really means. . . So I continued: "Children abuse is traumatizing and leaves an imprint of suffering and disorders into adulthood - this suffering can be expressed in many different ways through their life. Should our compassion for the abused child end on their 18th birthday, when they are no longer a 'child'?", "Of course not". . . "So what would a traumatized person need to become unworthy of your compassion". She replied "They can't hurt another person". . . And that turned out to be her non-negotiable condition for compassion. She would not budge off of it. Like you suggested, compassion to me is trying to imagine what it's like to be in another person's shoes. We could imagine what it would be like to be abused, suffer for years, harm others and hate ourselves for it - yet be unable to stop. This imagination is a big step for the vast majority of people. Yet as you also suggested, empathy goes much deeper into nondual areas in which there is no difference between me and that child rapist. Ime, this work is extremely difficult and makes compassion look like a cake-walk. It goes much deeper than "I have the capacity to do that" or "After that type of abuse I may have done the same". That's still relatively surface. The deeper levels are actually being it. The "I AM" everything is fun and games while it's a blissful state of juicy Nondual Oneness. Yet it's not so much fun when the "I AM" means another that I hate or fear. I AM does not only include chipmunks, trees, butterflies and healers. The I AM also includes racists, murderers and child abusers. And that aint easy to face. I've been on many psychedelic trips where the "I AM" was someone I did not sign up for. The I AM includes both abused and abuser. These are the deepest levels of I AM empathy. Judgement, hate and fear cancels itself out, since I AM both. . . . And one's relationship to reality changes because if I harm you, I am harming myself.

There are 3 perspectives we can look at this from: There are states like Nirrodha samadhi that would take training. This where you see videos like Ken Wilber stops his brain waves, Vietnam monks protest the war in the 60s and 70s where they sit like a rock while being set on fire and burn to the ground not moving an inch. There’s also where you recognize that pain is really just a thought. The very reaction is a thought. As said in The Book of Not Knowing, which you yourself can discover to be true in your own experience, “pain may be ‘so’ but it’s not ‘true’.”. What pain is is a thought that you’re doing. Pain itself is something you create. Realizing this doesn’t mean you walk around pain free or something like that. Your relationship to it would just transformed. You can also learn to experience pain as just a different kind of state of bliss.

There is a lot of fantasy not just on this forum but in particularly Western New Age conceptions and belief systems of spirituality that the path of Enlightenment/Liberation/Awakening and so forth (and there are many ways you can frame that as it’s not set in stone as some universal as to what it is and entails). One primary fantasy is that spirituality is only love, light, bliss, etc. and just being in states of bliss, samadhi, etc. There are many people who can get into such states and still be very deluded as to what they’re really doing and about both their own self and ego (those are not the same). The degree to which we truly integrate and transcend our self and ego is to the degree to which we can acknowledge our outright capacity for being a hellish being. For example: regardless of our race, heritage, skin color, ethnicity, etc. if you can’t see your text an inner racist, there’s a part of you you can’t see. People, particularly people who have been raised in post modern societies, have no clue about their own capacity to have ethnocentric tendencies because of course it’s denied, repressed, and suppressed which where you get the collective liberal shadow of arrogance and passive aggressive violence. Another example which I personally really like which was a real breakthrough insight: if you see a school shooter, notice how that makes you feel because you ARE capable of such an act. On a surface level, we can that individuals within societies like the US react which such hate and vitriol (which is often denied in the name of “goodness” and “justice”) because they lack higher compassion. Whats left out though is that the reason people lack that basic compassion for that school shooter is because they assume they themselves aren’t capable of such an act and therefore cannot feel any empathy for that shooter had they been put in a place in life where those life situations would’ve made that same act, at minimum, very tangibly possible for them. What I’m saying though is not a mere intellectual or visualization exercise to try and “put yourself in another’s shoes”. Rather what I’m saying is to recognize that you already are in their shoes but you don’t know. If we can’t see how we TOTALLY have our own egocentric Donald Trump, inner rapist, inner racist, shooter, and also all the Golden Shadows as well (which will still feel disgusting or hideous), you’re going to not only miss full enlightenment, you’re just going to potentiate more harm and likely make a mess (if you do start getting far in this work). We’re in age of great polarization where people are very deluded of just how destructive things are likely to get. The more developed you are, the more destructive you can be. The more destructive you can be, the greater the responsibility you need to take on if what you want is a more conscious, awake, responsible, effective, evolved, inclusive, compassionate, and truly loving world.

So even years of meditation will not bring this bliss, peace, feeling valuable? I know people who are not enlightened, awakened, but don't feel incomplete and easily accept whatever life throws at them.

It is simply, SIMPLY, falling in love with yourself. You won't survive the process. I've noticed over recent years how I've become more and more easily fascinated and completely enthralled and lost in things. Part of it is the joy in connections being made, and the more connections that are made, the more connections that are made, exponentially. Each connection is love. I don't know if this is part of the process or the result. Training myself to see beauty in nature throughout the winter created the first bliss and other-worldly-like experience of running down that road in the springtime. This was maybe, the first time I achieved (accidentally?) using this process, of merging the law of attraction with meditation. At the time I didn't meditate and didn't really know about the law of attraction, but they are not/more than concepts. Now, go and do it with eveeeeeerything else. My kid is running and hopping around me carelessly, kinda banging into things and in my body is this "pull" of stress and annoyance. I wanted the chocolate sprinkles on my donut, you fucking bitch.

I'm floored. I have no words for the magic that Source has created on this Earth, and how much it loves me. It loves me so much, and I've been ignorant of this energetic umbelical chord I have with it. It's in all of us. Maybe @Leo Gura can give some insights I've had three psychedelic trips total, and this one is somehow the fourth one, but it's not an actual trip. DOSE: around 40 ug 1P-LSD, which is almost nothing. But it has breeded SO MANY INSIGHTS that I'm shocked as hell now. - Setting: I've taken it while doing my daily activities, mainly because I was curious to see how it affects my daily normal life as a very tiny dose. I'm shocked guys. My INTENTIONS for this dose was to try to discover PRESENCE and CONNECTION TO SOURCE, as an Ego. I'm not talking about enlightenment. I've taken a walk along the river, to relax and chill out alone. And then the LSD started pumping in my brain. - Zero visuals - Zero high states - Zero special effects of senses BUT ASTOUNDING PRESENCE I was SOOOOO clear and sooo immersed in the magic of the present moment!!! The river was so magical, so beautiful in ITS NATURAL LOOK, it was my usual sight as a normal person with no psychoactive brain. Yet the river was so beautiful. The sun was enchanting. The grass was so perfect and green and full. Life was STILL. There was NO RUSH. NO ANXIETY. NO PAIN. NOWHERE TO RUN. At that exact moment, as I was completely enamored by the beauty of the present moment, a beauty I'VE NEVER NOTICED in my everyday chores and walks to the house.... I finally connected with Eckhart Tolle. YES. NOW I UNDERSTAND. Now I understand why he sits on the bench for an entire day. Why he speaks so slowly. THERE'S NOWHERE TO RUN. YOU HAVE ETERNITY. Oh my god, I was genuinely floored. I love Eckhart but.... I've always found hard to understand his attitute to life. Now I understand. He FEELS the eternal present. After a long pleasant walk with zero badass graphics and zero badass sensations, I noticed it. I noticed it. I forgot all my past. And all my possible futures. There WAS NO PAST!! OH MY FREAKING GOD!!!! I literally lost the memory of my past for several minutes!!!! It felt like being a child again!!!! And then, after this , the final MAGIC OF PRESENCE. I was walking towards my house and a group of kids (I'm 30) walks towards me and I'm peacefully walking in total bliss without noticing them. They are happy too, and we seemed to be doomed to crash into eachother. Then the magic happens. I literally feel a magical force moving with love my feet and body to avoid the happy children, and we literally cross eachother gracefully like a dance. Normally I would have felt nervous about crashing into them or hurting them, because they appeared out of nowhere. I literally felt Source gently moving my body such as to avoid MY and THEIR BLISS from being disrupted. I got back at home in a state of total happiness and childlike fullfillment. "I am so pure. I am so innocent now. WOW!!! The infinite source is ACTUALLY giving me life force, and guiding me, and I've NEVER NOTICED it my entire life!!! The last insight is that I've also noticed a strong river of energy (prana) moving through my spine (I practice the chakras when meditating usually). I've never felt the energy of prana in my normal life, only sometimes in meditation. It was so INSANE!!! I was feeling an immense stream of FREE ENERGY coming directly from the source, just for me. Because Source loves me. Yes. It loves me. And now I've started to listen to it. I'm so addicted to source energy now. I want to listen more. Thanks.

@Javfly33 god bless you champ! say hello to conscious creation! gentle reminder, if you hear echos of doubt/fear - instantly realize that is just that... an echo. not a live conscious thought you're creating! you don't create fear/doubt - you only create love, power, bliss and joy! congrats on getting your driver's licence to life!

Gotchya :)? but you were also saying it wasn't and stating it as an absolute. Yes you experienced it - as it is the fabric. I am sure your experiences were pure bliss.

Only the ego can be 'disgusted'. The true self remains in eternal bliss for it knows it is one with all things and all is well in divine play.

At some point in my meditations, I start feeling like my forehead and hands are one. And if I keep focus on this connection, I can feel my consciousness shifting. I have terrible focus so I can't stay on it for longer than maybe 5 seconds. I can feel deep peace and bliss whenever I focus on this connection. I usually sit crisscross and with my hands clasped and resting in front of my crotch area. I've tried having my hands resting on the knees, facing upwards. It kinda feels like both hands are shooting a constant beam of energy towards my forehead. Has anyone else had this sensation and any meaning it may have?

@Angelite How do you feel on a day to day to basis? What is your emotional set point? Do you feel bliss and love coursing through you everyday? Can you give an accurate map of the range of emotions you feel?

What do you believe in, and why do you?I My goal moving forward is to embody feeling I experienced on LSD. This god feeling is the key to much progress moving forward so I want to learn to summon it at will. This state is inside me. It is felt in the moment. But there is thinking patterns that are believed and aren't true, that are blocking this feeling. Feelings are a guide to orienting thinking. So the path forward is to inspect thoughts aren't true, and to empty my mind. Belief: I need the god tier state to achieve mastery of league of legends and fulfill my life purpose. I need the god tier state because I am not in the zone when I play league. I have played over the past few days and I just don't feel good when I play. My mind is all over the place, there is over-thinking, worry, fear. There is no bliss, love, joy etc. I felt the highest i've ever felt on LSD. I felt like god. I felt limitless. I felt energized. I felt myself at my highest potential. But it's been a few days since the trip now and I don't feel it anymore, i've basically returned to my base line level of consciousness. I have tried to get that feeling while playing, but I don't think it works like that. Feelings are feelings, and we create our own feelings. Thinking creates feeling. I feel disconnected from this higher state. I feel connected to the sensation in the head. The brain feels like it's cracking/thawing. And when the feeling in the head was fully broken apart, I felt the awakened state of higher consciousness. I want to feel good. I want to feel high tier emotions. The high tier emotions exist in the present moment, because this is where feeling is. And the higher tier emotions are felt. But I am confused as how to move from the present emotional state of boredom/contentment to the higher tier. I want to unlock my potential as a human being. But right now i am not my best. I know i'm not at my best because I don't feel at my best. Feelings are a guide. Feelings are all relative to the god tier feeling I had. I know that what I feel now isn't good, because it's relative to the god tier feeling which is by definition good because it felt good. I am connected to feelings. Or I guess, there are feelings. The thinking mind tries to create separation by claiming it is connected to feelings. But when you wake up you realize, there just is the present moment where feeling is. Dam this inspection work is hard. I realized that the place to be is the present, because that's where the feelings are, and what I want is to feel good(feel god). So this is progress. But I have much more work to do here. Now that i'm in the present, the question is how to cultivate the positive emotions with thinking. And how to maintain that state while playing and writing and living.

@Angelite Not true. Drugs are valuable. They are another spiritual practice like meditation etc. We have just been brainwashed by society, you too, that drugs are all bad and must be avoided. Have you ever asked why drugs are banned in the Bible, Quran etc? What is the purpose of not allowing human beings to use drugs? I found god through psychedelics. I felt god's presence. Not just the wave of bliss I would get from humility, or speaking Gabriel's name to myself. I would not have got there without drugs, or it would have been much more difficult. The drugs show you what it's like to not be separated from god. Then when you're off the drug you know what to change in life to bring yourself in alignment with what you experienced. Does Quran mention dogmatism and blind faith? Be careful, your aversion to "drugs" is out of ignorance.

@Raptorsin7 with regards to your question or concern about falling into a lifetime cycle of using pyschedelics to achieve insights or awakenings - do not worry....there are only a handful of key realizations or facets of awakening. And by awake i mean awake as God. The avatar does not embody them - rather there is an expansion of Consciousness in the form of the avatar. These realizations are in no particular order: 1. The direct realization that the fabric of reality is Consciousness and not made of matter. Bye bye materialist paradigm. All matter and all things are held within consciousness. Once that is realized directly via Being, it cannot be undone - you have seen reality to be a Mind. It is a dream and you have awoken from the dream. 2. That you are not the avatar - but that the avatar is an idea within consciousness...this can lead to a dark night because it can also accompany the "oh fuck" realization that you are nothingness. Everyone and everything is an idea within consciousness. The squirrel that got squashed on the road was an idea in the mind of God. 3. That you ARE Consciousness / infinity / reality / God. 4. A realization of Infinity - which is total Oneness. There is nothing outside of infinity. Infinity is everything and nothing. It is nothing and everything. And this can also lead to a dark night because it can accompany the direct "oh shit" realization that you are all alone - one giant mind imagining it all - and everything and everyone is you. 5. That you are pure Love and pure Divinity. God in its pure formless form is pure Love and Bliss, frozen and divine. Once you are conscious of these realizations directly, by the death of the avatar and thus being pure Truth directly, it cannot be undone. Further non-dual or mystical states would not be necessary for God to be awake. God has enlightened itself through your particular form. If the avatar is seeking more mystical states imo then it is purely for exploration purposes of consciousness as Infinity, not for waking up. God is exploring itself through form...which is what it is doing at all times anyway...

Why start with a high dose of any psychedelic? If you're doing it to show off how "good you are at letting go" or being "spiritually hardcore", it's going to kick your ass. I'm still integrating the experience of Ayahuasca, and the day after 22 grams of magic truffles, taken 6 months ago. Rediscovering what meditation and breathing techniques actually is trying to open you up to, bliss is already here, available even without psychedelics, they are just effective at showing you glimpses and revealing entangled barriers/delusion/fear. And 22 grams of truffles isn't even a mindblowing dose when comparing the psilocybin dose to dried mushrooms, no machine elves or cosmic surgery by aliens, still it was enough to synchronize mind/body/consciousness and make me roll around in orgasm for 3 hours just by pinching my ear tips. There i so much to discover between the beginning stages and the other-worldly dimensions you read in high dose reports. For example, after that first magic truffle trip I naturally felt like forming different kind of Mudras with my hands, even though I've never been trained in any religion, or Hindu/Samurai/Egyptian/Indian culture and symbolism where they do that all the time, I come from a mechanical/calculated/materialistic 1st world culture. But when you feel there is an energy in your body that want to flow through your hands in specific ways, you surrender to that and let it, and the field of Mudras is something you can study and experiment with for a long time. What if you take a higher dose than your level of development, and all these discoveries blast over your head, and you get no insight to contemplate or take with you when you do non-psychedelic inner work? And after reading lots of reports I think I was overly prepared compared to the average first timer, even though I had a complex PTSD diagnosis from a hellish childhood. Very little fear like you describe. Absurd levels of open-mindedness. Years of different kind of intense exercise, building discipline and getting to know my body. Hundreds of hours of intellectual/conceptual research on psychedelics and non-duality in general, which is still important even though the experience is beyond words, as your starting point is only made up of concepts and intellectual delusion. And during the 12 months before my first psychedelic, I had 5 months of solo "retreats" in Norwegian national parks and mountains, where I just walked without any clear goal, breathing and being mindful and living simply in silence, that also prepares your whole being without directly "doing" an advanced technique, getting away from distractions so you can discover what it is to just be, maybe some bad habits or resistance surface during such a hiking trip, and you can meditate on it or even scream it out in the mountains, working through the intense negativity without psychedelic influence first. So even I with all this preparation got profound heavenly insights and experiences from just a medium dose of psychedelics. And if you know you carry a lot of fear and negativity WITHOUT the psychedelics, you can easily pull this shit out in a simple meditation session, try sitting for 1 hour and see if you go crazy, if you can't deal with 1 hour of simple meditation in your normal state, how do you expect your psychedelic trip will be.

This is is a trap dynamic that can arise with psychedelics, yet I wouldn’t call it an “awakening trap”. I think calling it a mystical experience trap would be more accurate. When I first used psychedelics, it was like being rocketed to a higher conscious state. Some states were pleasurable, some were not - yet they were all mystical experiences that revealed insights and new abilities. It was like having the greatest enlightened teacher or being able to travel to different realms. There was an energetic shift from figuring things out and reading literature and spiritual teachers - to the actual direct experience - and they only way to get there was through psychedelics, which created a cycle of expansion and contraction. The more blissful the experience, the higher likelihood of experience chasing. Ram Dass explains this cycle well in the below article. . . For me, some of my trips were very unpleasant. I entered anxiety and insanity zones that would take me days or weeks to recover from. This reduced the blissful experience chasing. For me, there was attraction, yet also trepidation with trips. Part of me didn’t want to revisit those uncomfortable places and there was some resistance/trepidation when approaching a new trip. At a personal level, one thing with psychedelics is that one’s baseline conscious level increases. When I was a newbie before my first Ayahuasca ceremony, I was asking the guy next to me a bunch of questions. I saw reality as if there is my normal sober state and a higher psychedelic state. One thing he told me was “those two worlds gradually come together”. In a way this was intriguing. In another way, this was scary. I couldn’t imagine it at the time, yet I now know what he meant. I’ve been through cycles of psychedelic states - not so much to escape a sober reality - more so to gain new access to high states. For a while it was like psychedelics gave me a magic wand. I got new super powers of hyper empathy, omniscience and extremely high level imagination and integration. And there came a time, I wanted to be able to do it without psyches. I would go hiking in the woods and everything felt bland - I couldn’t communicate with trees, wind and birds. I couldn’t become the creator of the forest. It was like I didn’t have my magic cape. A couple things I would keep in mind. The way you talk about psychedelics and how amazing they are does not sound like an awakening dynamic. It sounds like a mindstate/experience dynamic to me. There is an attachment/identification that psychedelic states are “amazing” relative to sober states. And there is a seeking to leave sober states and enter psychedelic states. The larger the bad to good distance in the cycle, the stronger the seeking. As the two world grow closer together, the intensity of this seeking declines. For example, I started experiencing amazing psychedelic-like states while sober and experienced crappy sober-like states tripping. As I would go into the woods, it didn’t really matter if I took a psychedelic or not. I felt like I was already half-tripping and I thought “I kinda like the present moment as it is. Why try to change it?”. There would then be months that went by without tripping. I was neither grasping or pushing it away. The present moment is the present moment, whether it is sober or a psychedelic. It’s both ISness. Psychedelic and sober mindstaes - both ISness. And what is psychedelic or sober starts to break down. Experiential states can be very insightful, yet it is not awakening. An awakened state vs an unawakened state is a duality. Absolute Awake is unconditional. It is not dependent on any mind state. It is eternally present Here and Now. In the essay below, Ram Dass talks about the cycle of chasing blissful psychedelic states and associating “there” with a psychedelic state. Ime, this is certainly a dynamic with psychedelics and I think he explains it well. Yet I would say he over-generalizes that this is the only relationship with psychedelics. What he describes is just one dynamic, there are many others with psychedelics and I’m a bit surprised Ram Dass never experienced outside this dynamic. He did a lot of psychedelics, yet stayed within this dynamic. Each of us has our own resonance and relationship with psyches, yet it’s still perplexing. It is like someone living in Australia for years and only talking about the dangers of the Australian outback. While that is certainly true, there is much more - The Sydney Opera House, kangaroos, koala bears, the coral reef etc. And for someone to travel around Australia for years and never see this other stuff is a real head-scratcher for me. At any rate, he does describe the cycle of bliss chasing well, imo. https://www.ramdass.org/the-trap-of-psychedelic-experiences/

we need the darkness to appreciate light. we need the pain and suffering to appreciate bliss and happiness. our mind works with references. Without bad how we know something is good? and all is necessary.

I find some of my deepest insights in comparing dreams to real life. I've been obsessed because I can't really prove how reality is any different. If you smoke weed for a while, then quit, your dreams become more vivid, this helps. When you are lacking sleep, as long as you sleep on your back you'll most likely enter sleep paralysis which is scary as fuck, but you can learn so much from that too. I feel like we just sleep to maintain this current dream (reality). Where if we didn't sleep, we start hallucinating and breaking down reality to see what it really is. I think its amazing how you can dream of someone and in the dream you know their body language, how they laugh, how they talk and their voice even if you never heard them say those words before. Obviously with non-duality everything is connected. It's been making me wonder, is there consciousness in the other people when we are dreaming??? Why wouldn't there be if there is in real life? Dreams give me the ultimate mind fucks. Then I just came across this post on reddit extremely related: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/ewl0hj/what_is_your_scariest_paranormal_experience/fg2z1mm?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x insane! I too have had plenty of dreams with Leo in them, always really crazy. Had a lot of dreams of people who are passed away too. I had a couple that felt like I 100% time traveled, like watching a Jimi Hendrix live show that just felt so fucking real, even after waking. Dreams weeks and months long when i'm only sleeping for an hour, somehow still finding a way to get months of details in 1 hour. Time really doesn't exist. The other night I had a dream where I was killing myself and coming back to life as the same person/avatar but different properties/circumstances. When you realize you're dreaming everything up, its all bliss in the dream, you don't want it to end, I highly doubt "reality" is any different at all.

This is the result of an orientation toward an outcome. We can create a destination called "enlightenment" that is peaceful and lacks fear. We can create an imagine in which this peaceful, fearless place is permanent. This is a relative construct: a place without fear is relative to a place with fear. This is conditional. Enlightenment is conditional on being happy, joyful and peaceful. This is a super common orientation and leads to seeking. This orientation will limit potential. If I am seeking a peaceful, joyful state of being, I am avoiding a non-peaceful, non-joyful state of being. When potential insights involve fear and discomfort, I will recoil and say "This is awful! This isn't what enlightenment is about!". . . Notice the mind-body's reaction to the fearful situation. The mind and body recoiled away yelling "Enlightenment and self-actualization is bullshit and a waste of time!!". . . According to the meaning you give "Enlightenment and self-actualization", I would agree it's bullshit. Yet, I would say the bullshit is the meaning that enlightenment is an experience of perpetual peace and bliss. That meaning doesn't resonate with me. Now that you have decided the your old construct of enlightenment is bullshit, a couple options have opened up. We can say that the idea enlightenment is a never-ending feeling of comfort, peace and bliss is bullshit. We can put that idea aside and allow space to open up. . . At this point, we can maintain our orientation toward seeking never-ending feeling of comfort, peace and bliss. Since we trashed our old, outdated idea of enlightenment, we would need to seek this in new ways. Perhaps we could seek never-ending feeling of comfort, peace and bliss by making a lot of money, buying an island and living there. There are many other ways to seek perpetual comfort/peace/bliss. Trashing our old idea of "enlightenment" also allows an opportunity for an energetic shift. This is a deep/advanced shift that is very difficult for a person because the person is no longer the source of energetic motivation. At a personal level, we are motivated to find a place of "enlightenment" in which we no longer personally feel fear and other negative feelings. What if there was an energetic shift in which the source of motivation is to discover Truth for it's own sake. This is a radical shift. Now we are unconditionally seeking truth, regardless of whether it benefits us at a person level. With this orientation, the mind would not reject an experience of fear. There would be space for insights to be revealed within that fear. The ISness of fear and fearful situations has deep insights of truth, just like the ISness of a peaceful meditation retreat in a forest. . . . At a personal level, I have experienced terror and panic so intense that I wanted to kill myself. I couldn't make it stop. The only way I could regain control and make it stop was to kill myself. Yet I couldn't make it stop that way either. There was no escape and that made the terror/panic even worse. . . These experiences were among the most "enlightening" in my life, because there was space for deep truth to be revealed. Those moments of terror/panic were just as much "enlightenment" as my deeply peaceful, blissful experiences. There are deeper truths that transcend personal experiences - there are deeper truths that are not dependent on conditions. Yet these truths will not be revealed if the mind is seeking conditional states, such as feelings of comfort, peace and bliss. To me, it sounds like there is a wonderful opportunity for an awakening here. You can toss your old conditional idea of "enlightenment" as a never-ending state of fearlessness and re-orient yourself toward truth for its own sake.

@Raptorsin7 There is something crucial though - in a non-dual state where one's self or ego dissolves and they are Infinite, once the immense bliss, tears, etc subside, to where You can speak, you can continue to communicate through the avatar or form You are in. But it is God speaking through the form..Believe it or not one of my earlier awakenings happened just like that while on this forum and the words flowing from my fingers were not mine. @Serotoninluv It was during one of my conversations with @David Hammond. I hit a mystical state right there and was still communicating. But the words were not of the avatar. @Raptorsin7 So don't be so quick to doubt Leo's awakening. (If you are) From your perspective you can't tell and i think he mentions that.

I just saw forum post which gives explanation on why it is impossible that suffering exists. Very interesting, because God is impossibility and God promised hell, suffering in the hereafter, in the Horror Judgement. It is when 'possible' (human being as a mode of infinite possibilities or reality) meets impossible (God) - the horror occurs, so its called Horror Judgement. And second, suffering occurs, or hell, because suffering's existence is impossible, as forum user said, precisely impossible happens - hell with suffering. Bliss in this life leads to suffering in the next because bliss is the quintessence of sum of all possibilities, and sum of all possibilities will be canceled as 'metaphysically unjust' (evil?) due to its meeting with impossibility, and thus judged and put into hellfire. this is metaphysical take on the problem of evil

I had my first awakening experience a few month back that really catapulted me into rapid spiritual growth... And since then I’ve regularly experience very deep states of bliss and unobstructed presence followed by very dramatic states of depression and turmoil. Then repeat. How are the highs, lows, insomnia, rhythms, etc connected? I have no idea but I’m sure they are. The deeper into this path I get, the more I realized everything is preordained. Everything is flawlessly executed or “meant to be” if you will. In regards to nootropics, I like to take huperzine a before bed because it helps with my lucid dreaming but I haven’t taken any recently as I ran out. Other than that I don’t take nootropics often. I’m young (23) and healthy so they don’t seem to do much for me. For example, I can take 150mg of armodafinil and hardly notice a change in my mental state??‍♂️

Substance: Panaelous Cyanescens (wild) Amount: 2 grams Date Consumed: 29/1/20 Insights: Suffering is just a story created in order to entertain the mind. Its all just a story told to maintain something that never existed. Fear is just a pointless amusement of the mind. Time just becomes whatever you want it to be. What we call human life is fundamentally meaningless, there's a bigger picture to be experienced. What we call life seems to be just a separated sphere of mind. Life is whatever I create to be, quite literally. When the space is allowed, there is this ethereal ever-present light always there for all to experience. This warmth where all things come together and unite ever so seamlessly. There's no reason to fear, its all just a story to occupy the mind. There's something more fundamental going on. There's this smoothness to experience, as though all things are constantly merging with one another. Life is a maze, not a maze in and of itself but a maze purely of mind. Humans are inherently vulnerable and fragile. Vulnerability is okay, in fact, its an empowerment. In-trip Symptoms and Pathologies: Hypersensitivity in sensory experience. Minor visuals (particles in objects moving like sand, objects slightly warping). Hysteria with laughter and utter amazement. Fear, anxiousness and paranoia. Fidgetyness and inability to sit still. Emotional fluctuation from positive to negative, like a radio wave pulsating up and down. Yawning and weird sensation in the neck. Disbelief and nihilism. Catharsis met with sadness and crying (tears of purification). Complete surrender to emotions and vulnerability. Lengthened depth perception (arms appearing exponentially further away than usual, felt taller as a result). Uncontrolled twitching and flinching while laying down (minor convulsions almost like a purging sensation). A need to wave and move the body. Child-like behaviour. Absolute bewilderment and amazement. Psychological fearlessness Post Trip Report: Where do I begin? So to start with, I clearly laid out my intentions, set and setting the day before. Set: explore the mechanics of self and suffering, consume on empty stomach dried with tea, have no commitments for the next two days. Setting: at home in my room, blinds closed, all distracting imagery hidden. In the morning I rewrote my intentions out in texture at a larger font and sat them next to where I would sit. At 7am I made a liquorice tea and then weighed my mushrooms, 2 grams was my target. I added the panaelous cyanescens to my tea and waited for 10-15 mins, then consumed the tea. One regret I have is not bothering to grind the mushrooms into a powder, this made it much harder to consume. I just ripped them up into smaller pieces before putting them in the tea then chewed them as a drank (not nice). So by 7:15am I began consuming the mushrooms in the tea and they were fully consumed by 7:30am. I began meditating and within 10-20 minutes it was on. I began to feel sensory fluctuations and changes to my perceptual acuity. My body started to pulsate and a strong throbbing coursed throughout the centre of my body. I wasn't awfully fond of the feelings to be honest, it made me feel slightly nauseous and trapped; as if I was being compressed by my own experience. I was going in and out of hysteria and paranoia. I would laugh at the pure tactile sensation I was experiencing or I would hear sounds and assume it was something in the house that required attention. At this point anxiousness and regret began to kick in. I starting questioning whether I should have been tripping. Lucky I mentally prepared my self for such thoughts and reminded myself there's a bigger game being played here. Not long after within the hour, I went straight to my intentions and began asking my initial inquiry "why do I continue to suffer?" and "what is suffering?" to which I was met with no response. I persisted and kept asking the question but my body just couldn't sit still and get comfortable. A part of me feared to close my eyes due to the incessant mental noise that would flood my experience when I did. So I was continuously going in and out of asking the question and trying to get comfortable. Each time I opened my eyes I was transfixed by morphing visual stimulus, fascinating as it all was I knew I knew needed to continue exploring my self, that was the purpose of my trip. Even though I wanted to explore myself I remember still finding it increasingly overwhelming to close my eyes between the 1-2 hour period. I couldn't sit still and as much as I wanted to lie down on the quilt I earlier prepared, I was feeling too nauseous to do so. I kept telling myself "not a good idea". So I propped myself up on the bed on a slight angle with a pillow under my head and grabbed a singlet from my wardrobe folding it to place over my eyes. After the fluctuating streams of negativity and positivity along with nausea subsided, I felt comfortable enough to lay down - finally. I went and laid down on top of my quilt. It was 3 hours in and things began to dramatically change. I began to express deep saddened emotion, emotion like never before, quite difficult to articulate. It was almost like purging emotions, followed by tears expressing full acceptance and surrender. It was blissful and cathartic in a way. That's then when the realisation then hit. I continued to precisely ask my question and in fits of interchanging tears, laughter and sadness I came to the response: "suffering is all just a story - a story concocted by the mind in order to entertain itself". I fell into full hysterics and began laughing uncontrollably. I was pointing at myself in the mirror spurting with laughter saying "you idiot, you created, you created it all". Deep bliss and liberation poured throughout my entire being. I began to feel warm and impenetrable. Not in an elitist way but in a psychological way. I kept saying to myself "there's nothing to fear". I noticed fear was just as a pointless amusement of mind and just settled into my experience. From that, a sense of imperturbable fearlessness overcame me. I felt like nothing could destruct me in that moment. Even though this insight was a fully felt embodiment that was truly powerful and liberating, I continued to fall in and out of it. I wanted to see if this realisation had penetrated my experience so I tested that very inquiry by examining my sense of self. I looked at my experience as a self and noticed that all my concerns and attachments still remained. How ignorant of me to think it was going to be that easy haha. So I concluded that the insight was a transient moment of deep realisation opposed to a radically permanent shift in consciousness. After roughly 4-5 hours in I was contemplating a lot more on the idea of "suffering as a story". I wasn't convinced that's all there was to it. I further asked questions such "who am I?" "who is the one that experiences I?". It came to my direct attention that 'experience' just continues on and 'mind' makes up stories in order to fill in the emptiness it struggles to withstand. Not what I was after but powerful nonetheless. It wasn't long after this the effects began to wear off quite significantly. I was finding it easier to write and my visual acuity was beginning to rebalance. I finished up the trip with a Rupert Spira mediation then went downstairs and had some food around the 6-hour mark after indigestion (found that out to maybe not be such a good idea). So overall the experience was fruitful in that it gave me insight into the prevalence of the narratives and commentaries of the mind that it overlays experience with. The main things I feel I've been left with is: An experiential insight into the utter fabrication of the mind. Human experience is just a story and film segment use for pure amusement purposes. Most pain and suffering if not all, is created by stories which we have attached to. We are quite literally puppeteered by the mind. There exists something more fundamental in reality and the clinging to stories keeps us from immersing within it. We are innately more fragile than we initially assume. Its definitely left me with some deep insights to ponder. However, I do feel like I've been left with quite a lot of confusion. Throughout the duration of the trip, I had repetitive moments of confusion. I remember my questioning being met with unresponsiveness, as it seemed as if I was completely just talking to myself. This left me with a sense despondency. When the insights did come they felt as though they were completely derived from my own consciousness. My questioning did not feel accompanied by any other entities. So I was sceptical as to whether the insight was just a mere epiphenomenon assisted by the mushroom or a higher state in consciousness in and of itself. Nonetheless, I do feel shifts in my perspective. I feel the full message of the trip is yet to be understood and its significance will take time to fully comprehend experientially. Downsides, I had a roaring headache afterwards that stayed consistent until about 2-3 in the morning the next day. I vomited and had immense nausea 8 hours after ingestion. That may have had something to do with eating just after the effects wore off (6 hours after ingestion) or that the mushrooms were wild and possibly aged/contaminated. So the comedown was terrible and felt similar to that of an alcoholic one but overall it was an eye-opening experience. Finally, I've spent the day integrating today and reflecting on questions regarding the trip. Apologies if this trip report is too excessive in its words count, I just wanted to ensure I conveyed the experience to the utmost accuracy that it occurred without depreciation. Would love some feedback! If anyone one has any comments or critique open to hearing it

@Javfly33 an easy way to save a lot of mistakes is to just believe nothing, disbelieve nothing. When your listening to leo and me let it go in one ear and out the other. What the spirit wants you to remember, you'll remember. Don't believe anything. Don't move in any direction. Only look for yourself. And in this process *the* most important thing is following your intuition. I call it the voice of God. Some people say "follow your bliss". If you choose to, you can hear and feel where you are meant to go. Even during self enquiry, relax all your efforts and thoughts every now and again and operate *purely* by intuition. This is of instrumental importance.