Leo Gura

No. It's a loose hypothesis I have. I don't know for sure. There is no difference, but also there is. You are always in some state of consciousness. All states of consciousness are God, but you can only know that from certain states of consciousness. So your state of consciousness is absolutely important. You cannot be a donkey, for example. That is not an appropriate state of consciousness. If Daniel Ingram was a donkey, his enlightenment would disappear and no amount of Buddhism would help him.

@Aaron p Yes

LOL Way to keep an open mind, bro.

Hehe, if thought isn't now, when is it exactly? Thought is precisely now.

@Beginner Mind See my last vlog. The universe is structured in precisely such a way as to maximize Love. Every movement of every molecule and all the way up the chain of being is working towards this purpose. Including every pixel on this screen you're looking at and every character written on this forum. It's quite something to behold.

No! There is definitely a reason why reality is precisely how it is. To dismiss this as "mind" is to make one of the biggest mistakes possible: it is to never realize why you created reality. Rather a shame not to know that. You honestly believe reality is here without a why? All of this precise structure and complexity with no explanation?? Just randomness? Just experience? Ha! Don't be gullible.

@Anderz Yeah, but she's also quite naive and politically inexperienced.

Replace alcohol with psychdelics. The original cure for alcoholism via AA used LSD. Everyone forgot the LSD! Now it's all talk and no mysticism. The founder of AA used LSD to heal himself. P.S. Nothing wrong with AA. But understand that your problems go deeper than talk can fix.

In practice no. We usually use that word "enlightenment" quite sloppily to designate any degree of nondual realization. Often times the degree of it is minor and narrow. Many people who are conventionally called "enlightened" do not understand all of those 5 points I mentioned. And there are more points besides those 5. Binary designations are very misleading. You should always wonder: To what degree is this guy enlightened? What does he really understand? What specifically has he become conscious of? It's like if someone told you he's doctor. Okay, but that doesn't say much. What really matters is, How good of a doctor is he? Not all doctors are the same. You are the entire universe. What more do you want? Because there is nothing but Truth. Nothing else matters. How could God not care about itself when there is nothing but itself? They are not immersed in God-consciousness. They are immersed is mindless survival and selfishness, as are most humans. They are totally clueless about God even though of course they are God all along. But they don't know that, and that's what matters: knowing it.

The divine plan is Love. The trick is understanding what that means. You would require infinite intelligence and selflessness to understand the plan. The plan is so grand that the ego literally cannot understand it.

All why questions ultimately lead to the question of Why is reality precisely the way it is? And the answer to that is: Absolute Love. Feynman was going in the right direction, but he did not go far enough, deep enough, wide enough to understand the ultimate WHY.

Of course they are very present, because they got no higher mind. They are pre-ego. Enlightened humans are post-ego. It's not the same thing. Your cat may be very present and pure, but he is not conscious that he is God. Whereas as a human can be. It is not enough to just be present. One must realize that he is God. An imbecile can be very present. That doesn't equate to metaphysical insight. You can do a frontal lobotomy on a human and he will become very passive and mindless like a cow. But that isn't God-realization. The point of all this work is not be present, it's to understand what reality is. If you're not crystal clear about what reality is and why reality is, then you've got more work to do.

@Rodrigo SIlva Tolerance varies from person to person. Assuming normal tolerance, I would stay under 4g of mushrooms and under 300ug of LSD. Even those doses can be very intense and challenging on the psyche to integrate. If I do mushrooms or LSD, I keep it at 2g and 150ug. But I'm probably unusually sensitive. Many folks would probably need to double or triple that to experience what I experience.

Of course technically I don't. I can't crawl inside their heads. But one can still make educated deductions. When an enlightened person is not able to properly answer questions about the nature of Love or Truth, that's a red flag. If Love or Truth are denied, something in their understanding is missing. To me the highest teaching is very simple: You are God. Infinite Consciousness is the only thing that exists. Everything is imaginary. Everything is designed for the sake of Absolute Love. Truth & Love are totally identical. Any teaching which does not state the above in clear & explicit terms, I am suspicious of. There are further nuances, but that's the core of spirituality/awakening.

@Rodrigo SIlva You can do a lot of work with LSD and mushrooms even without 5-MeO. Don't underestimate them. When you want to transition to 5-MeO is all up to you. There is no rush. But be careful with high doses of LSD and mushrooms. They can get really hairy. I would stick to medium doses at most. It's very important that you don't spook yourself off with one bad trip. A lot of newbies get spooked off because their doses are too high and they are unable to deal with the truths which are shown them. So they end up sweeping the entire field of psychedelics away under the rug. It's a form of denial. The wisest course of action is to proceed slowly, moderately, carefully, patiently, yet persistently and methodicly. Tortoise wins the race in the end. Aim for 50 to 100 trips before you start to get the hang of psychedelics. Anything less than that is noob-land.

I agree.

I'm still telling you that brains are imaginary, as are neurotransmitters. The word "neurotransmitter" is being used here in a relative, imaginary sense. It's not the neurotransmitters I trust, but the Truth which they help to unveil. If you were stuck in jail cell inside a dream and I told you to use the key to unlock the door, the key is still imaginary. An imaginary door requires an imaginary key. It would be foolish to reply to me, "Haha, Leo! If this is all a dream like you said, why are you telling me to use this key? Why do you trust the key?" When inside The Matrix, we speak in the relative truths of The Matrix world. One of those relative truths is brains and neurotransmitters. Once you've taken the neurotransmitters you'll realize neurotransmitters and brains are imaginary. But only AFTER you take them!

No they can't. If they could the whole world would be enlightened by now. It's almost the opposite. No matter what a master does he will not enlighten you. That method of teaching is too indirect and crude. Once in a blue moon some student wakes up. The other 99% fail. The failures are just not publicized, for obvious reasons. I've met people who do vipassana for 15 years and still don't know what enlightenment is. So a donkey knows that he's God but 7 billion humans don't? Haha!

@mandyjw Something like that.

Reality is too massive to have it make sense all at once. You gotta eat the elephant one bit at a time until you realize, "Oh, that was leg, that was an ear, that was a tail." The perfect place to begin eating it is anywhere. Just trust that over the months and years you'll see patterns emerge. If Actualized.org is not comprehensive enough for ya, nothing will be. It's so comprehensive it will take you a decade to realize how comprehensive it is. That's not a mistake. One day you will realize: "Holy fuck this is HUGE! How is this even possible?"

LOL Yes! There is INSIGHT and UNDERSTANDING. You cannot reduce those two to anything more fundamental. You must have an insight into what insight is. You do not understand what understanding is. Just notice that. This requires serious contemplation. It will not be explained to you in words. With deep enough insight you will realize that perception isn't even a thing. Perception is actually Being/Truth. "Perception" is a dualiatic notion, so be careful with just throwing that word around. A good way to contemplate what insight is, is to bring to mind specific examples of insight. For example, an insight was necessary for you to realize that whole numbers go up to infinity. At some point when you were a child you started counting: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5... and then at some piont it hit you: This can go on forever!!! That was an insight. Insights are often quite ordinary. I remember vividly when I was a kid the moment when I realized why a penis gets hard. It was a massive epiphany: "Oh, it needs to be hard to fit inside a hole!!! Wow! Of course!" That was quite an insight! Nothing is obvious until you have an insight about it. Your birth was an insight. One day you had the insight: "Oh, I exist!" And on that day you came into being as a human. Insight is a mysterious thing. Which is why we call this mysticism.

Some people's reality and consciousness is so radically different they might as well be another species. You guys are underestimating just how radically different consciousness can be for humans. This is a common oversight because humans looks similar from outside appearances. But as you've been told, don't judge a book by its cover. This is what's happening with humans. Most humans simply assume that all humans are like them. This is a bad assumption unsupported by science, evolution, medicine, genetics, or other facts. It's as if you walk into a book store and treat all the books the same just because they are books. But there are huge differences between books even though they have a similar form. That similarity is superficial when you really dig into them. Some humans are like that donkey, they will never attain enlightenment. The reasons for this are nuanced and complex. Motivation is part of the equation. Most people do not have the motivation to do it. You cannot dismiss motivation as part of the "talent". Motivation is a huge factor. You cannot just train someone to be motivated about Truth. Yes, training helps, but there's much more to it than training. And who you can train also depends on who they are. Many people are untrainable. There is no reason whatsoever that all humans should be equally spiritually capable given how evolution works. The difference between a human and a donkey doesn't really exist. Brains evolve to become more and more capable of insight. There is no such thing as "a human brain" vs "a donkey brain". There is an infinite spectrum of brain structure -- from worms to aliens -- which allows for greater and greater insight capacity. I don't downplay any of that. That's all good and important. But my concern is not any of that. My concern is accessing the deepest level of consciousness and understanding. For that, training alone may not be enough for most people. That's all I'm saying. Not as similar as you imagine. Nowhere near 0.1% of the population is awake. It's way lower than that. And when it comes to truly understanding the deep structures of God, it's less than 0.0001%. I would estimate that less than 0.1% of awake people truly understand how deep awakening goes and all of its many facets. It's more important in spirituality than in getting women. Obviously if you look like Quasimodo that affects your chances attracting women. Although still not impossible. My biggest concern with the Red/Black Pill guys is that they use genetics as an excuse to not even try. They turn it into an egotistical ideology. Obviously I'm not saying that with spirituality. I'm not making some argument here about how you cannot realize God. I'm just saying your physiology plays an important role. So alter your physiology, alter your neurotransmitters! That is what spiritual technique is about. Yes, you ARE still limited as long as you have a human body. But, that doesn't mean you can't access the Absolute. You can. You can access it deeper and deeper levels and facets. Degrees of depth here do not contradict each other, rather they build on top of each other. It's like this: you can learn some math, it will be valid math, but that doesn't mean you've exhausted your understanding of math. Math goes very deep. As you go deeper into it, the old math is still valid. So in this way you are accessing Truth but you have not exhausted Truth, because Truth is infinite. Your understanding of math can deepen forever. It's hard to articulate that here for you. I have had extensive hour-long conversations with Shinzen, asking him all sorts of nuanced metaphysical questions and his replies did not fully satisfy me. I see him as having gaps in his understanding. For example, he does not hold that enlightenment is Absolute Truth. He still hangs on to aspects of materialism, holding enlightenment as a subjective thing. I do not think he understands what Truth or Consciousness really is. I also don't think he understandings what Love really is. Yes Yes If you think about it for a moment you should quickly realize that it must be possible to lose enlightenment because otherwise humans could not exist. To be human God MUST be able to lose awareness of itself as God. This is how you were born. And no matter how enlightened you get, you will eventually lose it in order to incarnate as a tree, worm, bird, human, alien, etc. You already have direct experience of being unawakened. How did you get there? Only one way: by losing your awakening. Everyone has lost their awakening, even the most enlightened people including Buddha and Jesus. Otherwise they could not awaken. Awakening is only possible because of unawakening. Nothing I said contradicts that. I never said he denies siddhis. I'm not just talking about siddhis in this thread. Trying some psychedelics doesn't mean much. It's a question of what one has become conscious of using them. Lots of people have tried psychedelics and have little understanding to show for it. My claim is not merely that Shinzen doesn't have all the possible siddihis. My claim is that his understanding of Truth itself is incomplete. He's not wrong, but it's not the deepest level. I'm not contradicting him, I'm just saying there's deeper understanding, deeper insight, deep consciousness. How it will help is a question of survival. That's not my interest. My interest is understanding reality for its own sake. Whether it helps or hurts is irrelevant to me. The Truth is whatever it is regardless of how it effects you. Any benefits that understanding of reality offers are secondary and beside the point (for me). The deeper one goes, the clearer it becomes who has and who hasn't gone that deep. The things I've realized cannot be put into words in any way whatsoever nor taught in any way whatsoever. And yet I can intuit that Shinzen Young and Ralston have not realized what I have realized. If that sounds arrogant to you, I understand. But it is what it is from my POV. Shinzen doesn't understand Truth. Ralston doesn't understand Love. To me, those are important oversights. I would not be satisfied missing either of those understandings. Obviously these are my understandings of their attainments. I could be wrong. I'm not saying you should believe me. I'm just stating my best understanding of the situation at this time. Certain things they have told me do not square up with my deepest realizations. And I will doubt all teachers before I doubt my own deepest realizations. If the choice comes down to trusting 5-MeO-DMT and DPT vs trusting Shinzen and Ralston, I will trust the neurotransmitters. And no, that is not materialism. Direct consciousness is king, and that's what the right neurotransmitters facilitate. No human teacher can take you that deep. All human teachers and teachings are to be questioned and doubted. Including of course myself. - - - - - - - - P.S. Nothing I said here should be used to entrench a victim mentality. Keep two things distinct in your mind: 1) the actual mechanics of how humans awaken, 2) any stories you come up with for why you cannot awaken and why should give up or not even try. I am talking about #1 in this thread. #2 is self-deception you gotta be very careful with. When it comes to genetics and physiology you gotta make the best of the hand you've been dealt. Playing a victim is not a smart move regardless of how bad your hand is.

If it helps you good. But it is not required for all people as Martin likes to declare. My point is that people have different requirements in their awakening process. It all depends on how your mind works. If something works for you, great. But be careful declaring that it will work for everyone or have importance for everyone or be necessary for everyone or is "the one and only true way."

Since the universe is consciousness, consciousness is capable of self-understanding and insight into the truth of things. God is able to recognize itself and this ability is present all throughout everyday life, science, and thought. Yes, thoughts can be tricky, but thoughts also can contain kernels of truth. How is that possible? Because the powr of insight is baked into language. Language is not just a bunch of scribbles on a page. Language is made sense of or understood by a much more profound quality of the universe. Perception is not the only game in town. The universe doesn't just perceive, is can also understand. Understanding is how you're able to make sense of the things I say and see the truth or falsehood in various sayings. But it goes deeper than language. You can understand how to turn on a faucet. What do you think that is? Don't take that for granted! You could not turn on a facucet without some level of true understanding. It means that once you become conscious of the Absolute, don't then fall back into doubting it. Like: "Well, was that really God? Maybe I'm not God after all? Maybe I was just hallucinating?" No! You are God! Stop doubting that. Don't make doubt your God. That would be putting the cart before the horse.

A fractal of consciousness expanding in infinite dimensions.