Leo Gura

@Mihael Keehl Sounds like you're on the right track. Keep doing that and soon you'll be ready for deep metaphysical epiphanies. The emotional work is all part of this same path. Be patient, pace yourself, this is a marathon not a sprint. It's all good.

That's not Fox Yoga. Real Fox Yoga is a yoga studio full of smokin hot girls

For you to realize you're a devil

Don't try to school me please. Focus on your own work and I will focus on mine.

You ain't realized shit yet. When true realization occurs, disidentification is not hard. It is automatic. It's not a matter of easy or hard. It's a matter of being conscious or not. Be careful about tricking yourself that you already understand enlightenment. Not even close. Your ideas of it are not it at all and hardly worth anything. The ego-mind is going to try to turn enlightenment into a conceptual thing in order to keep itself at a safe distance from actual enlightenment. It's extremely sneaky. Almost devilish you might say

@Ashlyn I see. Sounds like you're resisting something. Have you tried contemplating what the root issue is? As in: why do you feel the need to do that? Ultimately what you want to do here is to become conscious that all the above is something that YOU ARE DOING. Right now you're not conscious that you are doing it, in the sense that it feels like something that is happening to you. To change this, you must take ownership of it. So step 1 is: "Okay, I suspect I am doing this, but I'm not sure how or why", and step 2 is: "Okay, now let me get to the rock bottom of why I am doing this. What does it get me? How is it serving me? What is it protecting me from? What bad thing would happen if I stopped doing it?" Sit down with a journal, set aside a couple hours, and really bore into this. You want to get to the rock bottom of it so that you're clear and conscious of what it is and why it is. It's clearly serving your survival in some fashion. As you investigate this, the goal is not to go back into your past and find justifications or causes. It doesn't really matter what happened in the past. What matters is why you still feel the need to keep doing it today. If you are able to reach the rock bottom, you should feel some release. But you have to actually reach the true source of this, not just some ideas or opinions. You need the actual source. And the source may not be what you think it is. It is often something counter-intuitive like a belief such as: I am fundamentally unlovable, or, I am afraid I will die, or, I am worthless, or, I am afraid that if I give my love freely it will kill me, or, I need money to be happy, etc. If I were you I'd contemplate this deeply sober. Then I would take some mushrooms or LSD and contemplate it again during the trip until the issue because very clear. Psychedelics are perfect for this kind of self-reflective work. Fundamentally what's happening here is that the ego is sabotaging itself because it has a deeply flawed understanding of itself and life. The ego is stuck in some sort of unconscious survival pattern which it feels it needs. You could also try to address this issue from a somatic perspective. See my video: Shamanic Breathing and use that technique every day for a week and see what comes up. That should open up various blockages in your body. Practices like Hatha yoga might be helpful for you. Also see my video on Body Awareness. It sounds like you live too much in your head and are disconnected from your body. Body awareness practices can reconnect you with your body.

@aclokay You sneaky devil!

If 5-MeO went mainstream half of society would implode and there would be a massive backlash.

@Shin The stateless state.

@Enlightenment You are playing with fire and could kill yourself. 5-MeO is no joke. If you are on SSRI's you have no business taking 5-MeO back to back or even at all.

@Deadline Generally no. And people don't even confuse love with the Absolute. Just the opposite. People vehemently resist the notion that love could be an Absolute. People are just driven by emotions like robots because they never bother to contemplate or be mindful of their emotions.

@Truth Addict Yes, now you get it. It's sort of like trying grab one part of a blanketing using another part of the same blanket because all you have to grasp with is blanket itself. The blanket is oneness. Oneness is trying to grasp itself but can't ever succeed in total. How can a blanket grasp itself totally? It can only grasp itself partially. To grasp itself totally is must simply be itself (without any grasping). And that is enlightenment. The moment you realize that it's impossible to grasp yourself, you've grasped yourself The Nongrasping Grasp. The Gateless Gate. The Groundless Ground. The Selfless Self. The self-licking ice cream cone.

@Deadline Love is a very especial and unique thing. Don't confuse it with other emotions. Love as an Absolute is not really an emotion. If you want to understand emotions, just observe them in your life as they arise. You don't need any awakening to do it.

Actually, all symbols are just territory. There are maps proper. A map is what you get when you confuse part of the territory for another part of the territory. To make this real clear: if you draw a map of Florida in the sand on a beach in Florida, your map is literally Florida. There isn't a map + Florida. There is only Florida, which includes within it a smaller version of itself drawn in the sand. So what it means for Florida to be Florida is that is has drawings of itself within itself. Notice the fractal nature of how this works. Now expand this out to reality itself. A thought/image/symbol of reality is itself a part of reality. Such that all you have in the end is reality. All you have is the territory. So in fact: the map is the territory! Strange loops are not a bug here, they are a feature. They arise due to the self-reference problem: when you have only one thing in existence, how can it point to itself? There cannot be a duality between map/territory. Symbols cannot stand outside reality because they are within reality and because there is nothing outside reality. Inside and outside are of course one.

I think you underestimate its impact. Technology is always affecting culture, even in the rural South. Do they not have internet? Are they not affected by globalization? Are they not affected by Muslim migrants? Will they not be affected by driverless cars in 10 years? Are they not affected by closing factories and jobs moving to China? Are they not affected by Amazon 2-day shipping? Are they not affected by smart phones? Are they not affected by gay rights? Are they not affected by Youtube? You can't hide technology. Once it's mainstream it's everywhere around the world within a few years. To be clear, the effects of technology are not always positive. It's always a mixed bag. Stuff is changing very quickly now so there will be a lot of problems for people who are not quick adapters (which is most people). The faster one's environment changes the more mentally flexible and openminded one has to be to adapt to it. This is very big problem for stage Blue. All the political shifts we're seeing lately are directly connected to technological advancement. The 60's revolution itself was made possible by the technological developments of modern chemistry and psychedelics. Now try to imagine what might happen if 5-MeO-DMT went mainstream.

I know that state well. There are no misgivings about being in it. It's is a state of total God-realization. You cannot want anything more. Permanent dis-identification just equals permanent identification with God.

@kieranperez Technological innovation seems to be accelerating though.

Evolution seems to be accelerating. The whole universe is accelerating. New technology makes a big difference. But it's hard to say for sure. There are many factors. In the 60's the US was extremely Blue. Green was very radical in the 60's. There was a huge backlash to it. And it really only emerged in California and the most advanced cities. You have to understand that what shapes culture via the media is not representative of the average people. Many people in rural America are still very Blue. They are the Fox News audience. Probably 70%+ of the world is at stage Blue or below. Hollywood media is not representative of that, giving a skewed picture of progress. Most people in the world are still racist, homophobic, misogynistic, and nationalist. Basically 70% of the world population is at the level of development of Nazis. Think about that.

This is pure genius Come back and watch it after you awaken.

I exist.

@EternalForest It did. You just aren't appreciating how backwards it was before the 60's revolution. The entire self-help movement stems from there. But you can't go from Blue straight to Green. You must pass through Orange, and so here we are. It's not easy to shift 300 million people. We're getting there... slowly...

And a map is a territory within a territory

To me awakening means a permanent disidentification with form. An ever-present state of nondual awareness. That's not something I have yet.

@Immortal peace You're sort of conflating two issues there, existential issues with mundane survival issues. If you care about survival there's no escaping that you will have to handle those survival issues. For example if you're starving and you have no money or food, no amount of meditation will fix that issue. But what meditation can do is allow you to die in peace. How? Well, you'd need to become very good at meditation or you'd need to awaken to realize that death is an illusion. The body will die from lack of food, but you as God will not. If you want the body to be alive there's no escaping finding food. Which is why spirituality is not an escape from everyday obligations. That's a bad way to look at it. You want to get masterful at handling survival issues. Which in your case means: design a way to make a decent living. Don't try to offload this issue on meditation or enlightenment. Learning how to earn a decent living is a whole skillset. It's tempting to think that you can avoid developing such skillets through "finding peace" via spirituality. That's a bad approach. As your practice spirituality though, even though you'll still have tricky survival issues to deal with, you will deal with them more calmly and effectively. They won't stress you out as much as they would otherwise because in the end you know that whatever happens will be okay. And you will have more emotional self-control. A simple way to calm yourself is to breath slowly and deeply for a few minutes or hours. Sedona Method is also really good for clearing out emotions.

There cannot be emotional mastery without enlightenment. Emotional mastery is even harder than enlightenment. But if you just want to do some basic self-help stuff and work on emotional issues, yes, you can do that. You ain't gonna be anywhere near understanding the true nature of emotions. But it can be helpful.