Hello, came here looking for info on suppliers, stumbled on olympus mon's saga of his recent experiences in peru, which surprised me with how far towards reality some of ya'll have come using this tool. Reading his account I realized that while my story contains very limited use of entheogens it might be of aid or interest to some on this forum. It's far enough outside consensus reality that to protect my reputation and dodge the potential of being taken away by men in white coats for evaluation, I've told only one friend portions of my experiences over the last seven years. I feel that without substantial detail and background much of this story, which may strain credibility as it is, might be utterly unacceptable to the consciousness of even the most spiced, so this may get long. It will start slow but strageness will surely come. While I have read extensively on the topic of ayahuasca, no trip could be as mindbending as what's happened to me. Anyone for having visions stone cold sober, a hundred or so dreams or visions that have come true, often hearing the thoughts of others before they speak them, numerous gross and spectacular violations of the laws of physics at the level of walking on water? Given our culture and human understanding in general, without anonymity it wouldn't serve me to tell this story in public.

As I've never spoken in detail about most of this, I would love to hear from you. It could take awhile to get it all out, so if anyone's interested, subscribe to this thread and I will be updating. This is an experiment for me, I'm curious how a community of heavy entheogen users will respond, as short of people who have directly experienced such things I can't conceive of any group who would entertain the highlights of the account to follow as anything but delusional mental illness or attention seeking lies. Until I stumbled on this forum and olympus man's posts in particular, I honestly thought I would take most of this to my grave.

Some background:

Roughly eight years ago a webpage of Michael Langford's showed up in a google search on a completely unrelated topic. The page was on how most spiritual teachers are frauds and only in it for money, fame and so on, there could not have been a more perfect introduction to spirituality for my agnostic mind. I printed the whole page and threw it in a stack of papers. It ended up in a box and was rediscovered upon unpacking after a move. The page contained quotes from a handful of teachers this Michael guy thought were legit, Ramana Maharshi, Nisargadatta, Papaji and some others, and lead me back to his site which contained the contents of his book "The Most Direct Means to Eternal Bliss" in nascent form. He claims to have had an epiphany allowing him to understand the teachings of several indian gurus on how to most rapidly eliminate the ego. He also claims to have vigorously applied this, thus ending his own. Surprisingly, being agnostic to near atheism and having already "completely figured out" religion, I felt compulsed to study the gurus Langford had derived his technique from. What he believes to be the fastest path to enlightenment seemed to be supported, although with large differences in expression, by each of these gurus. Seeing this consensus, I decided to drink the kool-aid and apply the recommended meditation technique.

Langford describes this form of meditation as "awarness watching awareness" or "awareness abiding as awareness". In my studies I found that others have variously called it remaining in the heart or abiding as the self(both from Ramana Maharshi), clinging unswervingly to the I AM(Nisargadatta), mahāmudrā śamatha without support(3 of 4 schools of Tibetan Buddhism), trekchö/dzogchen(all 4 schools of Tibetan Buddhism), focused emptiness(pathwork), presence(Eckhart Tolle), zazen(as defined by Dōgen, founder of the Soto school), samadhi(Patanjali's yoga sutra), be still and know god(Torah) and taken as a whole Jesus's sayings in the Gospel of Thomas. So it's essentially the highest and final practice of most teachers and traditions with enlightenment as their goal. Like I was, most students are initially not ready to undertake or even able to comprehend the ultimate practice. As an effect of interacting with and providing for all the questions and needs of these students almost all teachers and teachings develop a high noise to signal ratio. As a result of this it took me thousands of hours of reading to figure out that all these teachers and traditions are, in the end, identical and prescribing the same practice.

The practice is to focus upon one's awareness, this awareness is the same awareness that is right now aware of your surroundings, your body and all it's senses and your thoughts. When this awareness is focused on to the exclusion of all objects of this awareness including one's thoughts, breath, body, surroundings, etc. the mind falls silent and then with enough practice it is said the ego eventually dies. We shall see.

If you've made it this far, the dull part is over. Will start with where things got interesting tomorrow.

edit: Current experience with entheogens: two quite healing trips on shrooms(lots of fear), once with iboga(gentlest thing ever), have used weed a little in the past and have twice experienced very detailed visions of future events, once with OEVs the other with CEVs and another time hyperspace and purging on minor amounts of it. This site rocks, btw, I've never come across anywhere I would've remotely considered relating these events before. Honestly I probably had yet to develop sufficient understanding of the events I will describe to be useful to others anyway, it took several years for me to accept some of them and to fit them into a model of reality I can accept. It's a shame I didn't learn the Yoga Sutra more thoroughly when I first read it. Last night when I wrote the above, I looked at it for the first time in 6yrs for confirmation of the way I used the term samadhi and found it espouses the same model of reality for the events I have experienced as I have formulated on my own over several years. Aya should be interesting, I plan on using it frequently and perhaps at high doses for a little while to hopefully help me decide between some different options I have in my life. This forum has been so helpful towards that end, great fear facing/transcending community here, haven't even looked around much but I love everything I've seen here. peace