Leo Gura

@daniel695 Becoming conscious of your emotions is the core of all development and awakening work because emotions run your entire life. It doesn't matter what medication you're on, you can still mindfully observe and inquire into emotions. Your entire life is run by emotions 24/7. The issue isn't that you have too few emotions, it's that you're totally overwhelmed by them to the point where you cannot even tell where an emotion ends and your life begins. Observing and deconstructing emotions is very challenging work, for anyone, regardless of medications or not. You could start by observing every day in which ways you suppress emotions.

@Ampresus That's nonduality. Now the trick is taming that Ox. Your body? What is a body? Does it really exist? Or is it a conceptual construction? Inquire deeper into what this "body" really is. There is no difference between "your body" and a coffee table.

@kieranperez Look, man, just start doing the practices. Start doing the exercises. Start building one habit at a time. You need to find ways to take the stuff I've talked about and exercise it every day. It's not rocket science. There are so many ways to exercise the theory.

Another way to say: "thought and emotions are so impaired that all contact is lost with external reality." As it turns out, external reality is a thought! To be lost in a fantasy, thought is not impaired, thought is hyper-active. The purpose of meditation/yoga is to impair thought.

@Identity Sounds like you're progressing nicely. Just make sure you keep yourself grounded in actuality. Be careful not to conflate direct glimpses with your feelings, thoughts, theories, and images of them. The deepest truths are not images. Distinguish between the creations of your mind (thoughts, stories, images, memories) vs actual BEING. This is paramount. Notice that nothing you think or imagine about the Truth is the Truth.

@Rilles That might as well be the definition of enlightenment. Lol External reality? What's that?!

Overall I would put him at Orange/Green. The part in him that I find Yellow is his openmindedness to diverse perspectives. I mostly used Joe as an example of the multi-perspective aspect of Yellow. But that's far from Yellow's only aspect. Joe still has a lot of Orange that he needs to transcend. The deeper I learn about Yellow, the more I see that extremely few people are solidly at Yellow. Yellow is very deep and sophisticated.

Not the deepest levels in my opinion.

@Mada_ When all of reality collapses, yes, it will feel like you're going insane because you are unable to distinguish between real and unreal any more. Most of what you used to think of as "reality" was just a thought-based fantasy. Including your own birth and the existence of other people. Hang in there. These kind of insights can be rough. Truth requires acclimation.

Lol, he HAS lost his mind. That's what enlightenment is. Mind is just an idea. Mind does not exist, neither does sanity, and neither do you. You don't yet realize the tree you're barking up. Spirituality is not going to go the way you think.

@smd I received various private messages from people who were hurt by Rali's cult. It's very easy for stuff like this to get out of hand, so don't take it for granted.

@kieranperez It sounds to me like you need to focus on handling some of your basic survival needs. Learn to survive in the world a bit more so that you develop a knack for success and getting stuff done. As you meet those lower level needs, you'll be ready to move up into higher needs. A skyscraper must be built on a solid foundation. Don't worry about spending a few years learning how to do business. Business is important to learn. Practical skills are important to learn. You want to handle all of your survival needs so that then you have lots of free time to delve into spirituality, art, etc. It's kinda hard to do art when you can't pay your bills. Learning to get practical stuff done is part of your developmental growth. I had to learn a lot of practical stuff before I could get Actualized.org off the ground. Actualized.org runs due to practical know-how, not airy-fairy spiritual ideas. Go learn to be a programmer or whatever you need to move you along towards your dreams. I learned lots of scripting and programming because it is so useful.

I get that. Then again, it's almost a lie then. Because in fact for you it is more than a belief. But maybe I'm just splitting hairs here. The trick when talking about God is that you're damned if you do and damned if you don't. If you say it's just your opinion or belief, that is untrue and gives the wrong impression. If you say that it is Absolute Truth, that makes you sounds like a fundamentalist nutcase, and also gives the wrong impression. It's like we are afraid to say the truth because we know no one would believe us. So we play coy. Just food for thought.

@Angelo John Gage A decent explanation of a very tricky topic. I noticed you saying several times that you "believe" this. What is your direct experience of God? If I was shooting a video like this (and I do have this topic planned for the future as a video), I would make sure to stress that God is not a belief, or a theory, or a speculation, but a direct experience which the viewer can have. This is what's most amazing about God: you can realize it for yourself! This is what most people misunderstand. A newbie watching your video would walk away with the idea that what you're talking about it is just a philosophical theory of God. The viewer would think, "Well, how does this guy know? He's just theorizing. This is just his opinion." It's absolutely critical to plant the seed in the viewer's mind that consciousness of God is a real thing and requires doing concrete practices. Otherwise God forever remains an idea. The whole point of such a video would be to get people to realize that they must start doing the necessary practices. Other distinctions which might have been useful are realism vs idealism, and esoteric vs exoteric versions of religion. Really what your video was debunking were the exoteric versions of God. All mainstream religions are exoteric. Most religious people don't even know that esoteric religion is possible. It's a very tricky topic, so you did a decent job. The tricky thing about God is, it's both deeply personal and impersonal, encompassing every set of attributes.

Indeed it is The holiest of holies.

@Aaron p The most important test is called Ehrlich. It mostly tests for psychedelic Indoles. Those other tests are be useful too for filtering out other harmful agents (you don't want to find meth in your psychedelic), but you need a positive test for Indoles. There is no test kit that's able to distinguish 5-MeO-DMT from other Indoles. And freebase vs HCl is not something you can test with a kit. The kit don't care. Test kits are not to be fully trusted. Which is why you always want to test new substances with very small doses to verify your batch is what it claims to be.

Joe is a decent guy for what he's doing. You just have to understand that his show is not about spirituality or personal development or truth or consciousness or serious science. It's basically about mainstream gossip. It's a gossip show with some tidbits of wisdom. But also a lot of egotistical nonsense. It's not designed to be a spiritual path. It's designed to be fun gossip. And if you think of it on those terms, it's great. Not everything has to be ultra serious and profound. But if you expect to become deeply woke listening to his show, then you'll be disappointed. Relative to other talk show hosts, Joe is pretty wise & evolved. But then again, that's not the highest of bars to clear.

If you think it's bad now, you have no idea how bad the bashing would be if I really let loose I have never properly bashed them. So far I've only made minor counterpoints to stave off very basic ignorance that I see some of my viewers have learned from them. In the end, they cannot help being exactly who they are. So what would be the point of my ranting?

That is not masterful teaching. That kind of polarized teaching style does a disservice to students, as it makes them ideological and emotionally reactive. Teachers who teach like that are themselves not fully developed & conscious. I myself have had to back off that style as I become more conscious. It is a disservice to you guys. Because in truth, there is no one to blame for anything. Everyone is doing their best, even terrorists, Nazis, psychopaths, and cult leaders. They cannot help being who they are and the proper response to their situation is understanding and compassion, not hate or ridicule. For example, I've wanted to shoot a rant video against JP for a long time now. But I hold myself back because I would rather take the high road. Even though a rant video against JP would get me lots of views and clicks and approval -- it would also make you guys more ideological against him and distract from doing the inner work. So I bite my tongue. You see, the ego's whole game is to get you to avoid doing the inner work by any means possible. So ego loves to externalize the problem and make it about something "out there" -- some teacher, some teaching, some other group of people, some culture war issue, some political scandal, some latest outrage -- anything to avoid self-reflection. I have no interest in getting into public battles with anyone or defending my work. I just want to work on myself and be creative without any justifications for my work. My work speaks for itself. If you find my work useful, then use it. If not, then leave and pursue other things. Telling me you disagree with my work is unnecessary. I know better than most of you the flaws and limitations of my own work. I don't need guidance from a random cocky Youtuber who does not know anything about me. I get my internal guidance from a much higher quality, non-human source. And in the end if you feel my guidance is bad or wrong, don't follow me. I am not here to be right, or perfect, or the Buddha, or your daddy figure. From the very beginning the only function of Actualized.org was to catalogue various insights that I have that I find interesting. That's all this is. There is no pretense to Truth in my teachings since all teachings are concepts and by definition partial and untrue. Anything that you hear me say is ultimately nonsense. It was that way from day one, and it could not be otherwise. From the very beginning my work is was meant to be self-effacing. Like a snake eating its own tail, such that in the end, nothing remains.

It's an intuitive high-level hunch based on subtle cues. Then again, often these people display their egotism in very obvious ways. For example, no serious teacher would make the core of his teaching the bashing of other teachers. That's an obvious red flag. That's ego reaction, not genuine teaching. People who spend a lot of their time and energy criticizing other teachers or teachings automatically reveal their own lack of consciousness, as all criticism is ultimately untenable and absurd. Reality cannot be otherwise, so there is nothing wrong and no one to blame. When you become deeply conscious, the desire to criticize anything falls away entirely, because it is an ego-game. The more conscious you become of the devil within you, the easier it becomes to spot Zen devils and their tactics. After years of doing this work you will smell ego from miles away because you've studied it so deeply within yourself. Watch out for people who make a lot of noise and stir up controversy needlessly, over and over again. This is a very popular online marketing tactic of late. People like Trump, JP, Mike Cernovich, Steven Crowder, Alex Jones, Sam Harris, etc. are master manipulators in this regard. Any cult leader wannabe is going to be a master manipulator & bullshit artist.

You have to understand the trickeries of running such a community. I crack down on stuff like this immediately because egos will not hesitate to exploit this community to build their own cults and brands. People like Rali and TJ turn criticism into a marketing strategy. The strategy is to stir up a fake controversy to gain views and free advertizing. In my book, this is unacceptable. What they are looking for is attention, which is why they are denied any air whatsoever. If you want to criticize me or Actualized.org, go for it. I don't care. But I am not going to let you turn it into a marketing strategy, nor will I allow you to poach members to start your own movement or brand because I do not trust your devilish ego to create a non-cult community. The mistake people make is they get a little taste of self-actualization or spirituality and then they think they got what it takes to teach or run a spiritual community. But they are so ignorant of the dangers involved. I take great care to make sure Actualized.org never becomes a harmful ideological organization. People who I judge to be building harmful ideological organizations are not allowed here. There's nothing new here. This has happened before and it will happen again. Every year a new Zen devil comes here to start his cult. I spot such devils immediately. I smell them a mile away. I spotted Rali very early on. The trouble is, they cleverly exploit this because a healthy community must allow criticism. So it becomes a PR problem banning such people because it makes me look like an insecure tyrannt. So it's a tricky balance to strike because they will abuse this to craft their marketing strategy. The bottom line is, if you guys wish to criticize myself or Actualized.org in a serious way, go for it. I will not close such a thread, but if you do it as a marketing strategy or you are doing it from a place of ego as a distraction, then it will be shut down. The trick with criticism is that the ego loves to use it to muddy up the waters so much that people get lost and confused. It easily becomes a distraction from doing the work. It's so easy to create fake controversy and milk that cow. But even so, criticism and receptivity to feedback is necessary in any healthy community / organization. So I welcome constructive criticism and feedback which has no ulterior business motive.

Of course All religion is nondual teaching in some sense. The only question is, How much has the teaching been corrupted? And, How well is its original intention understood?

@Aaron p Point to one thing which isn't the Truth. It is impossible because Truth has no opposite and non-truth doesn't exist. Truth is all around you. You're just failing to recognize it as such because you're holding Truth as a concept. Truth is not a concept, Truth is being.

@Eric Tarpall Enough of this Red Pill BS.

@Taavi That kind of detailed how-to information is gonna be found in courses and seminars, not books. Serious business training is never done through books. Books are too cheap for that. Try taking a $1000 course or $3000 seminar. That's where you'll learn practical stuff. No one is going to put that information into a $20 book. Serious business advice is very costly. Because if it's any good, it's worth tens of thousands of dollars. At $10,000 business seminar is not unreasonable.