I have to come to respect a lot of opinions on this forum, and wanted to solicit opinions.

I stumbled upon Actualized.org on youtube while researching 5-MeO-DMT, and have noted that Leo Gura appears to have ingested 5-MeO *hundreds* of times and concurrently developed a non-dualist philosophy around the insights from his "awakenings."

While criticisms of his insights (and arrogance) abound, they are often from people without deep psychedelic experience. I am curious, what do you think of his "teachings" and do they resonate with your own experiences using psychedelics such as DMT, 5-MeO, Salvia, etc.?

I apologize, I don't know Leo Gura and I don't have experience with inhaled 5 MeO DMT, however I have been suspecting a certain arrogance and disconnect from others in many people who glorify this molecule and the practice of inhaling it often. I might be wrong, it might not be very different from other psychedelics in this regard.

Non Duality is the premise of all spiritual teachings... İntegrating this awareness harmoniously into a dual world is the actual task. Sitting on a high horse preaching on non Duality in effect perpetuates an energy of separation/duality... At first glance paradoxical and tricky it is.

Hmm.. I can only offer half an answer to your question, but here it is: I'm pretty invested in meditation, that's how I came across Leo.

And the things he said about meditation weren't all wrong, but there was a lot of hybris. Like, in one video, he said, he now, 2-3 years after meditating for the first time, basically knows dozens of techniques to get people enlightened quickly. And while I'm not enlightened and so can't really judge, in the meditation community, no one making such claims would be taken seriously. The top teachers have decades of experience, tens of thousands of hours of practice and still are pretty humble, highlighting how many flaws they still have. More importantly, they don't claim that the 'get people enlightened', because that's a path everyone takes by themselves. For a few individuals, it happens very quickly, for most, it doesn't.

Maybe Leo's a Mozart of enlightenment, a genius of rare brilliance, and his claims are true. Maybe he's misrepresenting his attainments and capacities.

Anyways - a lot of what Leo says is pretty common stuff in meditation / spiritual communities. I don't assume he 'developed' all of this by himself, psychedelics or not. Which is per se not a bad thing, good teachers in any subject don't have to invent it all, but can merely be very good at understanding and reproducing, that's fine.

And, similar to what dithyramb said, nonduality is far from Leo's invention. It's one of the two main approaches towards enlightenment from a somewhat buddhism/hinduism based point of view. The other school is the gradual one. Zen is a nondual school in many ways, too, even though the most typical approach is probably Advaita Vedanta. Many weird and controversial people there, Rupert Spira might be one of the most respectable.

So, I'm not saying all that Leo says is wrong, which isn't the case. But yeah, my impression was of a certain hubris and that there are better people to follow. And if he claims that he invented a nondual philosophy by himself by using 5-MeO-DMT, that would be just nonsense.

What I know for sure is that 5 MeO DMT knows stuff that you and I could never know. In regards to your question, I think it's easy to forget that the relevance and understanding of any great perspective or experience you have with entheogenic molecules is going to be limited to the type of person who is listening. The vast majority of people just do not care about any of this. We each have different universes inside of our souls that work in different ways. The perspective I have from my experiences through my lens of life lead me to love psychedelics, but that doesn't mean the information, insights, ups, downs, senses of enlightenment etc. that I experience need to be understood by others. Even among psychedelic users, you cannot just take an important part of one person, give it to another person, and expect it to be just as important.

A few of my friends have asked me once or twice what the big deal is with DMT and 5-MeO-DMT. I wish I could go back and change my answer to if you have heard about what these molecules feel like and it does not interest you and or makes you feel uncomfortable, AND you are also perfectly happy in your life, then you are probably not missing out on a single thing.

I love that perspective though 5meo is unknown for me, this wisdom shines.
Making generalizations e.g. reaching 'enlightenment' by X or Y , is not a trademark of enlightened people imho. And people know that, so I fear for mere dubious motivations to do so.

You know what would be helpful? If you could link to some of the teachings you mentioned - then we could take a look and comment more closely.

There are literally hundreds of hours of YouTube videos, which is quite impressive on scope alone:

https://www.youtube.com/user/ActualizedOrg

I find his videos to be quite good, much of the time, with lots of compiled wisdom and relatively good organization, logic, and preparation. Since my last post I've done a lot more research into other perspectives of non-duality and have started reading Ralston's excellent book, the Book of Not Knowing. I am starting to see how it all relates to the work people like Leo and Martin Ball are doing with the use of 5-MeO, so the journey continues.

From an enlightenment perspective, it actually makes sense that 5-MeO would be the psychedelic of choice, as it acts directly on the dissolution of the ego and is the most powerful of all known psychedelics. Since letting go of every aspect of the ego is what a true non-dual enlightenment experience requires, it makes sense that 5-MeO is the most powerful tool to help accomplish this.

@VibeSurfer, I totally agree, though I happen to be one of those people with an unquenchable thirst, tapered only by my fear of how powerful they are and some caution regarding my physical health. The fear I can overcome, though, and the more experienced I get the more I think a cautious, methodical, intentional approach is best anyway. I'm certainly not at the point where I'm doing 7g of mushrooms, bombing DMT, and then smoking Salvia on the comedown. This isn't an escape for me, but a grand journey of discovery. It's the first time in my adult life that I've felt childlike Wonder again, and this sense that there is more out there than I have ever imagined.

Arguably, it would be Salvinorin A.
But... tbh, its an unfruitful comparison.

I have an affinity for that childlike wonder as well. 5-MeO-DMT feels to me as if it shows you what is left behind after it strips everything from you that you thought made you. It feels so pure. A full body spirital exorcism that drops you off with euphoria, positivity, and love. It turns my most stubborn demons to stone and then to ash, and then they are just blowing off in the wind somewhere. I still don't know how to use words to do this molecule justice. It is the beyond.

The power of psychedelics is highly subjective. If you consider a somewhat standard breakthrough dose of n,n-DMT for a human, lets say 25mg. Well that would be a standard breakthrough DMT experience. Most would argue DMT is stronger than LSD. If you took 25mg (25,000 'hits' ) of LSD, I think you enter into a bit of a gray area. What about 50mg of n,n-DMT vs 50 mg (50,000 hits)? Even grayer in my opinion. I would never in a million years intentionally take that much LSD in either scenario, but I have been in phases of my life where I whimsically decide to smoalk or not smoalk 50mg of DMT with the same carelessness of having a beer or not having a beer.

Will salvia become lethal at any known dose? 5-MeO-DMT's lethal capabilities make it stand out from other psychedelics IMO, demanding the utmost respect, preparation, and research.

I absolutely agree with you on this.

I'll speak a little about my experience and why it makes me repel against people like Leo.

Just before I joined this place I had an encounter with 5meoDMT that was lifechanging. Over the course of two months, I did it six times, each time except the first being an IM injection of highly purified HCl. The first time was done IV, and because I had been told that it was n,n DMT, my dose was way too big. I could spend the rest of this post f'ing the ineffebale, but suffice it to say that it made a huge difference in the way i went forward into the world after that.

I made alot of mistakes blindly stumbling around in this new, spontaneously and quite accidentally "awakened" state. Although there was great intention in my use, I did not expect it to be met with such ferocity. I almost lost my mind because i had absolutely nothing to attach my experience to, despite having decades of psychedelic experience, multiple OOBEs, an active spiritual practice- all of that was just theory and in the face of a new- to me objective- reality it became very difficult for me to remain in a rational, or wise, state.

I joined this community as a blathering, egotistical, ignorant fool full of ideas born from my own beleifs. Had this community fostered a sense of self-aggrandizement and allowed me to exercise it without pushback, I may have become a person like Leo. With no real vision on how to integrate the experience into my own life making it transform my suffering into good living, I would have been tempted to instead offer it to others and maybe even tell them them how to do it.

I am so glad for this place and the jerks that reined me in multiple times when I began to get all grandiose and out of hand because it allowed me to grow within the experience, and communicating with others who are struggling along different parts of this weird path helped me to see that all there is to my experience is me. I have no business telling you, or anyone how to think, or feel, or do. All I can do is do the best I can at making the best decisions for my life that improve it, because if i want to be in a good place, i want to have neighbors in a good place too- and everyone is my neighbor.

Leo whatever his name is, and so many others like him- the Sandovals, the Rettigs, the deGuzmans, hell, even the Martins do not- to me- have the vision, the creativity, nor the humbleness to just walk their own path. They must instead disrupt the path of others because they have not nullified their desires and attachements, yet they claim knowledge and allegiance to the one thing.

If someone is inclined to do this, then they have all the tools they need availabale to them. Granted, the universe kind of sh@t the stuff out onto me with little provocation, but had the barrier of another human been placed between me and the thing- i.e. someone willing to sell it to me with the provision that i listen to their interpetation of the thing exclusively, it never would have happened. Perhaps my distrust of humans developed from 20 years in the heroin trade served me well, IDK, but I see a lot of similarities between these people and the scuzz that i dealt with then..

Put simply, he cannot know what he talks about with so much veracity and pseudo-wisdom. It is the same reason I want to throw Duncall Trussel off a bridge (in his cartoon form, of course )

If learning is your goal, then it is always best not to focus only on what a single person has to say, but to widen your scope before deepening it.

Look at what other thinkers have to say. Look into different spiritual and philosophical traditions and practices.

Look also, into what people who are critical about leo gura are saying, and try to figure out if they might have a point.

What are the pro's and cons of nonduality?

Spiritual enlightenment is not something that, without any personal subjective experience, can be understood intellectually. But intellectual rigor IS your friend on your path to enlightenment.
It will keep you grounded, it will help you separate facts from fiction, filter out the bullshit and distinguish dillusion from enlightenment.

Yes

I'm along the line with @Dragonrider's suggestion. Though I had also stumbled on Leo's vids while research 5meo but really intellectually transmitting the understanding of "enlightenment" and "non-duality" is futile or at most educational as most of us realized akin to how you'd describe a dmt trip to someone never had. I'm not saying I know he's or he's not enlightened and because subsequently I didn't go into most of what he was saying. My view is that psychedelics are like tools as wheels are tools, but you still got to put efforts to get to the top of the mountain with the risks come with.

I got to experience 5meo in normal dose in facilitated setting and couple threshold doses months later. IMO it is better to go above threshold as the threshold amount pushes my ego to an edge but can't quite let go... So I had some years of meditation practice before my first 5meo. And that first experience was life changing. The dose was enough there was no time for the mind to grasp and within seconds my awareness was non-existing or merged back I do not know. But at one point my awareness was back in a different space/dimension, then my awareness came back to my body and the room but without any mental thoughts and mind chatters, for a while it was pure silence in awareness. It was a very pleasant state. I think for many meditators can relate to this state of being and somehow 5meo takes me there for a glimpse. But I've got to say it does affect my sleep for a while with the threshold amounts and seem to affect my other psychedelics trips after as it seemed to somehow has affected on my brain chemistry but this is my conjecture fyi.

It's not just about Leo,
there is also a great Community over there:

https://www.actualized.o...ightenment-spirituality/

I don’t believe in enlightenment so you can imagine what I think of him. I think that a person can have the impression and feeling of seeing clearly and having the weight of an ignorant perspective removed but I don’t think that that is a mystical state. It’s another perspective in an infinite spectrum of perspectives, none of which are correct or incorrect, just part of a whole. I don’t think highly of people that take their own nonsense too seriously.

Then you are on the path to enlightenment

But should he take not thinking highly of such people seriously now?