Leo Gura

@ajasatya No, no, no. The movement of your hand is not at all the same as understanding Einstein's General Relativity and being able to predict the existence of a black hole 100 years before it is photographed. You are underappreciating the degree of intelligence and understanding that goes into science. It is not so mechanical, and you cannot seperate it from truth in the way that you are trying to do. You are creating a duality between science and truth. There is a profound connection between metaphysics and epistemology. This issue is far more nuanced and profound, and no bit of forum explanation is going to do it justice. You take understanding for granted. Genuine understanding is possible. This is a very amazing thing! How is it that a dumb simplification can predict a black hole? All of this must be deeply contemplated, not replied to with dismissive answers. Without properly understanding this issue science and spirituality will not be integrated but fragmented from each other. In the future, mankind will integrate the two.

@AlwaysBeNice God-realization and consciousness.

Transcends and includes. Yellow is not a lone wolf in the way you imagine. Yellow can have many relationships.

What is it that makes a model work at all? How is it possible to understand anything in life? How it possible to know how a car works, for example?

@Nahm Nah, there's much more to it than that. What is the connection between science, truth, and understanding? You cannot just dismiss all science as delusion, since there is no fundamental division between science and spiritual inquiry. Spirituality is the science of spirit, you might say.

There's a pretty massive difference between 10ug of LSD and 125ug of LSD. Or 0.5g of mushrooms and 4g of mushrooms. Or 15mg of 5-MeO and 30mg of 5-MeO. Doubling a psychedelic dose more than quadruples the effects.

@Peter124 A whole series of books could be written on such a broad topic. If you want quality advice keep your questions narrow and concrete. "Give me some advice for doing personal development successfully" is very broad.

I try to go wide and teach to ordinary people. I don't see myself as the deepest. I see myself as a bridge-builder, helping people to interconnect various parts of reality. At least that's my role for now. It might change in the future. For example, Sadhguru does not give a fuck about helping you understand how science and spirituality interconnect. I do. What is the connection between Western science & spirituality? << That's a really good question to contemplate.

Of course! What is science? is a very profound question. I highly recommend everyone spend a few years or decades contemplating it, as I have.

No, surely not. Duality is a tricky beast. In this case they are getting close to Truth but they still haven't realized that self/other is a duality which must collapse. Despite that, they can still glean some nugget of truth from that experience, like the sense of Divine Love. That sense of Divine Love might then inspire the person to be more selfless and to practice more yoga until finally they realize one day that self = other and that self = God. Then their realization will be complete. My point is, you should allow people a path towards the Absolute without cutting them down at intermediate stages. It's very demotivating and confusing for a spiritual seeker to realize something like Divine Love only to have a callous person tell them something like, "That's all ego delusion." Imagine if your child came home from 1st grade and showed you the A+ he got on his homework and you responded with, "So what? That's all horse shit. Where is your college diploma? Talk to me when you get your diploma." It's not realistic to expect everyone to become a Buddha without a lengthy spiritual path. We should allow people to walk their paths, being patient with them and helping them out without cutting them down.

@Druid420 You said that you think those mystical experiences are purely confusion, emotions, and ego. What I'm telling you is that the situation is more nuanced than that. Mystical experiences -- even if they are not full-blown enlightenment -- are not pure ego or delusion. They can be valuable, truthful, and healing. So don't be so quick to dismiss them. Just because something is not 100% Absolute Truth does not mean it should be dismissed. Much of what we deal with in this work is various degrees of half-truths. That is okay. We shouldn't expect perfection from humans.

No, that would be me coming from the Absolute Truth, which is not a paradigm at all. Discover for yourself whether you are God.

I would say you're not deeply enlightened because if you were deeply enlightened you'd realize that you are God. But your experience of that old man, if it really occurred, really occurred, and it may contain some deep truth, such as that you are loved or that God is real. It's just a partial truth. Most truths are partial truths. Partial truths are still valuable. You can't always expect 100% unadulterated truth. Most people need to do a lot of work before they are ready for that.

It's not so simple. Mystical experiences are common and genuine. Of course delusion can surround them too. And they are ALWAYS interpreted through one's stage of Spiral development (which is often as low as Purple or Blue). The reason you're struggling to understand this is because you're coming at it from a narrow materialist paradigm. Where you are expecting there to be one external physical-like reality which all people see. That's not how reality works. Stuff is more fluid and relative than that. Different people experience different realities. Some people might see an angel while you do not. This does not make the angel any less "real" any more so than you never seeing a kangaroo makes it any less real.

If all is ONENESS where else could things come from but you? You are just not fully conscious yet of how everything circles back to you. Your will creates the universe. But this is only true if you are in a totally nondual state of consciousness. Don't expect it to be true in a conventional human state. Trip deeper and you'll realize you are creating the whole thing. Sure you can. You can be more or less aligned with the Truth. Someone like Donald Trump is God, but he is not aligned with it so his power, love, and goodness is very limited. There are many degrees of alignment and embodiment. For example, an awake racist is not fully aligned with the Truth. And yes, there are awake racists, sexists, and so forth. Many people have awoken but stayed at stage Blue ethnocentric. That's very common in the East. Some folks act more God-like than others, even though of course all folks are God. Hitler did not act very God-like. He was more of a devil. But of course the devil is none other than God. But it's a God which lacks self-awareness that it is God. So what we're talking about is degree of awareness of oneself as God. For example, I know that I am God. But I could be more aware of it than I presently am.

@ivankiss Sounds good. Great job! You seem to have struck the mother-lode.

The problem with that is that Ramana Maharshi was clearly extremely spiritually gifted. Whether it was genetics or good karma doesn't really matter. He had unique capacities which ordinary people do not have. So comparing yourself to him can be problematic. It's like Arnold saying that benching 500 lbs is a piece of cake. Yeah, for him it is. If your brain is already in a spiritual configuration, then obviously you don't need yogic techniques which are designed to rewire your brain into a spiritual configuration. If you are 7 feet tall you don't need high heels. Some folks are born 7 ft tall. Some are born spiritual midgets.

My path is unique and it does not neatly fall into the 10 Ox pictures. Those pictures do not account for stuff like psychedelics. I am definitely nowhere near the end so I continue my work. This question is too broad. I cannot tell you how to live your life. You are God, so figure yourself out. No one can do it but you.

Yoga has more of a physiological and bodily component to it than meditation or self-inquiry. This is not to say that self-inquiry or meditation are bad, but there is good reason why yogis do all those bodily practices. It really helps with embodying one's enlightenment. There is an energetic component to enlightenment which could easily be missed if all you do is self-inquire. Emotional blockages can reside in the body. After the drug wears off you are not totally back to normal. Permanent shifts are made. You have to stop thinking of this process of awakening in a binary way of "awake/not awake". There's much more nuance to it. Personally I think yoga is more powerful than meditation or self-inquiry. But that's my guess and it could vary for person to person. If meditation was as powerful as yoga, yogic techniques would be obsolete and they would not have been invented. That's my guess. It's hard to fairly compare all the techniques because they each require so much training that no one person has mastered them all. Also, no two people have identical capacities. The point is: keep an open mind and experiment to see what works best for you. I am not trying to convince anyone that yoga is best. It's hard to argue that yoga is not powerful. So it's worth exploring.

@LifeLife If you are short on money then I would advise you not take too many supplements as the cost adds up pretty quick. Maybe only take the top-tier ones like modafinil. The ones that give you the most bang for your buck. Once you have more money you can experiment more.

@Gadasaa That's not unusual. 1) Keep in mind that most people look happy from the outside when in fact they suffer deeply inside and their lives are going down hill. Many celebrities fit this description. 2) It takes time to build up a great thing. Investment is required. For example, starting a business might put you into debt more so than someone working at Starbucks. But in the long-run you will be much wealthier as a business owner. 3) Learning theory takes time and energy away from practice. Some guy totally focused on practice will achieve more results in the short term but less in the long term. 4) You cannot compare yourself to anyone else. Other people are not in your shoes. They have different abilities, strengths, and weaknesses. Some people are "naturals" in certain areas of life which you will have to work your ass off to attain. 5) Progress is highly non-linear. It has ups and downs. Sometimes you must take 1 step back to go 2 steps forward. You need to have a vision and long time horizon and be patient. See my video: Be Fucking Patient!

@Druid420 Yes, waking up only increases your ability to distinguish things.

The key word there is CAN. Besides which, how would you know? Have you tried all the techniques? Have you gone all the way? How would you even know what "all the way" is? All you have are stories from gurus. And how do you know which guru is right and which is wrong? Because they certainly don't all say the same thing. See how tricky this is? You don't know what you don't know. There are many valid techniques. But to reach the highest levels will require that you use these techniques with such focus and intensity that it will physiologically change how your brain fires. You have to consider: your brain physiology puts some hard limits on your degree of consciousness. Which is why psychedelics are so great. They change your brain physiology in such a way that you are able to access states of consciousness which most ordinary brains cannot access without incredible periods of practice, or even at all. Consider the possibility that if your brain was twice bigger your awakening would be deeper in ways that a normal human brain cannot even fathom. Yoga is specifically designed to change the physiology of your brain. Think of it like doubling the size of your brain. Of course you are not physically doubling its size, you're just changing how it's wired. Which is just as significant. And not just the brain but also the bodily nervous system. Do not assume that all people or spiritual practitioners have access to the same brain hardware. Not at all. Every brain is unique, with unique pros and cons. Some people's brain hardware is so inadequate they cannot add two numbers together or recognize their mother or father. People take all this for granted. The reality of how spirituality works is much more complex than most people are willing to admit. And the paradox is, brains still don't exist Tricky, tricky stuff.

self/ego vs God/Self is a duality. YOU ARE GOD! Wake up!

The mind can get "downloads" from God/Universal Intelligence. These downloads can be verbal or non-verbal. It doesn't really matter what symbols are used. God can "speak" to you through math equations, English, Japanese, ancient Egyptian, colors, an angel, an image of Christ, Ganesha, tea leaves, or a million other things. Of course it's also possible for the ego-mind to be deluded and mistake it's own devilry for communication from God. Alex Jones is a great example of this. So you always have to be careful to distinguish your personal egoic agenda from downloads from Universal Intelligence. It can be tricky to sort this out if one's mind is no sufficiently pure. The devil loves to pretend his own agenda is God's agenda. As you become more conscious and spiritually attuned, it will feel like you're in communion with God all the time. Hell, you ARE God, so eventually you realize that every thought arising in your mind is how God gets shit done through your body. Really what's going on is that a field infinitely intelligent consciousness is creating reality. This is happening at all times. Every thought you have is part of this field. As the ego-mind dissolves, God takes over your entire mind and body. Your mind and body become indistinguishable from God. Eventually, if you purify yourself enough, every action you take becomes a movement of the entire universe. Every time your finger moves, the intelligence of the whole universe conspires to move it towards Absolute Goodness and Perfection. The movement of your finger creates Heaven on Earth. Your entire experience of life glows with God's consciousness. You are illuminated. Your will becomes God's Will. You are totally at ONE with God, with zero distance between the two. All duality collapses into Absolute Oneness which knows no opposite. Total self-realization has occurred. Now you finally understand the magnitude what you are. You are Infinity. Your Will is creating the entire universe. Ta-da!