Leo Gura

I explain some of that in my video: The Dark Side Of Meditation.

Psychedelics do not cause mental illness. This is mostly fearmongering. If you have an existing mental illness perhaps psychedics can make it worse. Perhaps. But they could also cure it.

In my experience the symmetry is not relevant much. Sure, you don't want to be all twisted up, but requiring some symmetry to realize God is ego itself.

I don't.

Why? You have to consider than even with your difficulties you might still be way ahead of most people on the planet. Just because you struggle with learning calculus doesn't mean you don't have a massive leg up on a donkey trying to learn calculus. Being talented or gifted doesn't mean life is easy. Probelms and challenges are always relative, so no matter how capable you are you will face challenges which will bend you to your limit. A donkey can carry 1000 lbs on his back before it breaks, you cannot. The donkey has you beat there. The donkey might look at you struggling to carry 200 lbs and laugh to himself, "What a whim!" But if you put 2000 lbs on the donkey his back will break. So the donkey is not free of struggle. Donkeys get more loaded up because they are expected to carry more than humans. If you observe nature carefully you will see that every physiological structure has its strengths, weaknessess, and breaking points. That is the nature of form. Every form has its limits. Form also always comes at the cost of flexibility. The more formed you are, the less flexible you are. Only God itself has infinite flexibility. Think of an object which is infinitely flexible. That's God! Ta-da! Notice, it must have no form.

Yes, but it explains things better because over 50 lives a lot of difference between people can accumulate. It shows you that there may be levels of development or consciousness that you simply won't realistically be able to reach in one life. For example, wouldn't it be valuable to know that it took the Buddha 50 lives to reach his level whereas you're on life #3 right now? So, like, don't beat yourself up if you can't actualize his results. And even so genetics and physiology are still a factor. You have to account for why humans are more conscious than kangaroos and worms. There must be a spectrum of spiritual ability which goes from worms to lizards to kangaroos to chimps to humans and far beyond. Humans cannot be at the top. Not even close! There must exist much more conscious beings than humans.

No, it can't. Siblings are often raised in similar environments by similar parents and teachers yet they can come out very differently. One of the greatest unsolved mysteries of developmental psychology and spirituality is why some children and young adults advance through the stages so much faster than others. Practice and environment are certainly factors, but not the most important factor. Past lives are a good explanation here. Most people do not even care about metaphysics. Just to care about metaphysics already requires a certain type of mind/personality. I have cared about metaphysics from the very beginning. Without that, I would be just some regular dude flipping burgers at McDonalds. I'm not a gifted meditator but my metaphysical curiosity is through the roof and came built into my brain from birth. I did nothing to deserve it. At least in this life. Maybe I did something in a past life to earn it. I dunno. Or maybe I just won the genetic lottery. Out of 7 billion humans, surely some will be born will exceptional metaphysical curiosity. Humans are not minted in a factory like widgets. We have unique gifts. It's important that we be honest and acknowledge any gifts we may have. We also have unique weaknesses.

If you think the Buddha was a just your average guy off the street, you're really misdiagnosing how spirituality works. It takes an exceptional person to do what the Buddha did. What that means exactly is a mystery, but something special and extraordinary is happening on the inside. Past lives might be a better explanation. Whatever the explanation, it's not merely lack of effort or training. I want you to start noticing that people's brains and minds work is very different ways. We are not all the same. Some people think very differently by their natural constitution. Some constitutions are more suitable to spiritual work than others. Just observe people carefully and you'll notice the differences in how they think and see the world. It's quite stark and obvious. People do not see the world in the same way. It would be better to say: people live in different realities with some overlap.

Spiritually gifted folk. You can meet them in various spiritual circles. Healers, psychics, masters, yogis, sages, prodigies, shamans, witches, channelers, saints, etc. It's a combination of factors: diligence, discipline, willpower, passion, focus ability, existential curiosity, openmindedness, baseline level of consciousness, appropriate personality type, and more. Notice, it's much easier to stick with a technique when is produces immediate significant results. Some people sit down to meditate and start having mystical experiences within days or weeks. This of course makes it much easier to stick with the habit compared to a person who meditates for 3 years and doesn't have a single mystical experience. I've met people who've sat down for one weekend, did 2 days of self-inquiry and awakened. That's totally unusual results. The average person can self-inquiry for 5 years and still not awaken. And it has to be this way. Otherwise half the people on the planet would be awake, but less than 0.0001% are. So you need some explanation for why that is. The explanation cannot just be that they're lazy or uninformed.

@electroBeam Of course environment is very important. Genetics/physiology + environment + training/effort = all important The most successful people do well in all 3 categories.

That's very humbling to realize. Yes, consciousness is capable of experiencing intense suffering. By experiencing some of that yourself you become more compassionate, loving, tolerant, and understanding. Try to imagine what it's like to live as a little child in Syria whose entire family was killed in a bombing. Yeah... that's some hardcore suffering and it goes on around the world by the millions every day. Makes you appreciate how good you have it in this life. Most people are totally ignorant of who deeply humans can suffer. Which makes those people arrogant and callous. Only through deeply suffering themselves will they come to realize their callousness and arrogance. 4-AcO-DMT is a very powerful substance. Be careful with it.

He would likely discover new realms, depths, and aspects of consciousness. They certainly take you beyond what would be natural for most humans. Of course even then there are still limits to what the body/mind can handle. Even the strongest psychedelic does not totally free you of human form. Some humans are like naturally high all the time because their brain chemistry is that way. This is quite rare, but still, not that rare. You can find such people. They probably are somewhat gifted. But also, the psychedelic catalyses that by 100x-1000x. Which would be hard to do any other way. A psychedelic is similar to Jesus spending 40 days in the desert with no food or the Buddha sitting under the tree for 2 weeks straight without moving. Only it happens much faster and easier, not requiring so much suffering.

@AlwaysBeNice I feel pretty confident that a kangaroo is ignorant of metaphysics. If you have evidence to the contrary, please share.

@Schahin Practically speaking you can make choices and steer your life. Using your intention properly is critical to personal and spiritual development. You are the CEO of your life. God has delegated this power to you, so use it well.

Ha! If only life worked so easy. This is one of the best forum softwares available. Months of work went into setting it up and getting to function well. Lots of money was paid to customize it for our needs.

Sidhhis do not remove all limits. Many limits still exist even if you are Jesus. It's very much like Neo in The Matrix. He learns to bend some of the rules but he is still constrained inside The Matrix. There are still many things he cannot do.

The key is how you understand the word "self". That's an extremely loaded word. If Self is understood in the widest possible sense as God, then all of life is self-imposed and self-created. But that does not mean you as a human body are not bound by constraints. You as God have imposed constraints on yourself which you do not know how to undo without physical death. For example, God constrained itself to be that bird, but that bird has no idea how to break the constraints of bird-ness. That is the whole point of death, to escape one's self-imposed constraints. But you can't have it both ways. You can't be alive in a body yet totally unconstrained. The body is a serious constraint. Life itself is a constraint. All form is limited, whether you're a rock, a tree, a bird, a kangaroo, Albert Einstein, Jesus, a DMT machine elf, or whatever. Whatever you are is what constrains you to be less than infinite. You are lost in the labyrinth of your own consciousness and your only escape is death.

Try to hatch an egg. Post on YT when you succeed. Like I said: madness.

Is a bird outside in nature free or not? Seems free, but it is also extremely limited. It's important to understand the limits of a bird. It would be madness to try to ask the bird to solve calculus equations. Likewise it would be madness to try to ask a human to hatch an egg. An important part of growing up is learning your limits. Paradoxically acknowledging one's limits can be liberating, as one then surrenders to them and stops trying to act in some loftier, idealized way. Telling a child who's not suited for math to be good at math would traumatize the child and ruin his self-esteem because he will always feels inferior and not understand why. He will then blame himself for being defective or inadequate when in fact he's just suited to other things.

@Schahin No, I would not call anything destiny. Humans exercise a tiny portion of God's Free Will. God has infinite Free Will. But also all of that Will is fully put towards actualizing Love. So in a weird strange loopy sense, God has no choice but to actualized Infinite Love. Then again, God freely chooses Infinite Love. But then again that is because God is so Infinitely Intelligent that it would never choose anything less. Which means it cannot be anything but Love. And so it goes, round and round in a vicious circle. As it must, because free will vs destiny is another one of those pesky dualities which must eventually collapse. Contemplate this: what is the difference between free will and destiny? Eventually you'll see that the two poles must meet and become one. This issue is analogous to the wave/particle duality in quantum mechanics. The true nature of light is that it's not one or the other but has features of both. Likewise with free will and destiny.

This forum software is too tricky for even God to fix. The reason it, this is a 3rd party platform. Which means I can't just go in there and make changes to the code willy-nilly because the code needs to be upgradable, making changes very tricky as new upgrades override old changes. Basically we are stuck with the forum as-is with only minor cosmetic changes. And even those are problematic as they get overridden. And because the code is so complex, every new update introduces new bugs and problems even if it solves old ones. So there's no perfection in this game.

I've done over 70 psychedelic trips. Many very deep ones. Never once have I vomited. Totally unnecessary unless your body feels a need to do it. Healing happens regardless of vomiting. If you eat before the trip, you will almost certainly vomit on a heavy trip. Don't take Martin's method / attitude as the only one. It's one out of many. My trips tend to go differently than Martin's descriptions.

You have to be very careful about biased selection. People certainly do become enlightened using those methods, but less than 1%. How do you account for the other 99% for whom the methods do not work? Just saying they are lazy is not a good enough explanation. The people who get enlightened using those techniuques are the ones who are already highly predisposed to it. You must be highly predisposed already just to do the practices seriously. Don't discount that. Training is important, but also not sufficent. You can train a donkey all you want but it will never reach the deepest levels of consciousness because of its fundamentally limited physiology. Ditto for humans. Shinzen Young proves my point. I do not consider him to have reached the deepest levels of consciousness, and he's been at it for 40 years. Sure, he has gotten a lot better. But he does not understand the deepest mechanics of God. And he probably never will without better neurotransmitters. The Buddha very clearly also had supernatural talent. Those talents just lay dormant until he left to be a monk. Just the decision to give up his kingdom and become a full time monk was already an extraordinary act which could only have been made by a spiritually advanced person. Stories say that the Buddha tried various yogic methods and aced them all within a few years. Clearly a sign of supernatural talent. Be careful not to misunderstand my teachings. Life comes in a spectrum of spiritual abilities, from bacteria to kangroos to humans to aliens to God itself. Clearly a kangaroo is not going to fathom the depths of God no matter how much training. Why? Because of its physiological limits. It is too limited. Humans are better equipped. But still basically not good enough to fathom all of consciousness without augmentation. Humans lie all across the spectrum of consciousness. Some of us are totally retarded while others are Buddhas. This is certainly not explainable by lack of training, although training is often necessary to actualize our full potential. But what your full potential is, is highly constrained by physiology. Also, I am speaking about a lot more here than enlightenment. Consciousness is not merely about enlightenment. There is a width as well as a depth to it. Very few people explored the full width or depth alone, let alone both at once. So just saying, "But Leo, person X is enlightened" doesn't mean much. That is not a nuanced enough understanding of the spiritual terrain.

No, that's not enough to explain it. There are people who access realms of consciousness with zero training which other people cannot access with 40 years of professional training.

What I'm talking about goes way beyond beginners luck. I am talking about physiological brain differences and neurotransmitter differences which give people access to different realms of reality. Training is a thin vineer on top of this fundamental foundation.