How can we trust a psychedelic experience?

[Leo Gura]

2 hours ago, taotemu said:

Leo you make no sense.  If the psychedelic is imaginary then why do you say the only way people can understand your teaching is to take them?

Food is imaginary too. Yet you still need to eat it to live your imaginary life.

A dream is a dream is a dream. You are dreaming that psychedelics can awaken you. And so it is! Since you are God, your imagination rules the show.

I have never said psychedelics are the only way. I have shared with you dozens of various ways.

But practically speaking they would help you a lot with getting your head unstuck from your ass

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You could touch far more people if you could actually integrate your experiences.  It is clear you are ungrounded.

This has nothing to do with me.

Stop creating excuses and distractions. You are not conscious of what Truth is. I am helping you to see that.

[taotemu]

2 hours ago, Scholar said:

Everything is ungrounded, that's the entire point! The only reason to remain grounded is survival.

Good luck with that.  It is grounding that separates a spiritual master from a kid tripping.  If you don't care about grounding, just go live in a cave and trip out on 5MeO all day.

[Insane butterfly]

@taotemu

its not about if you should trust the psychedelic experience but trusting your own self, trusting your intuition is the key to understand and integrate those kind of experiences which  is amazing helpful for me. Sometimes you don't have to understand a trip but feel it, just have your eyes open and be open minded and insights will be revealed maybe weeks or months after where the aha moment comes.

I find psychedelics is the sledgehammer to brake a very well constructed wall aka. Ego! 

The more experiences the more open mindedness you have 

[taotemu]

7 minutes ago, Leo Gura said:

This has nothing to do with me.

Stop creating excuses and distractions. You are not conscious of what Truth is. I am helping you to see that.

LOL, again with the projection.  Follow your own advice and open your mind.  You think you are conscious of "Truth", yet based on the videos of yours I have watched and your behavior here I don't see it.  I suppose you could say the same thing about me, and that would be fair.  This isn't my first rodeo however.  After 45 years of spiritual work and many direct and powerful experiences and realizations of the divine I can recognize the Truth from BS.  I am still a work in progress and make no claims to being enlightened or more conscious than anyone else.  I am completely open to learning from those who have a greater spiritual mastery than I do.  That is what brought me here.  I am open to learning from you and the others here.  But don't expect me to just swallow BS that has not been thought through or integrated properly.  I'm not interested in learning spiritual insights from someone who is blind to their delusions and dangerous narcissism. 

I'm not fully integrated with some of my spiritual and psychedelic experiences, which is probably why I recognize it in you.  I'm your mirror, and you are mine.  Perhaps the biggest difference between us is I recognize it and you don't.  You have all the answers, you have full consciousness and realization of the Truth beyond the Buddha and Jesus or anyone else.  Nobody can teach you anything.  That is a spiritual dead end.  That is pure ego.

[Leo Gura]

Behavior has nothing to do with Truth, silly.

I could be a Nazi, and the Truth I point you to would not change.

[Carl-Richard]

1 hour ago, taotemu said:

This is an interesting perspective.  I suppose with the perfect use of psychedelics this could be the case.  My concern would be those cases where the trip sends people into delusional insanity.  It can happen and it largely is determined by the state of the mind and the ego strength of the user before the drug.  Ego strength is not necessarily a bad thing by the way.  It allows us to navigate consensus reality with some skill.  Make money, be a good person, raise kids, make the world a little bit better.  The problem with the ego is about over identification.

So what you fear is essentially your survival going south by you losing contact with consensus reality, ie. becoming "delusional" or "going insane". The funny thing is that the only way that you'll ever go insane and lose contact with consensus reality in the first place is by being attached to your survival. And you don't need drugs to get there. Trauma will do just fine (imo, it's the main factor at play). What unresolved trauma does is it challenges your survival in such a way that you start constructing your own internal substitute-reality in order to escape those challenges, and psychedelics can certainly exacerbate those kinds of underlying issues, no doubt.

When your survival is threatened, it starts seeking out solutions to protect itself, and when the threat is unconscious to ourselves and leads to enough chronic dysfunction and stress, one solution can involve changing the subjective experience of that survival by altering the very reality through which you experience it, because your "reality interface" is what you use to assess your survival (if it's going well or if it's going bad), and you always try to maximize your survival, which includes your assessment of it. This leads to thing like cognitive biases and having an internalizing or externalizing attribution style, e.g. "that went well because of me", or "that didn't go well because of somebody else", and you'll actually believe that this is actually what happened (and in that way, your reality skews in favor of some assessment you made about it).

I've written a bit on this in an earlier post which I think could help to elaborate on what I mean:

 

On 8.8.2021 at 3:57 AM, Carl-Richard said:

I believe I also got some insight into what the ingredients are that go into creating a clinically psychotic mind (a mind that looses its ability to keep in touch with a relative, socioculturally sanctioned consensus reality), because to be totally honest, I had some glimpses of that within myself, and I was probably going down that road if it wasn't for a sequence of very fortunate events.

In short, I believe that the psychotic mind is just the end result of spiralling down that dysfunctional feedback loop: unresolved trauma, paired with a hyperactive mind and a neurotic personality (negative internal attribution style, introversion, excessive rumination, anxious attachment style etc.), exacerbated by external stressors (substances, life events), and an escape into an idiosyncratic and mentally constructed world. The mind reacts to the aforementioned conditions by dissociating itself from the "normal" types of cognitive patterns that otherwise ground you in an emotionally embodied and socially aware consciousness of reciprocal collective understanding, and instead ventures into an abstract and vaguely defined mentalscape with loosely defined concepts and arbitrary semantic connections.

They say it's hard to distinguish genius from madness. I say that madness is when the hyperconnectivity and isolation of one's semantic content exceeds its sociocultural bearing capacity; that one corrupts one's ability to mediate between one's own semantic structures and the common semantic structures held by other people in the local environment, and this usually happens like I said in a runaway chain reaction that eventually terminates in a psychotic break. In milder cases, it goes by names like magical thinking or thought disorder. Now, what is so genius about the genius is that instead of retreating into his own fantasy world, he holds consensus reality in one hand and the hyper-creative, non-linear mental space in the other, and the result is a beautiful synthesis – a bridging of the two worlds – which is able to inspire and innovate.

 

So the solution for madness is to inoculate yourself from stressors by resolving trauma, analyzing your mental proclivities and creating a holistically healthy lifestyle. Then it's up to you to decide if you should avoid psychedelics or not, but remember that it's actually possible to hold both worlds in each hand: consensus reality in one and The Absolute in the other:

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'The psychotic drowns in the same waters in which the mystic swims with delight.' — Joseph Campbell

 

Edited August 24, 2021 by Carl-Richard

[taotemu]

41 minutes ago, Leo Gura said:

Behavior has nothing to do with Truth, silly.

I could be a Nazi, and the Truth I point you to would not change.

Truth is Truth.  But realization of the Truth and integration of the Truth is ALL about behavior.  Hitler may have had consciousness of the Truth, but it doesn't mean a thing if that realization isn't reflected in his behavior. 

Truth will be Truth regardless if we are conscious of it or not.  But consciousness of it makes all the difference in how we live our lives.  If not, then there is no point to any of this work.  Just go out and live your life and quit worrying about anything outside of materialism and ego.

[Inliytened1]

@taotemu what it seems to me is that right now you are not yet conscious or even open to the possibility that reality is absolutely groundless.  To be one or Infinite is to be absolutely groundless.   It seems you still believe there is some underlying objective reality or some ground somewhere. That there is some default.  There is not.  If you can forgo this there is a really good chance you will realize the Absolute.   But right now, when you say "drugged state" notice you are assuming aome default state or ground.

[Leo Gura]

7 minutes ago, taotemu said:

Hitler may have had consciousness of the Truth

Hitler did not have consciousness of Truth.

I do, and I am pointing you to it but you refuse to listen. Suit yourself. I tried.

[taotemu]

24 minutes ago, Carl-Richard said:

So what you fear is essentially your survival going south by you losing contact with consensus reality, ie. becoming "delusional" or "going insane". The funny thing is that the only way that you'll ever go insane and lose contact with consensus reality in the first place is by being attached to your survival. And you don't need drugs to get there. Trauma will do just fine (imo, it's the main factor at play). What unresolved trauma does is it challenges your survival in such a way that you start constructing your own internal substitute-reality in order to escape those challenges, and psychedelics can certainly exacerbate those kinds of underlying issues, no doubt.

I agree.  I live on the fringe of consensus reality already.  Of course survival is a big deal to the egoic self.  Nothing wrong with that as long as there is not an unhealthy identification to it. 

I love that Joseph Campbell quote!  So very true.  But the difference between madness and mysticism is how well one can swim.  One drowns, while the other swims.

[taotemu]

1 minute ago, Leo Gura said:

Hitler did not have consciousness of Truth.

Agreed.  But the only way we know this is based on his behavior. 

[taotemu]

6 minutes ago, Inliytened1 said:

@taotemu what it seems to me is that right now you are not yet conscious or even open to the possibility that reality is absolutely groundless.  To be one or Infinite is to be absolutely groundless.   It seems you still believe there is some underlying objective reality or some ground somewhere. That there is some default.  There is not.  If you can forgo this there is a really good chance you will realize the Absolute.   But right now, when you say "drugged state" notice you are assuming aome default state or ground.

Not quite.  I'm aware of the Void.  I'm a student of Taoism and so "objective reality" is fuzzy at best.  The ego lives in the world of dualism and the "ten thousand things".  I guess what I am looking to avoid is the nihilism that the ego generates in the face of nothingness.  Because I recognize the paradox that from nothingness arrives the world.  Yet the void of nothingness is absolute love.  Impossible to describe with words of course.  But experiencing it, it becomes self evident.  Damn.  Got me there.  LOL

[Inliytened1]

3 minutes ago, taotemu said:

Not quite.  I'm aware of the Void.  I'm a student of Taoism and so "objective reality" is fuzzy at best.  The ego lives in the world of dualism and the "ten thousand things".  I guess what I am looking to avoid is the nihilism that the ego generates in the face of nothingness.  Because I recognize the paradox that from nothingness arrives the world.  Yet the void of nothingness is absolute love.  Impossible to describe with words of course.  But experiencing it, it becomes self evident.  Damn.  Got me there.  LOL

Heck.  You made me smile...and  as I said, you stand at the precipice.