Leo Gura

There is no egoic free will, but there is God's infinite Will, and you are God. So it goes full-circle. Free will vs no-free-will is a duality. In practice your will is a sliver of God's infinite Will, just like your intelligence is a sliver of God's infinite Intellignece. By becoming more God-like you get more will and more intelligence.

@Freyah I use those shallow examples basically to mock many stage Orange relationships/marriages. It's said tongue-in-cheek. I like to amuse myself with silly examples. Silly, but still true. It shows the absurdity of the typical human life. Of course it does not have to be that way. Relationships are great and I'm all for deep intimate spiritual relationships. If you manage to actually pull that off, you'll be a hero in my eyes. That's challenging stuff.

Last year a city in Texas passed a law to ban robot brothels. So the robo-racism is already in full gear Bigots are surprisingly proactive with their bigotry. BTW, you should see the last Star Wars movie. It had robo-love and robo-SJWs.

The rabbit hole goes very deep. There are facets of the Absolute that even most enlightened people have not realized. This is not just a verbal or stylistic difference. You can realize Nothing but miss Everything. You can realize Everything but miss Nothing. Or you can realize them both at once to see they are identical. And it does not end there. There's more! There's God, there's Infinity, there's Intelligence, there's Love, there's Eternity, there's Goodness, there's Will, there's Truth, there's Consciousness, there's Paradise, and it still does not end there. You can spend a lot of time understanding all the above at deeper and deeper degrees of wholeness and interconnection. Do not expect a typical enlightened YouTuber to have that level of total understanding. This is rare, rare stuff. It requires extreme levels of seeking and openmindedness which almost no one has. Neo-advaita is not gonna cut it. BTW, I don't claim to be awake. But I know how deep the rabbit hole goes. It's ironic how many awake people do not. See, this shit is very, very tricky. When you try to boil this work down to a binary categorization like awake/not-awake you over-simplify and distort it. If only it were so simple.

Of course it could work that way in the most ideal circumstance. But so what? In real life that is not how 99.9999% of beings behave. I was more interested in showing you how life works. In practice even the most enlightened people are still forced to navigate life. Even if they don't eat people, they behave selfishly in other less dramatic ways. The point is, don't over-idealize enlightened people. You will be disappointed when they fail to live up to your utopian fantasies. You must explain why so many enlightened people act so selfishly, and your answer cannot be: because they aren't really enlightened.

Obviously not. My point is that the arguments humans have are not always small-minded. Who should control the Middle East? Iranians? Jews? Arabs? The US? That's not a small-minded argument. That's a serious survival issue affecting hundreds of millions of people. How is it going to get resolved? How many people are you willing to sacrifice in order to resolve that situation well? 10 thousand? 100 thousand? 1 million? 10 million? See, it's not so easy. Life is extremely complex and counter-intuitive. By trying to compromise you might end up getting 10 million people killed. Are you going to compromise or fight with the big oil companies on global warming? If global warming gets out of hand, millions of people are going to die from starvation, disease, displacement, violence, and civil war. Don't forget that small vs big is a duality. Small things lead to big things which lead to giant things. So the small details matter.

Hahaha... this kind of naivete is exactly why I said what I said. This is not how life works. Life ALWAYS works at the expense of other life. You can minimize that to some degree, but you cannot eliminate that totally. Just the fact that you are alive means some other organism cannot be alive. For example, the fact that you were the winning sperm means that millions of other sperm had to die. The problem is that you're not yet conscious of the trade-offs and costs of life. Study more closely how life works. Life and death are a duality which necessarily must feed off itself. It's not just an accident that wolves must hunt rabbits to survive and squirrels must hunt acorns. For every acorn that a squirrel eats, that's one potential oak tree that dies. So don't think that squirrels are innocent little creatures. Squirrels are acorn murdering machines. This needs to be accepted and understood, not avoided or worked around. You must profoundly realize how life and death are intertwined. Otherwise you will be under the illusion that if we could just get rid of death, everything will be peachy. No! The point is to realize that death itself is inevitable. You cannot be alive without dying. Cooperation and competition are a duality. You cannot have a life of 100% cooperation and zero competition. You must realize how the two co-arise. You have a self/ego for a very good reason: because you need it to survive. Selfishness plays an important role in life. You cannot just be 100% selfless and stay alive. If that were possible, ego would not be needed and it would not exist. You must realize that selfishness and selflessness are a duality too. You cannot have one without the other. With all that said, we can still work towards a more selfless society. But don't get overly utopian about it. People still gotta shit, eat, make money, fuck, and kill. Be clear-eyed about such realities. Life has hard stakes. Don't take survival for granted. It's very easy to create a sceneario where you will have to kill to survive, and you will. You do it every day. You just conveniently ignore it, because it's not useful to your survival. You are a survival machine first and foremost. When a Native American hunter killed his prey, he would say a little prayer for taking the animals life. He realized that he had to take the animal's life to sustain his own. That is what it means to be aware of your selfishness. This is not something to feel guilty about. This is something you can turn into a spiritual experience. Survival is a spiritual experience (if you look at it the right way, without taking it for granted). It's very important to face the brutality of life, rather than trying to avoid it, pretending like it's not there. Life is fucking brutal. Business is brutal. Relationships are brutal. Etc. This brutality is a real test of your capacity to love. Your love can become so strong precisely because life is so brutal. You can cry for every carrot you eat. "Thank you carrot, for giving me your life. I promise to use your energy towards the highest good."

@Peter124 Even enlightened beings need to look out for their survival, so there will always be conflict, disagreement, and violence. If two enlightened people are locked in a cage with no food, one of them will likely eat the other one. This is the nature of survival and it is not wrong. It must be accepted and embraced. Be careful not to over-idealize or over-romanticize life. People still got to eat, shit, make money, and fuck if society is to exist. Life is Love, but life is also brutal.

The key thing to understand about good manners and etiquette is that they are all a social construction and a survival function. They are not absolute. The mistake that many stage Blue people make is they take manners, social norms, cultural customs, paying respect, tradition, etc as absolutes, and therefore normative. In other words, you SHOULD and MUST adhere to social norms. This is delusional. As you become conscious and developed you will naturally respect people without making it a dogma or a should. Manners, social norms, cultural customs, paying respect, tradition, etc become problematic when they are done mechanically in lieu of consciousness.

Just understand that whatever your role-models hate or judge, you will probably start to hate or judge too. If your role-model has a shadow, you will tend to absorb their shadow and make it your own. Make sure you're aware of what the speaker's shadow is. His shadow is the place he's reacting from, which lessens his alignment with Truth and Goodness. Remember that all judgment is delusion. No exceptions.

There is no such thing as bad, AT ALL! Bad is an egoic delusion. Anything which exists is Absolutely Good. Murder included and anything else you can conjure up. Without an ego you would not be bothered by murder. Think of it this way: from the perspective of the universe as a whole, nothing can be bad because there is nothing outside the universe to contrast it with. This is one of the radical consequences of ONENESS. No, it makes you understand that all such things are necessary aspects of Absolute Good. You do not become apathetic. You are filled with unconditional love. The love is so deep it may seem like apathy from an egoic perspective because the ego confuses selfishness with love. It's easy for the ego-mind to see Absolute Love and spiritual detachment as apathy. It only appears that way because the ego-mind is so attached. Absolute Love requires detachment because so long as you are attached to anything, your love is highly partial. You cannot love the whole world from a position of attachment. Anything you are attached to means you can't love its opposite. If you are attached to peace, you cannot love war. If you are attached to love, you cannot love hate. If you are attached to justice, you cannot love injustice. If you attached to beauty you cannot love the ugly. Etc. Absolute Love loves EVERYTHING! No exceptions. Anything you don't or can't love, that's ego being scared and selfish. So you should distinguish between dualistic love (what most people call love) and nondual Love, which knows no opposite and has no boundary.

Like I explained in the Understanding Duality episode, good and bad are relative whereas Good is the transcendent absolute. The transcendence of good/bad does not leave you in a neutral place the way most people would imagine. It puts you in Heaven. Similar to how the trascendence of science and religion does not leave you with agnosticism, it makes you God!

I don't know who trungpa is. If a teacher is an asshole, then yeah, I'd say he's got some devil in him. He has more work to do. He can be awake but he has a repressed shadow which needs work. There are also degrees of awakening. Such a perosn may not have awoken to absolute Love for example, which is why he's still an asshole. It's pretty easy to realize no-self without realizing God or Love or Goodness and be an asshole. Which is why a good Zen master will drive his students to go deeper after their first kensho. The first kensho is just the beginning. A good master will not let a student stop at the first kensho. There is what's called post-satori practice. "If you cannot weep for a person who is crying, there is no kensho." -- Yamada Koun

The key issue with nations is the stage of development of their infrastructure. It does not matter what the ideology is so much as what values the infrastructure is embodying. If the courts, police, and politicians are corrupt, and the economy is pre-industrial or only based on one resource like crude oil, and there is no seperation of chruch and state, then no Green government is possible even if a Green ideology is spread to everyone. It works just like with individual development. Just because you read a lot of books or watch a lot of videos about personal development does not mean you will be highly developed. It's very easy to create a lofty image in your mind of how developed you are when in reality your diet is terrible, your emotions are all over the place, you have a crazy monkey mind, your finacial situation is a disaster, you live in a bad environment, your friends are criminals, etc. Such a person will not be able to function at a high level because the infrastructure is so poor.

Yes, the underlying motivation is the key moreso than any particular behavior. You can respectful at any stage of the Spiral. It's just that stage Blue values respect for tradition for its own sake and becomes rigid about it. For example, you must respect the Pope because he is a spokeman for the one true God, Lord Jesus Christ, and he is infallible. By not respecting him you will go to hell. Bow your head before the Pope or we may torture you for being a devil worshipper.

No, that concept is straight from Zen itself. Zen masters teach about Zen devils and Yako Zen, aka "wild fox Zen". Technically, a Zen devil is one who practices Zen without ever reading scriptures. And a wild fox is one who only reads about Zen without practicing. A Zen devil will say things like, "Who cares about the suffering of others? I am liberated and suffering is an illusion so nothing matters." Or stuff like, "Who cares about global warming? The world is an illusion anyways."

Ken has a very robust grasp of awakening and nonduality, and much more. His work is not just about awakening, it is about stages of development and various kinds of pathologies in this work. Awakening is independent of one's stage of development. Both are important. To awaken but still be stuck at a low level of development is very common and dangerous. If your teaching only emphasizes awakening and nothing else, it is a narrow and incomplete teaching which will produce a lot of problems if it's taught to lots of people. Stages of development are extremely important and yet they are virtually unknown to most teachers and traditional teachings. Which is why so many spiritual practioners come out half-baked. You cannot understand stages of development by sitting on a meditation cushion, even if you are the best meditator in the world. Introspection is not enough.

Because without a self, nothing is bad. When you realize you are immortal and infinite (the Absolute), you will be in literal heaven, where nothing bad exists. Heaven is an Absolute! Once your perspective of life becomes absolutely holistic, you will literally not be able to see bad any more. You will realize that "bad" is a fictitious concept. You will realize there was only absolute Good. It's a life-transforming realization. This is how you transcend suffering.

It's understandable that an ex-Soviet would have an allergy to Green and leftists because of his personal experiences with Soviet communism. The mistake though is to confuse stage Blue and even Red communism with stage Green American liberalism or democratic socialism. They are very different things and this is hard to distinguish unless you've studied Spiral Dynamics (which almost no one has). This is a common mistake conservatives make. They equate Bernie Sanders with Venezuela, which is absurdly bad analysis. Venezuela is closer to Republicans than to stage Green.

That's a big part of Blue actually. Respect and believe your elders because they have absolute truth.

Try to communicate to a mule what it feels like to go on a rollercoaster.

@FunBun Emotions are very tricky. What's required is mindfulness practice over them, and also getting to the bottom of why you feel the need to emote in those ways. See, those emotions are how the ego-self survives. So who you are results in those emotions getting acted out. Changing who you are will change those emotions and vice versa. Psychedelics are one of the most powerful tools for showing you a way past all that egotistical acting out. See, right now you don't even know what it means to be free of it. So it will be very tricky to stop acting out. You need to become deeply conscious that you are "doing" emotions as a means of ego survival. The emotions are there to keep the ego intact. The whole process is ruthlessly efficient and very tricky to stop because it is a matter of life and death from your POV. To change those emotions you will have to REALLY change. To become like a whole new person. How you define yourself is what then gets emoted. Take a look at how anger, fear, judgment, guilt, jealousy, etc. are serving to maintain your self-definition, your self-image, your persona. How would you have to change your self-image such that your habitual angers, fears, judgments, and guilt no longer needed to arise? What are all those emotions defending? This is a big can of worms which will take some serious work to sort out. But it's worth it.

SWOOSH! The sound of Ralston going over your head. Empty your cup first if you really want to learn.

Yes. When the nonduality and consciousness of God gets really intense it will literally make you feel sick to your stomach. Although I've never actually had to follow through with it. But if there was food in my stomach I would have probably vomited. Sometimes you feel like vomitting simply by realizing how full of bullshit your entire understanding of reality is. I have never run into problems tripping solo. That's with around 30-40 trips. But I am very careful when I trip. Solo tripping is ideal if you are responsible and careful. Bad trips will happen, but you just tough them out, letting them beat you up a bit, reminding yourself that this is how growing is done. Ideally you become your own shaman/guru without needing a Mommy.