Leo Gura

I have no serious criticisms of him. He knows his shit. He doesn't deny love. He talks quite a bit about Eros (his term of Love), and he says that the driving force behind all evolution is love. Which is correct in my view, although even that doesn't go far enough to underscore the importance of Love in all of Creation. He might not be as explicit about Infinite Love as I am, equating Love & Truth. But that's probably because he has not accessed some of the deepest insights I have accessed via psychedelics. I think his understanding of reality would be deeper if he went deeply into psychedelics. But oh well. It's good enough. You can only ask so much of a guy. He has done several life-times-worth of amazing work. Ken is one of the greatest Western philosophers and intellectuals who has ever lived. We are lucky to be alive alongside him. It's sad that his health as deteriorated so quickly.

@Pouya Of course, that's what meditation & yoga are about.

Taking a break.

Yes Because materialism and sex is not other than spirit. Enlightenment does not limit your actions in any way. It sets you radically free.

@Javfly33 Yes. Really, the question becomes so internalized that it melt away and all you're left with is the raw present moment. Self-inquiry must take you out of your mind. If you're doing it as the level of mind, that's not going to do much. Out of your mind is the key. You must leave behind the verbal / logical domain. Psychedelics work by effortlessly taking you out of your mind.

A) You can certainly find cheaper trainings. B) You'd get a lot more value out of simply connecting with a few experienced wingmen in your city who can show you the ropes for free. Bootcamps can be a good way to get yourself in the game but the chief problem is that they are too short. Your results will not come from the bootcamp but from the daily follow-up work you do. The follow-up work is the most important part. Because every weekend needs to become your personal bootcamp. Don't underestimate the importance of having just 1 or 2 experienced wingmen to go out with every weekend. This is HUGE! It's worth much more than a bootcamp in terms of results. But if you got the money to burn, a bootcamp can be a good way to jumpstart this whole process. I did a bootcamp for $2000, but I got a lot more value from finding great wingmen. I also had lots of money to burn, so $2000 was not a big deal to spend. You can find wingmen via online forums or by attending an RSD FreeTour in your city. Befriend everyone at the FreeTour. Get their phone numbers and start going out with them every night. All that a bootcamp really is, is some dude telling you to approach girls and forcing you to do it all night long. If you can discipline yourself to approach all night long, you don't really need a bootcamp. But of course this discipline is really hard for newbies, so you may need it. If we were doing a bootcamp, we would just walk into a club and I would point out random girls and force you to approach them. After you fail, I would just tell you to immediately approach the next girl. We would do this 20-50 times over 3-4 hours.

Doesn't matter how many hookers he banged, 5-MeO-DMT is still awesome!

Keep in mind that the Absolute is distinct from the structures of the mind/brain/self. Which means it's possible to awaken but still have addictions. Because addictions are baked into the structure of the mind/brain/self. Awakening itself does not necessarily change the mind/self. Which is why an awakened person can still smoke cigs, have a porn addiction, etc. You can think of it this way: awakening disidentifies you from your mind. But the mind still continues to fire according to its lifetime of karma. If you spent a lifetime watching porn, your mind has been programmed with that habit, and awakening will not automatically remove all that. You will have to retrain your mind. This is why many awakened people are still flawed and still have bad habits and cravings. The mistaken assumption is that awakening will perfect the mind. This is simply untrue in practice. What perfects the mind is deliberate training, which many people neglect to do, especially after an awakening or two. Perfecting the mind is harder than awakening. In practice you could get many awakened people hooked on heroin. Because in truth they ain't that awake.

YES! This is exactly what awakening is about. Awakening is not something you think. It's more felt. It's pure, raw experience. Ideally the mind is shut off or at least sidelined. Awakening is nothing other than the present moment, observed intensely for what it is. It sounds like this Kratom helped you enter a mild samadhi state. It's not an out of body experience, it's a nondual state of consciousness. Which is exactly what you want in this work. From this state you can now contemplate metaphysical questions and get profound answers -- not verbal answers but actual answers! That was your answer to the question: Who am I? There is much deeper to go. You are only seeing the tip of the Ox's tail. So keep exploring.

This is such a fluke condition that you cannot apply it other mental disorders. Mental disorders are legion, and most of them will slow down your path to awakening. Of course there are also some "disorders" which are called disorders but really are not. Don't forget that "disorder" is relative notion. Many a foolish doctor would call enlightenment a "disorder", without realizing that being a doctor is the real disorder here. Isn't it funny how considering oneself to be a human is not considered a disorder? Talk about self-bias! Lol

Be careful about getting too emotionally invested in Leo the persona. It isn't real. It has no import. Thinking highly of me will only become an obstacle in your work. If you're having dreams about me, you're attaching too much importance to me.

Having read the criticisms in more depth, I want to underscore that many criticisms of Ken Wilber are foolish and that the bulk of his written work is as solid as can be. Minor criticisms like his support for Andrew Cohen, Adi Da, and his over-emphasis of the Mean Green Meme and his political prescriptions are all knit-picks compared to the bulk of his written work, which is solid, and which has little to do with those things. Don't get distracted by the politics surrounding the Integral Institute. Just focus on his written work, which is genius. And as always, don't expect any teacher to be perfect in their embodiment or conduct. The criticism's of Ken Wilber found on the following website, for example, are pure BS: http://www.integralworld.net

Bloomberg got no chance to win Dem nomination. He might as well burn that $150 mil.

@Maya_0 It is YOU! You are God.

It can be an act of selflessness. Think of Christ or Gandhi. You can basically sacrifice yourself for your life purpose. But this is still all part of the relative domain of life/death. From the Absolute perspective there is no one to die. But if you get it in your mind this idea of "I will sacrifice myself in the name of glory and I will go down in history as a good human being." << That's ego Be careful not to create a self-righteous fantasy about sacrificing yourself. Rather, act as though you are not important at all. There is no sense is committing suicide for a good cause. No good cause requires your suicide. Rather just do your work and if you happen to get killed in the process by some haters, so be it. But if you actively try to be a martyr, that's ego. A true martyr never tries to be martyr. He's just doing his work and others react to it. If your life becomes selfless and has great impact on others, you will naturally develop haters who wish you harm.

He was speaking of total nonduality, the Godhead. From that POV, there is no need to speak of souls.

The whole point of the notion of a soul is that it persists between lifetimes as an intermediate structure between the human self and the Godhead. If soul is just ego, the notion of soul isn't needed at all. The point is in its being prior to ego.

It is no different than it not existing. It has nowhere to go, so to speak, and nothing else to be. Anywhere it goes, it is nowhere and nothing. From the highest POV, there is no difference between the universe existing and it not.

Like I said, these are nuanced distinctions. Of course from the ultimate absolute level nothing can be distinct at all, at which point soul merges into the godhead.

No, soul is not the same as ego. These are naunced distinctions which require much spiritual experience to make. I wouldn't make too big of a deal about it. Just shoot for transcending all dualities.

Of course you cannot ever be totally independent of your sources and influences, but that is not really a problem. All that's important is that you don't follow others too closely and diversify your sources. Keep a healthy distance from your teachers/gurus. Learn from them but follow your own path. Don't go crawling up your teacher's butthole. Don't go live with them. Don't go work for them. Don't go sleep with them. This is just such obvious stuff. Yet people blindly do it and then act shocked when they get hurt. Yeah, if you let your guru stick his dick inside you, you will regret it. That was your fault really for letting things get that far. Learn to maintain healthy boundaries.

Depends on how you look at it. At the highest level of consciousness a soul is none other than God. So in this sense there is no soul. All souls are just partitions in the mind of God and made of nothing. The answer to this set of questions must of course be riddled with paradox since we are now talking about the Absolute using dualiatic language. If God is unlimited, it must be unlimited in its ability to limit itself, otherwise it would not be unlimited. If God could not constrain itself inside an illusion if its own making, that would be a limit, which contradicts its unlimitedness. This God is so all-powerful it can fool itself. Illusion is not superior to God because God wills the illusion into existence, and also because there is no difference between illusion and reality, superior and inferior. All of these differences only exist in the mind of God and nowhere else. God IS the power of infinite illusion. Illuison IS creation! Illusion IS God's greatest power. If you just imagine an infinite mind, you can easily see that this mind can easily imagine being a finite thing, like a table or a kangaroo or a human. Just as you as a human adult can imagine yourself to be a child. It's easy to imagine something less than you, hard to imagine something greater than you. It's hard for a donkey to imagine God, but easy for God to imagine a donkey.

My point is precisely: No! Blindly following even the best human being of all time will result in evil. Goodness is not a function of content, but structure. Conformity is the structure of evil. Blind following is what created mankind's greatest evils. The core problem is blindness. If you are blind, you will commit evil. Nothing can compensate for being blind. And no one can make you see but yourself.

Seems like fair criticism. What must be remembered is that self-bias, survival, self-deception, partialness, and incompleteness are unescapable aspects of the mind. The desire to follow Ken Wilber blindly rather than thinking independently for yourself is the crucial mistake. Trying to join and follow groups too closely is the key mistake. Why on Earth would anyone want to join some "integral institute" and follow the work of one man blindly? Everything must be thought through for yourself.

Certainly not the left.