Psychedelic Meditation Course
Introduction (6 minute talk)
Psychedelic meditation is a path of healing and insight. Healing our burdened parts and insight into the nondual nature of awareness.
Our awareness is inherently nondual, already beyond confusion. However, due to the dualistic perception, our awareness has been seemingly obscured by ignorance, confusion, and emotional blockages. This confusion is temporary and can be completely cleared up.
There are two transformations: healing burdened parts and recognizing the nature of mind as empty luminosity.
Healing burdened parts is the transformation from the unhealthy subtle body to the healthy subtle body.
Recognizing the nature of mind is the transformation from the healthy subtle body to the nondual wisdom body. The natural state.
Psychedelic meditation with 5-MeO-DMT can accelerate both transformations.
Psychedelic meditation is an experimental practice that we are exploring as a community. Many of the insights in the manual have come from people doing the practice. Thank you for being a part of this process.
Recognize Clarity (11 minute talk)
We will describe the nature of mind: clarity, emptiness, radiance or display.
Duality is ignorance of the nature of awareness, which is empty clarity.
We will start with describing the clarity aspect.
One of the best ways to recognize the clarity aspect is the experience of self-awareness.
Self-awareness is not awareness of our relative self: name, job, gender, age.
Self-awareness means that awareness is aware of itself.
The ability to be self-aware is an intrinsic quality of awareness. It is built in.
We can forget that we are aware, and we can always remember or notice that we are aware.
Usually, we are caught up in activities and forget that we are aware. Forgetting that we are aware is a state of ignorance. This ignorance creates suffering and karma.
We might think that not being self-aware is not a big deal, but it is.
We become glued to thoughts, believe them, and follow the chain of thinking.
Compulsive thinking, compulsive chains of thoughts.
Reproducing negative emotions again and again.
Self-awareness has tremendous power to transform our lives.
Notice that we are aware. Being aware that we are aware is self-awareness. Like a candle flame is self-illuminating. It illuminates itself and it illuminates things nearby. Our awareness can know itself, and it can know appearances coming through the six sense gates.
Self-awareness does not depend on the visual consciousness. Self-awareness does not depend on any of the consciousnesses.
Self-awareness is the primary awareness that hosts the other consciousnesses but does not depend on them. We can be self-aware in all aspects of our lives: walking, working, talking, thinking, listening.
We can be self-aware in extreme states of being. For example, when dying, the six consciousnesses dissolve one by one: sight, sound, touch, thinking.
In high doses of 5MeO, the primary consciousness becomes as bright as the sun and outshines the six consciousnesses. As the clarity becomes brighter, the self awareness becomes brighter and easier. Non-meditators do not understand self-awareness, so they are glued to the experience of brightness. When they lose contact with their body they have fear. Meditators remain self-aware in high doses, so there is no fear and the very bright self awareness is profound and blissful.
Recognize Emptiness (25 minute talk)
Three aspects of the nature of mind:
Clarity – the knowingness of awareness.
Emptiness – the transparency of awareness. ***
Radiance – the unconfined capacity for anything to arise.
Three types of practice:
Shamatha with object – using an object as support for mindfulness.
Shamatha without object – self-knowing clarity does not need any support.
Nature of mind practice – clarity sees its own empty nature by looking and not seeing.
Awareness is transparent and ungraspable.
The analogy of a mirror being featureless. Awareness must be featureless in order to be aware of the many features. Awareness itself has no emotions or thoughts.
Examine this self-awareness. No one thinks to do this.
Does it have a specific location, or is it everywhere?
Does it have a shape or color, or is it transparent?
Self-awareness is transparent, featureless emptiness.
Look, don’t see, let be. The moment of not seeing is seeing emptiness. Like seeing the space in the room.
When recognizing that awareness is emptiness, subject/object duality collapses.
The subject is emptiness, so it cannot be separate from any object
Because of recognizing emptiness, there is no object to fixate on, so there is natural freedom.
Recognizing empty clarity is called the insight of rigpa, the experience of nonduality.
If you have not yet recognized empty clarity, don’t worry. Now that you know to look, 5MeO experience will give you an excellent opportunity to recognize empty clarity directly.
Understanding level.
Direct experience level.
Direct realization level.
Because of emptiness, awareness is primordial purity. It cannot be harmed or stained. It is beyond concepts or dualistic labels. We cannot say that it exists, because we cannot locate it. We cannot say that it does not exist because it is always present.
Awareness is unconditioned in order to be aware of all of the conditions. Awareness is beyond birth and death, beyond confusion and liberation, beyond time and space. It is a safe place to be.