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how do psychedelics work that's what we'll be answering in this episode I've really intended this episode to be for those people who have tried a psychedelic once or twice experienced something crazy had no idea what happened it blindsided you and maybe now you're scared of trying it again or maybe now you're researching to find out like what happened to me how do I explain what happened so if you care about explaining what happened then this is the episode for you I'm gonna explain all of the mechanics and metaphysics and the epistemology of psychedelics which I've been studying for several years now in a lot of depth and my background in this really it started with just existential and metaphysical contemplation epistemic contemplation which I've been doing for four decades basically since my teens without ever doing any psychedelics and then about three or four years ago I got into psychedelics and started experimenting with them and because I was already into non-duality and spirituality and philosophy and science and studying the foundations of science like it it really got me interested in how do I square what I'm experiencing in my psychedelic trips with mainstream science and our ordinary understanding of reality cuz it's so odd and so weird and so jarring some of the stuff that you can experience the psychedelic trips and I don't really see anybody explaining it anywhere I had to figure it out for myself I don't see anybody explaining it how it actually works so that's what you're gonna get here so let's get into that just for reference if you're curious I've done about 80 trips at this point various kinds of psychedelics I've done mushrooms I've done LSD I've done 2cb I've done five Mao DMT I've done DBT I've done four ACO DMT and many others that most humans don't even know about I've done psychedelics that there are no trip reports written about completely new substances which I'll be talking about in the future so stick with me for that but so I have quite a diversity of experiences and one of the biggest tricks with psychedelics one of the biggest problems is that people talk about psychedelics or try to understand psychedelics without having enough direct experience with them and also not having enough diversity in different substances because they can be quite different even though they're all basically taking the same place in different ways but it really helps to explore the entire field the entire territory to start to wrap your mind around what's really going on and I would say it takes about 50 trips at least 50 trips to start to understand what psychedelics are really about and that's one of the biggest problems that I see in the entire field of both science and in psychedelics and also in the spiritual community is that people just don't appreciate how deep this territory is how broad it is how much material there is here and they say silly things like oh yeah I did some psychedelics back in high school a couple of times with my friends I got it I got the message so you know as Alan Watts used to say you know once you hear the message you hang up the phone no no no no no no your first few trips that that's that's not even a beginning yet those are like the first few words of the introduction so humble yourself really open your mind and if you're serious about understanding what psychedelics are from a sort of a scientific perspective which is where I'm coming at it from then you got to be really willing to put your own balls on the chopping block and to really become a guinea pig and do this do you really want to understand if you want to really understand you ain't gonna understand it by reading books or really even listening to me although I'll help you hear this this this episode will be potentially life transforming for you because it will show you how to work with psychedelics and the full power of psychedelics which is little known to many people even those who have tried it a few times really cuz you got it you gotta really get deep in it you gotta get 50 trips deep into it to really start to understand what the hell is going on here so this is one of the most powerful tools that you will find for spiritual growth and for personal development hands down I've I've tried so many different techniques meditation techniques self inquiry techniques and other things and traditional self-help and psychology techniques and NLP type stuff like nothing compares to what a psychedelic can do for you nothing not even a a 30 day meditation retreat which is pretty hardcore most of you guys are not going to be disciplined enough to do 30 days of non-stop meditation that's that's very rare stuff but even that will not get you to the levels of insight into the nature of reality that a psychedelic can take you to so anyways that's the preamble now let's get into explaining how does psychedelics actually work well here we have to get very metaphysical and we have to really challenge the materialistic paradigm that mainstream science is operating under which is basically undergirding ient our culture as a culture as a species we have to explain somehow to ourselves how it is that we're here what it is that we're doing here and how it is that this thing we call reality works and so the biggest challenge was psychedelics is that you can't use that paradigm that we have used conventionally throughout our whole life I call this the materialistic paradigm the paradigm of that there are molecules and atoms bouncing around that make up the universe and the universe is 14 billion years old and we're living on a planet here and were Homo sapiens that evolved over billions did this whole paradigm this scientific materialistic paradigm of an objective external reality which existed before you were even born and will continue to exist after you die this whole thing you cannot understand what psychedelics truly are as long as you're coming at it from that paradigm because if you think that you're gonna take this chemical put it in your mouth digest it the chemicals are gonna rush up into your brain and do stuff change some neurons and neurotransmitters are happening in there and then you start to hallucinate things that aren't real this is the mainstream explanation of what a psychedelic is from that point of view yes I can Alex they don't make sense but if you do suck it outs with a very open mind deeply enough long enough you'll realize that that entire paradigm will crumble that's not how reality works that's not what reality is so here's how to properly explain what psychedelics are there is no objective external material reality and there never was ever there is only mind or we could call it consciousness everything that we think of as material physical external objective stuff the stuff that science measures tables chairs walls buildings bodies this all this that you see this around you everything you're feeling and experiencing all this material stuff this is mind this is universal mind the universe is a giant mind which is imagining everything including everything material so atoms are imaginary imagined by mind walls bricks buildings cars the earth is imagined by mind that's the paradigm you got to be coming from this not a Dogma that I suggest that you hold as an ideology this is just something that I'm telling you you will discover for yourself if you go into these psychedelic experiences with an open mind and you really want to get to the bottom of what reality is eventually you'll discover what I'm telling you but it'll be difficult for you to discover this because the things that I'm telling you are shocking and it takes an extremely open mind to to accept some of these things that I'm saying many of these things that I'm saying are scary frightening destabilizing to your sense of reality in your sense of self okay so the problem with the psychedelic is that it takes you so deep into the nature of what reality is that distinction between an external reality and your own self and your own life this collapses and so unlike traditional science where you can just be at a distance and you can just sit over here with your telescope and look over there far away and observe some distant star or galaxy or whatever and take notes on it carefully and you can just kind of separate yourself from what's over there this process completely breaks down with psychedelics precisely because what the psychedelic reveals to you is that the entire time that we've been doing what we call science traditional science really what that was is really we were exploring our own minds and the real breakthrough moment in a psychedelic trip is when you realize that there is no difference between a psychedelic trip and ordinary life what we call material life you are hallucinating right now everything is a hallucination it's not that you take a chemical and then this chemical does something to your brain to cause the brain to hallucinate imaginary stuff that isn't real and then you come back down to your sober state and here it is here's the truth here's ordinary reality right now in the sober state this is wrong that's not what's really going on what's really going on is that you're hallucinating right now all of us are and there is no reality aside from hallucination a hallucination technically the definition of what a hallucination is I use this term as a technical term it's a very precise term I'm not using it metaphorically I'm using it literally and precisely what a hallucination is is its appearance without substance appearance without substance and that's exactly what this is pure appearance without substance it feels real doesn't it it feels solid it feels tangible you can't just walk through a brick wall right because that's precisely what's being hallucinate 'add what's being hallucinating is a tangible material objective reality and by that being hallucinating that is what is here and since there's nothing but that there's nothing to contrast that against therefore your hallucination becomes reality and there's nothing behind it there's nothing behind the scenes causing it there's no brain which is being altered to create this hallucination the biggest misconception that scientifically minded people and rationally minded people and skeptically minded people have about psychedelics is that they think like all well Leo so yeah you you take some chemicals of course a chemical will alter your brain chemistry and then of course all sorts of way you can see all sorts of wacky things of course yeah and so yeah why would any of that be truthful how would you be able to trust any of those and all sorts of things like that but you're misunderstood you're misunderstanding that you're in a hallucination right now if you're in a hallucination right now means the brain that you are trying to ground reality into right no such thing so there will come a point in your trippin journey where you trip long enough deep enough that you realize that there never was a brain your brain is a hallucination so even though it seems like and here's where reality gets really twisted and strange loopy it seems like you're taking a chemical and you're putting it into the body and then that's affecting the brain of course these appearances are here there's an appearance of a chemical there's appearance of a body there's appearance of a brain if you cut the brain open you'll see some neurons and stuff in there I'm not denying that but all of that is appearance hallucination all we have to do is change what's in your consciousness and that will go away it will no longer be true see so it's not that you're taking a chemical really what the chemical is the psychedelic it's a chemical but what is it really it's consciousness you're taking consciousness you're putting it into the body which is also consciousness and it's affecting consciousness so consciousness is affecting consciousness that's exactly right because there's nothing but consciousness when a rock falls on the table it makes a loud sound that's consciousness affecting consciousness creating consciousness so the rock is consciousness it hits the table which is consciousness and the sound it creates is consciousness see so there's nothing surprising about this this is how all of reality works everything is consciousness interacting with itself and psychedelics are no different so you might wonder that well so what is so special about these chemicals that we can take these particular chemicals and they cause wacky hallucinations well the thing is that consciousness or infinite mind we are inside of a giant universal infinite mind which can dream up anything literally it has unlimited power to imagine anything right now it happens to imagining this human sitting here speaking to that human over there that's what its imagining in the next second it can imagine something else usually it doesn't because for the purposes of your survival consciousness needs to be very rigid and consents consistent because otherwise literally what would happen is you would start to think that you're losing your mind imagine if you woke up tomorrow and there was a pink giant elephant sitting in the corner of your room you would think you've lost your mind imagine if you walk outside and the and the sky flickers usually it's blue but now it changes to green orange black white pink purple and it does this 50 times a second you would think you're having some sort of disorder you think you're having you're having a seizure or something if this was happening to you you'd be terrified you would probably go and check yourself into a mental hospital but here's the mistake is to think like well okay yeah well if that was happening then yeah that is something's going wrong in my brain and that's a mental disorder I got to go to the hospital to fix that no no no that is the mistake the mistake is to think that the truth is is that consciousness can be in an infinite number of different ways it can imagine all sorts of different things some of them can seem sane some of them can seem crazy or insane but these boundaries of sane and insane these are completely arbitrary what you call saying is simply that which you're very comfortable and familiar with and what you call insane is simply those things which are radically completely out of the norm for you so you have to really understand psychedelics you have to go into it with an extremely open mind and be really willing to change your entire paradigm of reality because one of two things will happen either the psychedelic you do enough of them that they will force you to change your notions of what reality is throwing away all of the stuff that you learned in school and from your parents and so forth all the stuff that science has taught you you have to throw all that away either you do that or and this is what happens to most people is that before you even approach that point you will say to hell with this screw this this is some crazy wacky [ __ ] I want nothing to do with it and you'll stop and usually what will do it is just fear you'll be too afraid to go deep enough to really get to the point where you can understand what psychedelics are and the reason that is and the reason psychedelics are such a taboo topic and the reason they're so poorly understood by scientists and even by many spiritual teachers and gurus and mystics very poorly understood is because they're so threatening to one's sense of self and reality even some enlightened guru if he takes enough psychedelics I can pretty much guarantee that many of his beliefs and ideas about Awakening and spirituality will be shattered by the psychedelic because it's so radical and there's really no end to it not that I've discovered yet you can keep upping your doses more and more and more and see what happens is that the psychedelic what it does is it changes the ordinary rigid flow of consciousness so if we think of just your entire life the way that it goes you know like every morning you wake up then you brush your teeth you go to work then you come back home you eat your [ __ ] you sleep and so on and then you do that same thing the next day and you're kind of in a physical 3d reality that we know of and you interact with your friends and families all the people that you know you go to the stores that you know and all that stuff you're in house that you are familiar with and all that stuff you're in the 21st century all of that is highly fluid and completely arbitrary and changeable in the snap of a finger the only problem is that you've never actually had it happen to you psychedelics will change that for you in an instant if you take enough of them but the problem will be can you handle it see can you handle that cuz that that's very shocking when your reality starts melting around you and what's even worse about it is not just that you take a chemical and in reality starts melting around you no no it's way worse than that the real scary part about it is that you realize that oh that life that I used to live where I used to wake up in a house and go to the store and go to work and talk to my family and friends and blah blah blah and I was living in 21st century all of that that was just a trip all of that was a hallucination it was just an alternative hallucination it was a very rigid loose nation and now I finally for the first time in my life I've broken out of it that's what we call the breakthrough experience if you ever get that a breakthrough experience with psychedelics is an experience that's so radical that it completely recontextualizes your prior experience of life as you knew it and it basically shows you that that thing that you thought was life you were born you went to school you got married you had children that's all gone it's all imaginary you're in a new reality now something totally new has happened to you and it's completely shocking and baffling especially because you're trying to come into it understanding it using a sort of scientific materials paradigm where you're thinking like well but I thought there was like a earth and I thought there was a universe there was galaxies and I thought they were like humans and people and we were living in the 21st century and I thought my parents were this way my my children were like this and I thought my body was like this and now all the sudden all that stuff is gone and now you have to refigure out what reality is and that's extremely threatening and scary which is why people are so negative about psychedelics there's such a big stigma about it every time I talk about how to get a bunch of [ __ ] people you know giving me a bunch of [ __ ] for it and the reason that happens is simply because that's a defense mechanism of the ego mind that's all that that is so as I was saying your whole life has been consciousness just flowing taking different shapes and forms right now it's taking this particular shape and form and it's still flowing because look sounds are coming out of this mouth talking to you you're hearing it you're understanding it stuff is happening around you this is the flow of consciousness this is a hallucination but it's a very specific type of hallucination now what we can do is we can alter what this stream of consciousness is showing to you imagine you know you've seen maybe in sort of a behind the scenes documentaries and such where they go to these sound recording booths for professional sound recording and you look at this kind of mix board where they have literally hundreds maybe even a thousand different knobs knobs you can twist and turn and rotate and pull up and down and they adjust all the different aspects of the music and the recordings that are being made so imagine that that's what consciousness is like imagine that consciousness is like an it's a completely free field is sort of like a three dimensional or even more than that multi-dimensional screen kind of a computer screen but imagine a computer screen that has an infinite number of dimensions not - and it has an infinite number of properties they can take colors sounds smells imagine a screen like this that is consciousness and this screen has absolutely no limits it can display or render anything that you can imagine and even more right now it happens to be rendering and displaying what's right here what we can do though is imagine that to this screen runs a giant wire and this wire hooks up to this giant mixing board with hundreds of knobs and each one of these knobs can be tuned and adjusted fine-tuned to change what is being displayed it's like if you twist this knob here the colors will become more vivid you twist this knob here the colors will dim you twist this knob here the sounds will go wonky they'll become louder or softer you twist this knob here and you'll feel emotion you'll feel love or anger or hatred or jealousy or sadness you twist this knob over here and your body morphs your hand will morph into a tentacle you twist a little bit more it turns into a claw you twist a little bit more it turns into a wing you twist a little more turns into something else and you can twist all of these and all of these knobs control everything that's being rendered and displayed on this screen called consciousness but then there's one master knob it's a giant knob right at the center of the whole console and if you turn this knob this is the knob that we're gonna call pure consciousness awareness itself it's not any particular quality of consciousness so turning this knob will not change any colors it will not change the sounds it will not change the feelings and emotions that you feel nothing like that will change that's the content of consciousness the content will not change but by twisting this knob we are simply going to increase consciousness now of course the question is what is consciousness well I have episodes about that you can go search for those if you want a very detailed answer that's very specific here I'll just say that consciousness is simply your ability to be aware of everything within the field of consciousness all the colors all the sounds all the feelings everything all the possible objects so by cranking this up we're just making you hyper alert like super super super alert think of it as the difference like when you're really really sleepy the knob is almost all the way off if you were totally asleep dead asleep the knob would be let's say at zero but if you're awake but you're so sleepy that you can barely keep your eyes open the knob is you know it's a little bit on now if we keep twisting towards this direction a little bit more we twist it and we get to a point where we have ordinary current waking conscious what we call ordinary life as you're aware right now then we can twist it even more to a point where we might get to where you might be if you did 10 days of the posada meditation imagine that you meditate for 10 days straight if you've actually ever done that hopefully you have to get a reference point for what I'm talking about then you you you're in a state of consciousness where you're hyper aware of everything you're extremely sensitive you're more conscious than normal waking consciousness or if you've taken for example a nootropic like provigil or modafinil or are modafinil that will roughly put you to where you might be after a nice 10 day meditation retreat you're very very awake almost like hyper caffeinated but also calm not not super you know hyper and jittery but that's just the beginning of what this knob can do this is sort of the normal range that most people have ever experienced in their life but this knob can keep being twisted and twisted and twisted and it has no end the knob twists forever in this direction you can keep twisting it more and more and more and more towards more and more and more consciousness eventually if you twist this knob enough you will become so conscious that you're conscious of the entire universe try to imagine this as a possibility open your mind to this possibility that if we twist this knob enough we twisted a hundred times over itself you will become so conscious that you're conscious of the entire universe you have literal omniscience and then of course there's a bunch of gradations before that so before we get to that you can become conscious of a lot of different stuff before you get to UM nisshin's so the most important thing so here's how psychedelics are it the most important thing that a psychedelic does is that it it twists this major knob the main knob of consciousness it makes you a lot more conscious of everything in your visual field and auditory field and in your physical body it makes you orders of magnitude more conscious than you would be from a meditation retreat even if you meditated for thirty days straight you'll be more conscious than that and that's on a moderate dose of psychedelics if you take a high dose of psychedelics you can be orders of magnitude more conscious than even that these are levels of consciousness which are so conscious that is terrifying it's frightening it's completely beyond human consciousness you're not a human anymore at this point you go into what's called what I call God consciousness God consciousness because you become Universal and you become literally omniscient as amazing as that sounds but see what complicates the situation is that the psychedelic doesn't just twist this consciousness knob and leave everything else the same because if we only twist this knob this room would still be here all the colors and sounds would be exactly as they are but every psychedelic twists a bunch of different knobs it has a unique sort of character profiles so almost no psychedelic only twists the consciousness knob they all twist the conscious knob to some degree some more than others but then they also twist a lot of minor knobs which start to mess around with stuff like colors sounds feelings textures thoughts emotions objects all sorts of weird stuff can start happening so here's the trick with understanding psychedelics this is the key is that when it starts to come on your visual field most prominently will start to morph and it start to wave and melt the higher the dose the more it will morph and melt because what you're literally doing these are sort of disrupting the ordinary flow of consciousness think of consciousness like a river imagine is sort of us like a small stream actually for this metaphor and you now take a giant boulder or a log and you throw it in the middle of this small stream it's gonna start to divert the water and the water is gonna flow in a different pattern than it normally does so that's sort of pretty much what you're doing when you're taking this chemical you're interrupting the ordinary hallucination that you're having your whole life the thing you call your life that's a hallucination you're interrupting that and you're changing it so of course colors can change emotions feelings can change objects can change and so forth and the sky is the limit just like with a little stream you know if you if you get some giant boulders and logs you can block up the entire stream and you can divert all that water to flow in a totally different direction something radically different than what you traditionally call your life this will depend on the dose and the method by which you take the psychedelic and the kind of psychedelic you take and so forth and every psychedelic will be different you know if you throw a log into the river that will divert the river in a slightly different way than if you throw a stone versus if you throw you know some sand in there or whatever and so those different objects are like the different types of psychedelics like LSD or mushrooms or DMT 580 mio or whatever see so here's the problem is that because ordinarily people are not trained for pure consciousness you're only really trained to be able to recognize pure consciousness this central dial if you do a lot of meditation but since most people are very poor meditators they're not technically proficient meditators so they don't have enough experience with this so when they take a psychedelic you know like a high school kid takes a psychedelic the first thing you notice is that all the colors start to go wavy and crazy and you start to look at a wall you might see a face in it this kind of stuff and yeah these are hallucinations that's because the psychedelic is twisting these minor knobs and your attention gets distracted to the minor stuff to the colors and sounds that are changing you might listen to some eunuch you music and you might say oh wow that's some beautiful music the music is especially beautiful on the psychedelic I mean of course that's true that's because the sort of the music dial has been tuned or you might look at a tree and the tree looks especially beautiful because the colors are so neon and vibrant of course that's true because the neon color dial was was tuned differently than it usually is and you might look at the floor at the carpet and you might see weird patterns in the carpet you didn't see before league might see faces and dinosaurs and animals and demons and whatever else and that's that's because that image recognition dial of conscious has been tuned so you can now see images and patterns that you aren't able to see before and while that's happening you're being hypnotized and mesmerised by this by this changing content of consciousness so much that you can ignore sort of the meta thing that's really going on which is that you're becoming more conscious the central dial it has also been tuned and what's really most important for our work here if you want to understand what consciousness is and how psychedelics work is you really got up focus your attention on this major dial one of the common criticisms that I hear about psychedelics even for many enlightened gurus and masters and mystics and spiritual teachers is they will always throw out the objection like oh well but enlightenment is not a state and all you're doing with these psychedelics leo you're just changing your state and it's just a temporary change then you come back and I mean it's just a state change big deal except this grossly oversimplify the problem and and under appreciates really what psychedelics are when someone says this they really it shows to their their lack of experience with psychedelics because yes of course it's a state change but everything is a state right now I'm in a state you're in a state if you're awake if you're sleepy that's a state you're in if you're asleep then that's the state you're in if you're horny the NASA state you're in if you're angry then that's the state you're in if you're very meditative that NASA state you're in there is nothing but states of consciousness consciousness is all that there is now of course the trick with the psychedelic the value of the psychedelic is not merely that you get to change states of consciousness the value of the psychedelic I would say is more of a meta value it's the fact that you get to watch consciousness as it changes its States in so doing it's not that you're getting attached to some new state so it's not that I'm sitting there and I'm looking at the carpet and I'm seeing some face in the carpet and I'm saying oh this face is the truth or whatever no it's a meta thing that's happening what you're actually doing is that your mind is able to experience the new state and compare it to memories of your old state compare the two and see like oh so this is what is really going on this is really how consciousness works so the value of the psychedelic is that it shows you the fluidity of consciousness that's one of the key values just the fact that you get to change states and change into very radically different states that's a huge eye-opening experience do not underestimate the value of that that alone right there will change your whole life to be able to pop out of your life and look back upon it as though it was all an imagined hallucination just one state even though you're not looking at it of course from some other state when you come back to your ordinary life after your trip is over that that still changes you that changes you forever because most people have never had the experience of being able to pop out of life and look at it from a different state most people's minds are so closed they don't recognize that consciousness table of extremely radical states see most people are so under estimating reality including spiritual masters and notation teachers and gurus and enlightened people even they are under estimating what consciousness can do because what a psychedelic can do for you is orders of magnitude more than what they can achieve through their meditations you see when you're meditating mostly for spiritual work what meditation does is it works on the central knob of consciousness if you sit and you just focus on a wall for 10 hours straight you're gonna become so hyper focused you're turning this consciousness dial up and up and up and that's great that's very useful for meditation that could lead to awakenings to enlightenment Stu insights about reality and all that is good that's what spirituality is about that's what meditation is for but it's a lot harder for you to tune and to even know that there exist other knobs to consciousness it's not lis you can just sit there and meditation and automatically imagine a pink elephant and it appears you can't do that that's hard now actually technically it's possible if you sit and you imagine a pink elephant while you're meditating and you do this for months on end like industrial-grade meditation I'm talking about ten hours a day for months on end you will actually be able to see a pink elephant if you did that with enough intention and focus and serious commitment but it's it would be so much work that it's outside the realm of most people's abilities or there's really also I mean what would be the value in it not much valued either you see so see most people don't recognize that this is possible except a few people who have done serious yoga and serious visualization exercises as part of their spiritual practice then they can have an idea that such things are possible but with a psychedelic this becomes effortless you don't need to train for months you can do it instantly effortlessly and much more vividly than you can even with months of visualization practice so most spiritual people they don't understand there are all these other miscellaneous knobs to consciousness some of them are very very radical imagine I I twist a knob of consciousness and if I twist this knob you won't be able to tell the difference between people and animals anymore and and and inanimate objects there will be no difference between a table your mother and a dog if I twist this knob imagine other knob that I can twist if I twist this knob time stops now of course that's that's actually one that you can access through meditation fairly easily advanced meditators can access this knob and they can they can make time stop basically but imagine a knob where you can turn this knob and time flows backwards you would think like what that's impossible how could that happen science says it's impossible but you have to understand science is part of what you're hallucinating science is a hallucination part of this thing right here that you're hallucinating when I twist this knob of time flowing backwards by the time I've twisted that thing all science has flown out the window there is no more science at that point because your science you know your science requires this state that you're in right now to maintain it one of the biggest problems with science is that scientists don't recognize that all of modern mainstream science is done within one out of an infinite number of different states of consciousness so science really has been mapping a single state of consciousness the entire time imagine that a scientist got stuck in a dream his own dream a single dream from one night he got stuck in it and he kept exploring that dream and doing science within that dream and he thought that he understood everything about that dream because he mapped it all out measured everything catalogued everything he knows everything about how that dream works and then he wakes up only to realize like oh that was just a dream and all of my science no longer is applicable because that science was inside of that bubble which now has popped and then the next night he goes into a new dream and in that new dream everything has changed it's a totally different dream new physics new rules new cause and effects everything is different now he has to restart all of his science see that's analogous to what modern mainstream science is doing it's only exploring one state of consciousness and there are not just two or three different ones there are millions of them of course just to admit this is extremely threatening to science as a whole because what scientist wants to admit that he's devoted his entire career to studying a dream one out of millions of Dreams in that there are higher dreams there are lower dreams and higher dreams and that he's been studying the lower dreams some of the lowest dreams not the highest ones see that's how tricky this stuff is imagine that I twist a knob and you stop being human and you turn into a beer bottle I twist the knob again and you turn into a pinecone I twist the knob again you turn into a kangaroo I twist the knob some more and you turn into the entire human race not a single person the entire human race I twist the knob some more you turn into the planet the entire planet I twist the knob some more and you turn into the colour red you're not a living being anymore you're the colour red sounds trippy sounds impossible right and yet there is such a nub and many many other knobs there are so many knobs that do so many freaky things that there's not enough words in the English language to explain them all to you it would be like explaining color to a colorblind person or just to a blind person I guess is even better so you might say well okay leo but what so what so yeah there are all these knobs but what are these knobs get me okay so I turn into a kangaroo and then I come back what what's the big deal well the big deal is just the fact that you became a kangaroo and came back that completely changes your whole life that's a huge deal you can't look at reality the same way again and even a kangaroo is not weird enough cuz you might think you might even have some sort of spiritual belief in the back of your mind that says like well yeah I mean people talking about reincarnation so maybe maybe I used to be a kangaroo in the past now I'm a human maybe next next time I'll be a dog or something or an alien okay that's still sort of within the realm of possibility I mean this sort of science fictiony and crazy but still it it's at least something you can imagine you can imagine me a kangaroo try to imagine what it's like to be a beer bottle that's tough what would that be like what would your attitude be towards life towards people towards society towards science towards religion if you became a beer bottle for a day and then you came back what would that tell you about your humanity you see if this actually happened to you your entire life would change even though you would be back and in a certain sense nothing would have changed because you're back you're a human now you're in human form I'm not saying you you need to be a beer bottle for the rest of your life I'm just saying just the fact that you experienced it for a little bit already changes something in you it's sort of like imagine if you lived in a comfortable gated neighborhood your whole life in some upscale suburb in California and you grew up in this sort of cloistered perfect neighborhood it was all beautiful and nice and you went to nice schools and ain't nice food and the nice roads nice cars nice people nice police everything is calm quiet peaceful beautiful there are neighborhoods like this in California in fact I live in some of them when I was younger and then imagine you take one of these people let's say a teenager 18 years old who's lived in this idyllic California gated community somewhere like in Beverly Hills and then we take them from that and we throw them into a Somalia or Liberia the Congo or somewhere in the middle of Syria or Iraq into a war-torn area with with drug dealers gang rape child slavery genocide cannibalism this is not this is not fantasy these countries and these kind of life experiences exist right now in the 21st century in certain parts of the world people are going through those experiences right now right now as you're sitting here in the comfort of your cozy little domicile listening to me somebody else right now is getting um you know gang raped or is a child slave or is getting shot and tortured so that so imagine we take this this teen we throw him in the middle of Liberia somewhere then he has to deal with that for a few days and then we throw him back to his Beverly Hills you know upscale neighborhood is he gonna be the same person after that no when he sees you know cannibalism and gang rape and and slavery and all this if he's gonna come back and he's gonna like he's gonna look at that neighborhood in a totally different way and that's exactly what psychedelics do now of course he doesn't have to be negative it can also be positive conversely we could take a child or a teen who grew up in Liberia or in Somalia or wherever some terrible part of the world and we could plop him into the best neighborhood in Hollywood and have him live there for a few days and then plop him back and that's gonna change him to see he's gonna see new possibilities see he couldn't even imagined some of the stuff that that's there in that expensive neighborhood he couldn't be even dreamed of such things while living that hellhole that he was living in so that's what psychedelics allow you to do except even more powerful than that because these differences are still within the realm of physical reality we can imagine an even more radical situation where we take a kid from from Iraq and we throw him to a new planet with an alien civilization that is a hundred thousand years more advanced than humanity with teleportation devices and weird hovering technology and telepathic communication abilities and all sorts of crazy stuff they figured out how to make their bodies immortal right so all this crazy stuff that they figured out from the wildest science-fiction movies imagine wheat we plop a kid from Iraq into that for a day and then we bring him back that's a little bit more what it's like to take a psychedelic that's how radical that is and even that is still not radical enough because even in that example we're still within the three-dimensional physical material world it changes you it can change you profoundly now also it's not a cure-all I'm not saying that you do this you know if you take a kid from Iraq and you throw him into Beverly Hills for a week and then you put them back into Iraq is he gonna like all the sudden be an instant you know Hollywood celebrity back in Iraq no of course not a week is not long enough to pick up and learn everything there is to learn about what it's like to be an American elite there's so much there to learn so that's the challenge with psychedelics the psychedelic has so much to teach you yet it gives you so little time relatively speaking even a long trip of eight hours some of the longest like an Elissa LSD can give you a solid maybe six release even LSD doesn't give you that much time it gives you about six solid hours of tripping and then some after-effects that linger for another four or five hours but the the solid trip itself only lasts about six hours so in those six hours that's a lot of time but they they pass so fast when you're in a totally new realm and there's so much to learn there about yourself and about reality and consciousness that it flies by in seconds and then you're back and yeah of course you can't hold it all it's too much it's way too much so one of the biggest challenges that you come back and you're you're like whoa what the hell was that how do I make sense of that how do I embody that how do i how do I bring a piece of that back into ordinary life that's challenging but you also can you can bring back you're not gonna bring back the whole thing you're gonna bring back one percent of it and you might say oh well one percent that's so piddly but one percent of a giant thing is still significant see and then of course you can go back and you can trip again and again and again and not only will you be going back to the same places again and again again you will be going to new places further and further each trip will expand your capacity to go further and deeper and explore more and more territory explore more and more corners of consciousness and it just keeps growing you more and more and each time you come back you bring one percent back one percent back one percent back well if you do it a hundred times that's a hundred percent right there takes work it's not easy this is not a some magic pill and it takes a lot of work just sit there to contemplate it all after you come back because you're gonna see such crazy and radical things in these trips that when you come back you're gonna be like what the [ __ ] was that and you're gonna spend a week just in the shower what the [ __ ] was that cooking your food what the [ __ ] was that driving to work what the [ __ ] was that sitting at work doing your work what the [ __ ] was that thinking thinking that trying to wrap your mind around it try to remember and trying to figure it out and that's a very very valuable process you might by doing that process this is what I call integration work by contemplating that you'll actually be able to extract a few more percent so rather just bring back one percent by contemplating it you'll be back bring back 3% 4% 5% depending on how good you contemplate and so over time this all adds up and before you know it 50 or 100 trips into this your whole life has been turned upside down and it in a positive way because what's happening is that your your sense of what reality is is being expanded you're being pushed beyond your comfort zone metaphysically episodically psychologically and of course it's not just about don't get me wrong here it's not just about exploring some alien territories that's that's actually not mostly what it's about a lot of these trips are about exploring your own self what you are your own psyche your own past your own memories your own wounds and grudges and fears and trying to figure out your own life what your purpose here is in life how to live your life better and so forth because even though the psychedelics can tune all these other little minor knobs the most important knob is the central knob of consciousness by tuning that up that makes you more conscious of everything about yourself and about reality and that is really the whole not the whole but the majority of the value of the psychedelic is tuning that knob because by tuning the consciousness knob up you can contemplate and introspect and have profound insights into the nature of anything science relationships sexuality business life death awakening spirituality politics Social Sciences race relations love emotions psychology psychotherapy you name it it doesn't matter any topic will be enhanced with more consciousness whatever you're interested in but practically speaking what's gonna make the biggest difference for most people is tuning up that knob of consciousness as high as it can go and then introspecting and trying to get to the bottom of who you are why you're here what is life what is reality what is existence what is love what are emotions what is the mind these sorts of existential questions all of these questions can be answered and the insights you get are legitimate highly truthful insights now of course it is possible to delude yourself and the less pure that you are the more wounds you have the more shadow material the more psychic baggage you have the more dysfunctional you are in your life less mature you are the less developed you are the less conscious you are generally speaking the more likely you are to delude yourself with these psychedelic experiences but then again that's true in your ordinary hallucination as well this hallucination right now see the key mistake that scientists and rationalist and skeptics make about psychedelics is they think that will believe oh if I go to that psychedelic realm how will I know that it's true but even to ask that question is already that questions being asked from such an ignorant place because if you were at that realm if you understood how this knob of consciousness works you would just laugh because this current state that you're in this hallucination that you're taking for granted this default hallucination that you're in right now this is one of the lowest least truthful most delusional of all the possible hallucinations see the scientist makes the mistake of thinking like well okay if I think this psychedelic is gonna take me to some sort of hallucination land and whose salvation land won't be as real as real land what we call life material reality and then when I come back to a material reality how will I know that that hallucination land I mean is just hallucination and now I'm back in real reality no it works exactly the opposite way you take the psychedelic you go into real land you look back upon where you came from and this is hallucination land this is delusion land right here right now what's going on here material reality so how is this possible you might wonder if you're still struggling to stomach some of the radical possibilities I've put forth here the reason that is is because your model of reality your paradigm is actually incapable of reconciling what I'm saying because what I'm saying doesn't square with material reality that you learned in middle school the reality of bouncing atoms and molecules and all that it doesn't square with that it doesn't square with the reality that consciousness is created by a brain that's right those are stories those are paradigms and models that are completely inadequate for understanding reality at its highest levels that's kindergarten stuff all the advanced science you think you're doing it's kindergarten stuff compared to what you get when you're really conscious and that means you have to be open-minded and humble enough to say okay I have to be able to admit that my old paradigms were wrong and highly limited they're not all wrong they're just extremely limited in scope is the point and you have to be willing to open your mind and to go explore new realities and contemplate and figure out new paradigms your paradigms need to be completely retooled that takes intellectual work and emotional labor it's not just the work of sitting there and doing math equations that's easy work the really hard work is that for you to access and to understand reality at the highest levels you have to change as a being as who you are your whole emotional system needs to change all of your your entire web of beliefs of how reality works needs to change but how is it gonna change when you're so attached to it when your career hinges on it when your family and your relationships hinge on it are you willing to give all that up in order to understand reality if not then you've confined yourself to this little limited domain and that's where you will remain you're like an ant an ant all it knows is the little surrounds maybe a one-mile radius around its ant colony in the rainforest somewhere and nothing else that's all you'll ever know you'll always be that annual you'll never understand anything about the planet except that one mile radius around you little ant colony that's what most scientists are like that's what most religious people are like that's what most spiritual people are like that's what most ordinary people who do just normal self-improvement and they just want money in a house and a family and so forth that's what they're like they'll never know what's beyond it takes courage to venture beyond it takes radical open-mindedness it takes risk there's risk involved with it all exploration involves risk you never know what you're going to find that's the very nature of exploration you don't know what's out there maybe you'll find some terrible demon who will kill you maybe or maybe you'll find God who will bless you maybe maybe you'll find some alien maybe you don't know until you go there and see so the paradigm that you need to be able to make sense of psychedelics is the following one throw away your old materials and chemicals this is a fiction there never was such a thing your new paradigm is that there never was an objective material external reality there is no reality outside of appearance and subjective perception none reality is consciousness and there is nothing but consciousness which means that reality is an infinite mind this mind can imagine anything right now it happens to be imagining this body sitting here speaking to you and that body over there sitting there listening to me that's what it happens to be imagining right now the next second who knows what could imagine it can imagine anything it wants but it just so happens that it keeps imagining something consistent so that we can get a sense of reality because if this imagine something totally new right now there would be no sense of reality you would be basically like in a dream the only difference between a dream and reality is that here in reality it's very stable consciousness is extremely stable that's what makes it feel real and concrete you might say well Leo if everything was just an illusion like you're saying everything was a closed nation I should be able to walk through a wall no you shouldn't because the hallucination is that you can't walk through a wall you're hallucinating solidity you see throw away your stupid simplistic naive ideas of what a hallucination is I'm talking about a robust deeply sophisticated notion of hallucination hallucinations that are so real you cannot distinguish them from reality hallucinations that are so mesmerizing that imagine that you started imagining that you were a kangaroo and you just sat there day after day after day imagining that you were a kangaroo and you imagined it so much that you literally became a kangaroo and you could not remember anymore that you were ever a human that's the kind of power of imagination that I'm talking about that is the power of infinite mind everything that is occurring and can ever occur has only occurred and will ever occur inside of an infinite mind this mind is not connected to a brain of any kind it's not happening inside of any computer it's pure mind pure mind that's what this is that's what you are that's what psychedelics are and material reality is one one out of an infinite number literally an infinite number of states of consciousness that are possible that are inside of this mind material reality is a special case and if you're a scientifically inclined person then you should appreciate this this term in this concept of a special case a special limiting case of something much broader and more general for example there's Hein Stein's general relativity and then there's special relativity I sign special relativity Einstein first developed special relativity which explained time dilation in the relativity of of motion in like a us basically a single direction it was uniform motion basically velocity it didn't deal with accelerations but then Einstein you know he came up with his special relativity and it was very groundbreaking in this paradigm shattering discovery for physics which basically showed that you know time time dilated depending on how your velocity was changing and so forth and it showed that velocity and you know distances and all this and the speed of light and how these things are um you know relative depending on the position of the reference frame so it's kind of complicated but I'm just glossing over it here so that was special relativity but then you know he came up with that he said okay we got that but but what about except you know more complicated types of motion what about acceleration because I haven't accounted for acceleration yet and then he came up with general relativity which was his crowning achievement which but see general relativity didn't nullify special relativity what it what Einstein realized is that AHA special relativity is just a special confined instance of a more broad dynamic of relativity which we're going to call general relativity which includes accelerations because velocity is just you can wrap velocity into acceleration velocity is a special case of acceleration where acceleration is zero see so that's that's the analogy we're using here to try to explain material reality material reality is just a special case of an infinite number of states that consciousness can imagine when consciousness is imagining something very consistently like it's the same this second it's again the same the next second and again the next second then the illusion of reality and concreteness and materiality is created but if on second one this is a hand on second - it's a flipper on second three it's a claw on second four it's a tentacle on second five it's a wing you see that's then you're gonna call that something crazy you're not gonna call that reality but of course you have to recognize that what you call reality is completely relative and arbitrary you just call reality whatever you're familiar with for the most part so that's the paradigm you got to have universal mind imagining everything with no limits there's no limits to what can imagine but there also are limits to what your human body and this life can do because you are sort of in this life and in this body for now and as long as you're here and you want this particular stream of consciousness to continue you have to understand that that that creates certain constraints serious constraints such that even when you take a psychedelic you have to take a lot of psychedelic to completely like leave your body behind on a moderate dose of psychedelics you're still gonna have almost total control of your body you're still gonna be able to feel your body move your body do things no problem you'll be able to walk and talk and and do that but I mean if you take a really massive dose even your body will disappear melt away but you know those those get into dangerous territory when you get into doses like that you're you're playing with a loaded gun and that's why psychedelics rightly so are feared because when you get into high doses like that at that point potentially you could hurt yourself physically you could overdose certain psychedelics are actually lethal at very high doses others are not for example mushrooms you basically can't overdose on those you can eat 30 grams of mushrooms and you'll still be alive but but the problem is not just physical the problem is also mental because at such high doses reality will be warped so seriously that it's really gonna be difficult psychologically to handle what's happening to you you're gonna be torn apart your whole mind and your whole paradigm of reality will be torn to pieces so asked and so radically that you're not just gonna be able to sit there and and carefully piece it all together no it's like you're gonna get a sledgehammer to the skull sort of thing and then you'll be picking up the pieces for a year to come and it can terrify you it can cause panic attacks whatever you know it all a lot of it depends on how much you can handle how mature are you how serious are you are you pacing yourself properly or are you overdosing you know you can get to those high doses but you got to slowly ramp up to it you can't just jump into it with cold feet you got to become an experienced psycho not you got to do 50 trips first on mild doses before you're able to do a high dose and handle it successfully in a healthy way it doesn't come back and hurt you and leave you with some sort of PTSD or nightmares or something so let me explain a little bit further about what's really going on this is where it gets kind of incredible well let's let's see if you're open-minded enough I'll just tell it to you straight so what's really happening with a psychedelic is that the psychedelic interferes with the dream that God has been dreaming which is your life you are God which is infinite mind pure infinite mind that decided to dream up a particular dream the one that you're in right now this material dream and this material dream had to be very very stable and persistent because if it wasn't you couldn't have a stable mind or a stable life you couldn't raise a family you couldn't have a society you couldn't be a functioning member of society if there wasn't a stable earth and a stable society that you could be a member of you see so so Universal Mind God's mind imagine your particular life and it's imagining it right now as I'm speaking try to maybe become conscious of this as I'm speaking if you can your God imagining all this and the psychedelic will interfere with that pre-planned dream that you're dreaming now of course the psychedelic is also part of the dream that you're dreaming so it's not like psychedelics go against God I mean God imagines psychedelics just as much as anything else so it's not like you're doing anything against God's will here but it will interrupt the flow of the ordinary dream and shift you into some new territory some new kind of dream and when you take a psychedelic what happens is that literally everything starts to melt around you you can you can really feel the fluidity of consciousness that's one of the biggest things you feel on a psychedelic the difference between rigid consciousness as it is right now versus fluid consciousness where everything is morphing around and what's really happening there is the following thing is that God's mind is sort of opening up and expanding to its infinite potential into more abstract and abstract layers of pure imagination at the highest levels of imagination there are no fixed rules or objects of any kind everything is amorphous and fluid because it's literally just as though coming out of the mind see in the same way that thoughts formulate in your mind as you're writing a sentence or writing a paper or an article in the same way thoughts or even material objects are sort of formulated in the mind of God before they materialize so you don't notice that right now because they're already materialized here it's solid it's locked in but with the psychedelic consciousness will open up become more fluid and you will actually enter the stream of imagination through which God imagines all of existence including your current material life you will be able to look at your hand for example and you will see how you are actually literally imagining this hand into existence as God and the psychedelic makes this imagination process so fluid and so creative and so open so abstract and so amorphous that literally you can look at a wall and you can think of an elephant and you will see an elephant in the wall because as it turns out that's the actual mechanism by which all of reality is created it's not really that you're hallucinating or something is wrong with you you're not going crazy if you see an elephant in the wall what's happening is I mean really Law of Attraction is happening but Law of Attraction is happening at such a elevated state of consciousness that literally you are materializing the things that you are thinking will and thought and materialization and potential and actual all of these merge into one and from this super fluid state you are able to imagine entirely new worlds and realities you know how when you're daydreaming you can just sit there maybe in class you're bored when you used to be in you know literature class or something in high school you were so bored you would just sit there and stare out the window and just daydream as a teacher was yakking on about Shakespeare or something and you were sitting there you're just daydreaming about some videogame world that you wanted to inhabit and you just got lost in this sort of reverie of this sort of fantasy world you into this world you were running around as an elf doing something fighting somebody whatever that is a little taste a little microcosm of what can really happen what God is doing on the macro level of course you as a human have such limited capacity for imagination but when you crank up the consciousness and you crank up all these other dials your imagination goes through the roof your creativity goes through the roof you literally tap into the source of creativity infant pure infinite creativity which is responsible for the creation and the imagination of all of material reality this pure creativity is responsible for creating atoms molecules planets galaxies science mankind languages animals you name it and you're tapping into that and it feels so surreal and unbelievable because it's too good to be true here you were living this ordinary life thinking that reality is just material and physical and now one day you find yourself in the nexus of creation where God's mind is creating the entire [ __ ] universe and you discover that that's you who's been doing it the whole time it's utterly shocking and astounding it's so astounding that you won't want to believe it because people have told you all it's egotistical to say that you're God only a narcissist would claim that he's God you're imagining the entire [ __ ] universe what does that make you that makes you God reality is pure imagination tada but to really comprehend what that means to actually experience it not just to hear it for me as a story not just to take it on as a dog murder the ideology but to really live that even for a short while that takes a lot that takes a lot of maturity and development from you taste a lot of curiosity and open-mindedness takes a lot of fearlessness selflessness you already have to be on the spiritual path one of the biggest mistakes that people who take psychedelics make is simply that the people who take it because psychedelics are sort of an underground thing quasi illegal in certain parts of the world it's such a sort of a shady area of course why is a shady because it disrupts the nature of what reality is you can't you can't build a society without how long psychedelics at least not society in its current form so so of course society represses these things and forces them underground Sigma ties them demonize them because this is the greatest threat to society this is the greatest threat to power this is the greatest threat to people who want money power and sex and selfishness so under understand why psychedelics are demonized or demonized for a very good reason not because they're physically gonna harm you or cause you to lose your mind but because they threaten power structures and they threaten the whole sense of reality that our culture has constructed which is artificial and super limited so I lost my train of thought there's so many when my mind thinks it's thinking so many parallel trains of flawed at once that the most difficult thing for me to do is to pick any particular one it's like I'm I'm multi parallel processing 10 strands at once and so keeping track of all of them at the same time that's that's like the most difficult thing that I have to deal with and teaching this stuff because I can only speak one thing at a time but my mind is thinking ten different chains of thought at once so anyways I lost that one but let's pick up on another one um all right so so I told you the parrot how the parrot on the new paradigm you need it's always an imagination understand that oh yeah I was saying uh yeah the biggest problem with psychedelic users yeah they're just they're so immature because this underground thing they're so immature and so underdeveloped that when they take a psychedelic a lot of times what they get is they get a reflection of their own inner self this nasty ugly underdeveloped devilish demonic inner self yeah then they get terrified they run away and they never do a second look again yeah of course of course but when a pure person takes a psychedelic it's a completely different experience the determining factor or what psychedelics is not the substance itself that you take or even the dose its your internal purity how pure is your mind how pure is your heart how much shadow material do you have that really determines how your trip is gonna go the pure you are in heart and mind and soul and spirit the more selfless you are the more work you've done on yourself the more mature you are the more developed you are the more open-minded you are the more fearless you are the more curious you are the deeper you contemplate the better your trips will go and the more insight you'll gather now of course people wonder Willie oh but how do you know you can trust these insights it's a foolish question because insight is insight insight is a direct consciousness into the nature of a thing some aspect of reality when you have a direct insight it's absolutely true now of course you can misinterpret insights easily quite easily so I'm not saying this is foolproof there's a lot of self deception potential here but then again there's everywhere but what you'll discover with psychedelics is that the insights are more true and more more powerful and more certain than anything that you are able to access in ordinary waking consciousness ordinary life really what you should be questioning is why do you attach so much importance and truth and significance to ordinary consciousness ordinary life right here this is just a hallucination after all even under the scientific materialists paradigm what assigns tell you science tells you that you have neurotransmitters flowing through your brain all the time not only when you take a psychedelic all the time right now if you want to believe science there are neurotransmitters running through your head right now which are responsible for generating all the colors sounds and everything here without those neurotransmitters you could not understand the words that I'm saying nor could you recognize yourself or myself as human beings you could not access memories you could not understand what time or space are right so my question to you is how how myopic would you have to be if that's the case that if this current experience you're having is completely dominated by neurotransmitters how myopic would you have to be how arrogant would you have to be to think that this current configuration of neurotransmitters is the one true one the one from which you can understand what's true and what's false see so the irony of people who criticize psychedelics is that they themselves are doing it from a state of hallucination but they're so ignorant and oblivious and lacking in self reflection that they don't understand that what they're doing is you're criticizing psychedelics from a state of hallucination and delusion they're not self-aware enough to realize that oh well neurotransmitters are governing my entire state right now so if I'm sitting here thinking that all those psychedelics they must be stupid they must be false that's being run by the neurotransmitters in here so now imagine what happens if we change the neurotransmitter cocktail to something else which neurotransmitter cocktail is the one true one that allows you to access the truth well the mistake is seeing that there is one cocktail I'm not saying there's one cocktail you're saying there's only one cocktail and you're taking your current cocktail as the one true one what I'm telling you is that there's an infinite number of cocktails there is no one true one the truth is that all cocktails our relative and they just generate appearances and that's it that is the truth the truth is not a particular vision or cocktail that you have or see do the truth is a meta thing the truth is not one particular state of consciousness the truth is the realization that everything is a state of consciousness and that there is nothing but states of consciousness that's the real truth and psychedelics are very helpful for getting you to access that you see one of the things that these enlightened masters and teachers who poopoo psychedelics one of the things they don't tell you when they tell you that psychedelics just change your state yes psychedelics change your state but this is so foolish because different states grant you different access to insight and truth not all states are the same and this current state you're in I got news for you this is one of the worst possible states for accessing truth there are a hundred other states of consciousness that are way better way clear for accessing truth and the only way you're gonna know that is by entering those states you can't stay in your current state and judge some other state out there you have to be wise enough to recognize that oh I could be trapped inside of a state I need to break out of this state and see other states before I can really determine how good my original state was you see you can't just start out assuming that your state is the best state that's a silly as the way that humans used to think that the earth was the center of the universe and at the Sun everything else revolved around the earth why did they think that because they were so myopic and self-centered that they just thought that well this current configuration is the best one it must be the center of everything I got news for you it ain't the center of anything this is just one planet orbiting one star inside of a giant galaxy with billions of stars and then a universe with billions and billions more of galaxies just like this one with trillions of planets and God knows what else that's that's the scope we're talking about here your current state of consciousness he's as limited as living on earth compared to all the other planets in the universe that's how limited your experience of consciousness and reality is so taking psychedelics is not about achieving some wonderful state some blissful state it's about getting insight into the nature of how the entire system works and it's very useful to enter certain states to get that insight and this is precisely why meditation is done meditation is you sitting there focusing intently single pointedly on a single object in your mind or out in the world for long periods of times such that your mind focuses so much that literally your state of consciousness starts to change naturally now of course this is this takes a lot of work to do what a psychedelic can do in five minutes will take you five years of meditation practice but but if you want you can do it through meditation and in fact if you're an advanced meditator what you've noticed is actually very similar effects to psychedelics if you sit there and you focus on just an object in your room and you focus on it for 10 hours straight what's gonna happen is that your visual field will start to morph and will start to melt and it'll start to Sparkle and there will be you will literally start to get mild visual hallucination what is actually happening the reason that's happening is because your state of consciousness is expanding work we're actually through meditation we're tuning that dial up hanging up state of consciousness expands to the point where actually material reality starts to lose its shape just a little bit just a tiny little bit and your visual feel sourced to morph a little bit like this as you're meditating and even in Buddhism they have sayings like we're you know monks would meditate a professional lifetime monks would meditate for four months and four years and then they would they would talk about the dancing Buddha statue well you know in every Buddhist temple they have of course a statue of the Buddha but dancing Buddha why would why would the Buddha dance the Buddha's just sitting there so is that some sort of cute metaphor what are they really talking about these Buddhists why don't have to be so mystical and schmick Stickle and airy-fairy and new agey why can't they just be scientific about it well of course when they're talking about the dancing Buddha what they're really talking about is they're sitting there focusing looking at the Buddha statue for so [ __ ] long that it they start to hallucinate how the thing it just like on LSD search to morph like this the statue actually starts to morph and dance in their visual field that's your dancing Buddha it's literal see but to reach that state you have to be a super advanced meditator which many of you aren't because you're too lazy and too unserious about this work and you know that's hard it's hard way to go these days when I sit and meditate just for a little bit you know 15 minutes here and there in my room I get I start to get visual hallucinations they're very mild like on a very mild mild mild dose on mushrooms or LSD and to me that's a good sign that means I'm meditating properly hoping that happens but of course many people would freak out they would think all something's wrong with me no that's exactly what you want and the deeper you go to meditation the more likely that stuff is to happen if you become a very advanced meditator you can literally hallucinate you know in objects and beings into existence because what's happening is you're tapping into that pure abstract creative potential of mind that's exactly what you want of course it can be kind of freaky but a psychedelic is that times a thousand see so again the point is not to achieve some blissful state or to see some cool colors or to travel to some new dimension you can do all those things that's nice that's fun the point is the lessons the insights you get and the meta understanding of how this entire process works because as you're exploring all you different domains which are really learning is you're learning about your own mind how the mind of God is generating reality and why it's generating it if your mind is impure yeah you're gonna see some terrible stuff why because you're literally imagining it into existence so the trick with psychedelics is that they're a very powerful tool but don't get me wrong I'm not saying that they should be your only tool and that you shouldn't do anything else I have shared with you throughout previous episodes and I will in the future dozens perhaps even a hundred different techniques for how to do spiritual work how to work on yourself meditation self inquiry Kriya yoga shamanic breathing visualization exercises contemplation techniques and many many others so many that I can't even recall them all right now those are all important techniques and you're not going to be able to use only psychedelics to master yourself and to master your life get to where you really want to get to so don't fall into that naive mistake that trap rather psychedelics are very powerful catalysts very powerful tool for exploring consciousness and reality they can significantly speed up your awakening process they can clear up a lot of confusion they can help you to face fear of death which is one of the biggest obstacles for awakening for people they can get you to understand and have glimpses of awakening they can get you to do shadow work work on trauma and stuff that's holding you back they can show you your life purpose they can give you wisdom and guidance about what to do in your life which decisions to make for major life decisions they can help you to be creative with your art or your business they could help you to deal with relationship problems they can help you to sort out your own sexuality integrate the masculine and the feminine inside of you they can show you God they can show you love they can show you truth but really you're only gonna get what you give you're only gonna get from psychedelics what you put into it it all depends on the seriousness of your commitment your curiosity your open-mindedness and how much you want to grow up one of the other things psychedelics will do is psychedelics will skyrocket your growth in terms of spiral dynamics if you haven't checked out my spiral dynamics multi-part series go check it out it talks about the development of human beings various stages usually with active work you can take about 5 years for a person to grow from one spiral stage to the next so if you're at blue it'll take you four maybe five years of active self-improvement work to grow to orange and then it'll take another five years to grow from or two green another five from green to yellow and that's with active deliberate work assuming that you're open-minded you're completely aware of the model and everything and you're working every day towards it if you're not doing that then it might take you 20-30 years to grow one level with psychedelics with consistent use of psychedelics you can speed that up you can probably grow a couple of levels I mean one level every couple of years they will skyrocket you to the highest levels so that's one of the other advantages that they have if you're a scientist psychedelics will totally transform how you think of and do science which actually brings me to a nice analogy that I wanted to present heroes story because I find that scientifically minded people are some of the densest some of the densest minds they're so smart they're stupid and that they forget the true nature of science so here's my story Galileo Galilei in the 1600s he built his own telescope now he wasn't the first human to invent the telescope somebody else invented it but he caught on to the design very early on and he was one of the first people in Europe to build his own private little telescope it's all little bling nothing major but this telescope was such a radical technology that he turned it up towards the Stars and he started looking at the moon in greater detail than anyone has ever looked at it and he looked at Venus and neighboring planets like Jupiter and the moons of Jupiter he was actually able to look at the moons of Jupiter count them and describe them in some minor detail and then he of course started porting these discoveries but as he was reporting them of course the Spanish Inquisition in all of Europe basically which was very Catholic at the time this was I think even pre pre Protestant Reformation so as all Catholics you know Catholicism had a hegemony and a monopoly on on the entire thought structure of Europe and you have to really appreciate the significance of this at that time Christianity and science the study of reality they were intertwined there was no such thing as scientists in some laboratory over there and then theologians and the Pope over here and that there was a brick wall between the two no universities the first universities that were probably getting established around that time they were all theological based in theology based in Christianity so all of the main scientists of that time and there were scientists but most of them were actually religious folk priests and theologians and so forth and they were they were interested in studying reality but of course only within the paradigm of Christianity so when Galileo presented his findings of these moods and and planets so forth to the to the higher-ups what do they do they embrace some and they say oh wow you you created a telescope wow that's an amazing tool let me let me use this thing and and validate your discoveries no they demonized him they looked at his results and they said what sorcery is this planets you're counting moons and planets that shouldn't even exist up there who are you to contradict God it says here in our Bible that there can't be those moons out there there's only X number of planets X number of moons one moon and no more and yada yada yada and then when Galileo told them and remember these were scientists he this is the mistake that modern scientists make when they think about this example of course modern scientists understand this example but what modern scientists and a Thea and skeptics and rationalist misunderstand is that they use this example as an example of religious dogma suppressing science no no no this is an example of science being locked in a paradigm and being unable to understand new forms of science this is not an example of religion this is an example of science so the scientists of the time who just happened to be religious when they saw the results they rejected the results and when Galileo told them hey look this is I'm not making this stuff up this is not like if some belief system of mine I used a telescope to look and to see I saw with my own eyes look come come guys look at the telescope you can see for yourself too you don't need to believe me I'm not I'm not trying to create some sort of alternative Dogma to Christianity here I'm just reporting facts that I observed so what did those scientists do did they say okay let me look in the telescope no of course not they said what devil's instrument is that why should we trust this instrument of the devil to report accurate observations and they didn't even bother to look through the telescope that's a textbook example of closed mindedness and paradigm lock you are so locked into a paradigm and you are so closed-minded that you refuse to even open yourself up to a new modality of looking at reality that might disprove your paradigm that is the very definition of paradigm lock and you don't know what paradigm lock is I have a whole episode I believe it's called understanding how paradigms work go search for that you'll find it on YouTube mmm very important episode what we're talking about here so yeah so so these folks were locked into this paradigm so much that they refused to even look through a telescope because their paradigm didn't recognize the validity of a telescope well guess what's happening today with psychedelics today psychedelics are that telescope and today's scientists are those theologians of the past who denied to Galileo his very clear discoveries why because they were afraid to look into that telescope for themselves why because their paradigm was so limited that it didn't allow them to look through that telescope that's exactly what's happening today with modern science as soon as modern science begins to recognize psychedelics as a valid tool for the exploration of a reality everything in science will change it will be a game-changer bigger than Galileo bigger than Newton and bigger than Einstein there are a few a small pocket handful of scientists who are on the cutting edge exploring psychedelics right now and they will make groundbreaking discoveries the problem though is that they will be demonized and stigmatized and that most of these scientists who are doing this research if they're in a university they have to do it underground they can't tell their students or their colleagues especially that they do psychedelics because as soon as they say that I do psychedelics to advance my science and that my science is more accurate because I do psychedelics than your science without psychedelics as soon as you say that you're a heretic that's when the academic Inquisition comes for you that's when you lose your job that's when you stop being taken seriously exactly because science is a cultural phenomenon science is not merely about gathering data science involves meta scientific issues that are metaphysical and epistemological which involve questions of method the question of which methods reveal the truth this is an open question you don't know which methods are legitimate or illegitimate until you try them and with psychedelics with a psychedelic method it's not enough to do it once or twice or even five times because what you're looking at is such a gigantic and profound territory that it would be equivalent to let's say let's say I was one of these deniers of Galileo and finally he convinced me to try the telescope you know he said here just leo try the telescope just look in it if you don't see it if you don't see anything that confirms what I'm saying then you can throw it away and you can continue to prosecute me or persecute me but just looking at at least once so I say okay fine fine give me your damn telescope I'll look through this Devils glass once so I take it I look through it I look where where do I look I look at the wall I don't see anything and I throw it away and I say ah I see nothing you were full of [ __ ] Galileo you're an idiot see this isn't this is not real science it doesn't work this way to truly explore and investigate something you have to be willing to to work at it it's not easy to understand a new thing you know like if somebody like Newton invented calculus the first people try to imagine the first people who try to learn calculus from you and that was difficult there was no frame of reference there was no authority that told you that calculus was true you have to actually work through it and maybe it was wrong you didn't know you had to actually work through it and check it that could have taken you years to do likewise with Galileo's telescope you had to look at the Stars carefully you have to wait till it's the right time of day or night when there's no clouds no rain no obstructions you got to find the right places in the sky to look you got to look at them carefully with an open mind only then can you see what Galileo saw so it's not a matter of just some bumbling fool who looks through a glass and boom the truth is revealed it's not that simple likewise it's not so simple to psychedelic we're just you're some idiot ad at a friend's house some sort of party where people are drunk and you pop some mushrooms and you think that okay well Leo told me this will reveal the truth I take some mushrooms while I'm drunk and I'm smoking weed and I'm [ __ ] with my friends talking [ __ ] loud music is playing yeah you're not gonna get anything out of that but if you carefully methodically work through it multiple trips multiple substances really introspect contemplate have the right intention be mature be serious about it start with slow doses low doses ramp yourself up to medium doses then to high doses if you explore it in that fashion then it's a totally different ballgame then now you're now you're into into real science now you're into the real work and so that is what's required alright I'm going to wrap this up here this episode was designed for future Psychonauts I see a lot of people doing psychedelics and irresponsible ways that makes me disappointed because of the power of these these tools it would be sort of like if Galileo had telescopes and he you know he crafted five new telescopes to give to people to scientists and they took these telescopes and they used them to sexually pleasure themselves that would be the equivalent how how many people use psychedelics so don't don't do that this is a this is a delicate scientific instrument that you want to use in a precise and methodical manner to grow yourself and to understand reality in in profound ways so treat it with respect I don't recommend people under 21 years old toy around with psychedelics because you're just too immature at that age I feel it really takes maturity these substances require respect and care you got to be careful with your protocol all of those things I've talked about in the past there are risks involved of course you know when you're looking through a telescope you might look at the Sun if you look at the Sun through a telescope you'll burn your eyes out there's risks with exploration you got to be careful if you're working in a laboratory as a chemist and you're doing some chemistry experiments there's a risk that you'll mix two chemicals and it's going to explode in some sort of toxic cloud into your face you know early pioneers in science who did research into a radioactivity they died from radiation poisoning yeah science can be dangerous exploration can be dangerous luckily most psychedelics are not that dangerous they're not going to destroy your brain that's one of the that's one of the the best excuses it seems like the more intelligent a person is the more of an intellectual they are the more of an excuse they make against psychedelics by telling me that all leo but if I try though psychedelics is going to destroy my brain and then I won't be able to be the you know brilliant intellectual that I am that's like saying that looking through a telescope who will burn your eyes out by looking at the moon or looking at the Stars it's just excuses it's just excuses born of ignorance the mind is looking for justifications of its paradigm because it doesn't want to challenge its own paradigm see so yeah I recommend you be very careful be very responsible if you choose to venture into psychedelics by no means am i pressuring you to I'm not saying you have to I'm just I'm putting this out there because I feel like somebody will go on the internet go on YouTube type in something like how does psychedelics work what does psychedelics mean and they'll stumble upon this talk and for at least some of you this will transform your entire life if you really take to heart what I said here contemplate it all for yourself don't believe any of it verify for yourself go on this journey man the sky is the limit the rewards are unspeakable from doing this work and of course it's not just the psychedelics it's even more importantly it's the contemplation behind it it's the intent to want to understand reality and consciousness which is what my entire channel actual eyes already is about so now we're wrapping up this is the end and here I got to pitch my channel so this is my website actualize downward right here go click there you can find my blog you can find the course you can find the life purpose course you can find the forum where you can talk about this stuff people post great trip reports on our forum all the time some really inspiring ones go check those out check out my book list a lot of great books that will help you in your journey here and just uh you can also if you like this content you can support me on patreon at patreon.com slash actualized your donations and so forth support my research I do a lot of research into this I don't just read books all of the stuff in this episode has come from direct experience massive breakthroughs nearly a hundred trips dozens of breakthrough trips wracking my mind over this stuff for years experimenting with substances that no man has even ingested before like this is a lot of work goes into this money too so I do appreciate your support via patreon and yeah the final thing I'll say is that everything that I talk about in my videos is designed to create a foundation for existential understanding of reality what we're doing here is we're inquiring into the nature of life death Society consciousness reality science government psychology how our emotions work how to be happy in life how to be successful how to be healthy all of that it's a very holistic approach you're not likely to find a more holistic big picture understanding channel on all of YouTube I dare you to find one that goes into this level of depth but for you to be able to receive what is being offered here via these videos via these conversations I have one very difficult precondition prerequisite of you and that is radical open mindedness radical open mindedness you need to be absolutely open minded you need me so open minded that it will destroy your whole life and you are still gonna be open minded go check out an older episode of mine called radical open mindedness where I talk about that but that is that is the number one obstacle that holds people back from going as deep as I can take you your mind is just not open enough you're too judgmental you're too ideological you're too attached to your beliefs you're too arrogant you think you know how a reality is and how it works and you might say here will leo but you act so arrogant yourself so you're a hypocrite you don't understand sometimes yeah I act I act out I can a little arrogant sometimes but you have to understand that this is sort of just drama for fun for entertainment for you guys cuz this is a show this is a show this is a TV show right but when I'm actually doing this work I am the most radically open-minded one of the most radical open-minded people probably on this whole [ __ ] planet and I am deeply epistemic ly humble which means that despite all of the arrogant things that I might say at times on the inside I'm always questioning myself always always I'm always looking for ways I could be deceiving myself always I'm always looking for self bias as always and it's my having done that for some 20 years since I was a teenager since high school I've been doing this and really like take this is my religion open-mindedness is my religion and questioning myself and my self biases this is my religion I've done it so much that it's taken me to levels of understanding of reality which are unspeakable and on communicable and that's not because I can't speak it but because nobody can understand it whose mind is not as open as mine has been see and I'm not saying this to brag or to put myself on a pedestal or anything you're capable of being open-minded you just don't understand how important it is you take it for granted you think this open mining this stuff is just some sort of you know cute talk or whatever but this I'm dead serious about this one of the biggest things that's keeping you from Awakening and understanding reality is simply your mind is not open enough and that's one of the biggest things that will hold you back with psychedelics your just your mind is not open enough infinite open-mindedness is what you need and that's what I ask of you if you're gonna be really following along with me and really I'm not interested at this point in my career to be appealing to the masses and to be trying to convince every fool out there clicking through one of my videos randomly of the things that I talk about because the things that I talk about are way beyond conventional human comprehension you have to be serious about this work to be able to understand the things that I want to teach and I'm passion about teaching deep topics which is why my videos are so damn long so that requires a certain commitment from you if you're gonna be following with me you got to be serious find the reasons that you need to find to get serious about this work this is life and death here there is no more powerful work in in the universe that you can do than this work that we're doing to understand the very core of reality and the core of who you are and why you're here and there are definitive answers to these questions this is not theory and armchair philosophy the way they do in universities this work if you follow along with me and you carefully do the work and you're very open-minded and you use some of these techniques and tools that I teach about you will have a level of understanding of reality that is deeper than any academic any scientist I don't care how reputable they are any intellectual that's what's possible here but not only that you won't just have dry knowledge like some Nobel laureate it's gonna deeply touch your heart it's gonna deeply transform your whole life your whole mind everything it's gonna touch all of your relationships it's gonna touch your career it's gonna touch how you speak how you emot-- how you feel your health everything will be touched by this and in a positive way if you do it correctly but also you have to be very careful because there's a lot of potential for self-deception and there are many traps along the way so what I require of my audience is maturity seriousness curiosity open-mindedness fearlessness a desire to explore willingness to do hard work and not just to sit there on your ass watching videos or listening to some podcasts but doing work meditation retreats maybe psychedelics maybe some breathing techniques maybe some visualization techniques whatever I'm reaching levels of understanding of reality which are gonna go over most people's heads 99% of people even those who watch my content and I will outgrow you if you don't grow along with me I've already outgrown probably a majority of my audience from where I started a lot of people these days comment under my newest content saying that I'm crazy that I've lost my mind that have gone off the deep end that I'm a demon that I'm a devil whatever that they want me to go back to teaching all the material that this material isn't practical anymore but I told you I told you early on that the whole point of this work is that we're growing and if I'm doing this work and I'm massively growing and you're not doing the work and you're not growing that means I'm gonna leave you in the dust so brag it's just it means that I'm gonna be speaking from a different reality than you I'm gonna be inhabiting a different reality than you and I'm gonna be telling you about things that are gonna seem crazy to you but that's because you're in old reality you haven't been doing the work you've been slacking off you're just sitting around watching videos digging around online so of course of course you're not gonna and then the only the only recourse you're gonna have is to call me a devil or to call me insane or whatever yeah because either you're gonna come along on this journey with me or you're gonna you're gonna deny that this journey exists because you can't admit that this journey exists and all these possibilities that I talked about exist and then at the same time just sit back and do nothing see you're your soul is not gonna tolerate that your soul is these are gonna go on this journey and actually actualize some of this stuff and validate it for yourself or you're gonna become a troll and you're gonna say oh Leo's just full of himself he's just a [ __ ] or he's just a scam artist he's just one of these fake gurus like always he's just starting a cult yeah those are the excuses you will make when you're not doing the work but those of you who do the work I receive messages from you periodically glowing messages about how your life has been transformed and your eyes have been open to new possibilities and that's that's what I live for that's the greatest reward for the work that I do it's not the money it's the impact that I know that I can have on a few of you so I hope that you are one of those few one out of the millions you I hope you that I'm talking to right now that you will hear these words that you will arise from your slumber roll up your sleeves get to work and then one day you will experience some of the wacky stuff that I talked about and you'll discover how amazing it is and then you'll also understand why this stuff is so hidden from the majority of mankind because they're not open-minded enough they're not willing to do the work but we also have a lot more foundational topics to discuss so stick with me for the future you