Leo Gura

What I'm saying aligns with the best spiritual traditions. Almost all of them talk about degrees of awakening. So it's not an ego thing. I don't really care about being more awakened than someone else. I just care about not missing some important insight which I might easily overlook if I wasn't careful and comprehensive. I would rather err on the side of comprehensiveness. Because I can't anticipate everything I don't know. I always leave room in my epistemology for surprises and big reversals. All that's really required is radical openmindedness. Don't close down your mind even after an awakening. Keep being curious. Keep learning. Keep reading. Keep hearing other points of view. You just never know what you might discover.

@legendary Personally I feel there is an end to it. But that end sits at the bottom of a very deep well, so very few people have reached it. But I could be wrong. Of course minor insights about life have no end. Those and science are infinite. There is an infinite amount of personal development -style insights. Liberation does not require learning about everything. Learning never ends, but liberation I think has some end-point. You could be liberated but still learning new stuff every day about the world. It's important to distinguish those. If you define liberation as totally knowledge of everything, then that seems impossible.

@PT89 It's just too hard to tell and this becomes very controversial as no one wants to admit their favorite teacher isn't fully awake. I wouldn't spend too much time worrying about it. Learn from whoever you feel is good enough for you. Learn from multiple sources to avoid blindspots. Have at least 10 different sources that you are cross-referencing or you will get blindspots. Personally I cross-reference 50-100 sources to make sure I don't get trapped in a blindspot. That's how seriously I take this epistemic problem. It is no joke. You will get trapped, I can almost guarantee it.

@legendary That is very difficult to assess in practice, especially if you haven't had multiple awakenings yourself. The challenge is that different minds talk about awakening in different ways, so just because two people talk different and emphasize different things does not necessarily mean their level of awakening is different. To be totally honest, I don't know anyone else's level of awakening. I only know what levels I have experienced. The rest is my speculations. It is possible to try to guess a person's levels of awakening by asking them various questions about the nature of reality. Depending on how they answer these questions you might catch some clues about how awake they really are. But again, you're still just guessing. You don't really know. It could just be a failure to communicate. Many awake people are just poor communicators. Some questions I like to ask people to determine how awake they are: Why is there something rather than nothing? What is God? How does God create? What is your true nature? What is non-existence? What is Truth? What is Infinity? What is Consciousness? What is Love? Have you become conscious of infinite intelligence? What is the deepest thing you've become conscious of? Do other people exist? etc. If they are not able to answer these questions clearly and satisfactorily, then I consider that they are not fully awake. Although it might just be that they don't want to answer such questions. It can be hard to tell. To me the highest teaching must affirm: 1) You are God, 2) Total nonduality, 3) Infinity & Nothingness Teachings which cannot answer the question of why there is something rather than nothing are incomplete in my opinion. Because I have clearly answered this question for myself. So I know it can be done. Teachings which try to emphasize emptiness or formlessness over form are also incomplete in my opinion since they fail to fully comprehend that form and formlessness are identical. Teachings which claim there is no God are also suspect. Since you can clearly recognize that you are God. I am also suspicious of teachings which never talk about absolute Love or which deny Love as an Absolute. I am also suspicious of teachings which do not ever mention the energetic aspects of awakening. I am super suspicious of any teachings which claims that enlightenment is binary and has no degrees. To me this is clearly false as my experience says otherwise. If someone cannot explain clearly what God is, why God is, and how God works, they are not fully awake in my opinion. Since I have been able to understand all that for myself. It can clearly be done. And not as theory, belief, or speculation. You can be totally conscious of how God works. Of course you can also evaluate a person's demeanor, energy, and vibe. But this can also be misleading. It can be hard to tell whether you are projecting your own ideas onto them. So in practice the best thing you can do is not to get married to any one teacher or teaching. Keep looking for deeper and deeper teachings and you will probably keep finding them. And also remember, just because someone isn't fully awaken doesn't mean you can't learn a lot from them. So don't get too perfectionistic trying to find the perfect teacher. The most awake people are often poor teachers. Teaching ability is not at all the same as degree of awakening. The best teachers will likely be less awake than the most awakened people: precisely because they spend a lot time teaching! In the same way that the best mathematicians are not the best math teachers. Whenever you are in doubt, just ask 5-MeO-DMT and it will tell you the truth -- assuming you're ready to stomach it. It will not lie to you. Your mind might lie. But 5-MeO does not. Every answer you want is there. You just have to dig it out a bit, which can take time. I will trust 5-MeO-DMT over any living master. Direct experience is king.

Oh, yes! One can definitely have a direct consciousness of why it all exists. It's because something = nothing. In other words, reality cannot distinguish itself from nothing. It is being all states at once, so to speak. There is on one in reality to arbitrate between whether reality is happening or not. If you think it is happening, that's true for you. But you could also stop thinking that it's happening, and that will be true for you. Which is really true? Both and neither! You think there is something, but that something is not different from nothing. So it's sort of like reality never really happened. And yet it did. Paradox. Another way to phrase it is: infinity = zero. Existence has no opposite. Existence is Nothing/Zero. Pick an object in your room, like a chair. Look at it. Now, try to see it as though it were a hologram from Star Wars. A hologram is like an object which exists (it has an appearance of a chair) but actually it is nothing. It has no substance. It is just a hollow appearance with nothing behind it. Yet another way to phrase it is like this: Imagine that reality never happened at all. Imagine there was only nothing. Well, congrats! because that's precisely the case! You're sitting in this nothing right now! You are right in the middle of that nothing. You must stop thinking of nothing as formlessness. You must see that form is identical to nothing too. The duality you create between something and nothing must be erased since it never existed to being with. In other words: nothing looks precisely like whatever you are seeing right now. Nothing is NOT the absence of appearances. Don't fall into that trap. You must learn to see appearances as nothing. Look at a chair and see it as nothing. Look at a cat and see it as nothing. Look at a wall and see it as nothing. Look at human and see it as nothing. Look at a tree and see it as nothing. Reality is nothing, nowhen, nowhere, nohow. And yet appearance is there. Another way to phrase it is: reality has nowhere else to be but where it already is: nowhere. It's like a deleted computer file which cannot go anywhere once it's deleted but into the void. And so there it exists, in the void. Yet another way you can think of it is: there is no difference between actual and potential. You can think of our physical world as just a possibility within the mind of God which only exists as a possibility, not as actuality, because there is no such thing as actuality. There is only possibility. Reality cannot distinguish between possibility and actuality. That is a duality which must collapse. Conversely you could say that there is only actuality with no possibility. Either way we are saying the same thing: the collapse of those categories. What happens when all categories collapse? Nothing!

Survival, survival, survival! Mind = a survival machine. We'll be talking about the fundamental importance of survival soon in upcoming episodes. Lots of profound and practical new episodes on the way.

@tsuki I have not read him, but of course Spinoza was speaking from some truth. Yes, Infinity is a necessity. And yet at the same time it seems to have free will too. Paradoxical.

Did Muslims invent beards?

@SQAAD Science proved it 100 years ago with the radical epistemic discoveries of quantum mechanics. It just hasn't premeated mainstream culture. The problem is that you cannot prove something to a closedminded person no matter how much proof you have. If an ego-mind wishes to believe in materialism, no amount of proof will convince it otherwise. The way this problem is resolved is that culture must evolve. There must be a culture war to the point where materialism is so discredited that you would look like a fool to ever speak of it publicly. In the same way that you would look like a fool to say publicly that the Earth is 5000 years old. Serious people will laugh at you. So it must become with materialism. It will take hundreds of years for that to happen. The whole point is that the ego-mind does not allow its metaphysics to be open to being disproven. It is taken as fact/reality and you cannot change facts (or so the ego-mind believes). Of course there was nothing factual about materialist metaphysics to begin with. But this is denied by the materialist. It's a catch-22 situation. Individuals cannot realize it because culture is backwards. And culture cannot change because individuals are backwards. So it takes a long time for progress to occur. Generations must pass. The old dogmatic folks must natrually die off. This is one reason why death is good. If humans lived forever they would become totally rigid and stuck in their minds. Culture could not evolve. Technology could not happen as rapidly.

@SoonHei From what I now understand, reality is not just a grab-bag of every possibilty. It is highly selective. Yet it is still EVERYTHING. This part is paradoxical.

@ThinAir There is a more potent substance but it is not as good for our purposes. Max potency is not what you want. You want max clarity. I have not found anything yet with a higher clarity than 5-MeO-DMT. Yes, I have tried the other subtance. It was quite freaky. I would not recommend it to most people. It really warps your mind and has a high body load.

@SriBhagwanYogi In real life shit costs energy, which equals money.

Reddit is usually best. It has the most up to date info. Google: "site:reddit.com xxxxxxx" Replace xxxxxx with whatever specific question you have. Like: "site:reddit.com best LSD first dose"

Yes, the Godhead is void. And void is everything. And the I is that.

@taoislife Not sure what you mean or what you want me to do.

There is some truth to what you are saying. Yes, it's important to be careful. But also you have to consider where many people would be who do psychedelics if they didn't do them. My suggestion is: in a far worse place. For example, if I had not done 5-MeO over the last 2 years, my teachings would be significantly worse and less truthful than they are now and I would never have been able to access the levels of consciousness, truth, insight, and purification through traditional meditation or self-inquiry. So what was I to do in this case? My point is, don't let perfection get in the way of one's growth. Most people who follow me are nowhere near capable of having 5-MeO levels of consciousness and insight sober through a few sits of meditation or self-inquiry. So what do you suggest they do? Your suggestions must be practical and workable for ordinary people. You cannot just assume that the person is spiritually gifted as it sounds like you have always been. Spirituality is not equal for all people. Some people have a much harder path than you. What is to be done with such people? Since most people are in fact like this, we cannot expect perfection from them. It's not about becoming fully awake, it's about helping them become MORE awake THAN THEY'VE BEEN. There is a process at work here. Yes, there are traps in the process. Every spiritual path has many traps. Psychedelics do have some unique traps. But they are also amazing and life-changing is very positive ways.

They mostly agree that awakening = Absolute Truth = Nothing = Everything = God = Love = Consciousness It's just a question of how deeply you comprehend it, how much of its consequences you see, how well you embody it in everyday life, and how conscious you are of things. These vary greatly. There's also the issue of: how integral is your view of spirituality? For example, are you going to deny that Hindu's understand awakening? That Muslims do? That Jews do? That Buddhists do? Are you gonna pick one team and criticize all the others? Are you going to deny that people who use psychedelics have legit awakening experiences? Are you going to insist that self-inquiry is the one true way, or yoga, or Zen, or meditation? Are you going to insist that Jesus was the most awake, or Buddha, or someone else? Or are you gonna say that all awakened people are equally awake? There tends to be a lot of disagreement about all that mostly because the people disagreeing have not fully experienced and explored the things they're disagreeing with. Before you go disagreeing about 5-MeO-DMT, for example, how about you do 10 trips? Then let's talk. Before you go disagreeing about Islam, how about you travel to the Middle East and talk to 10 enlightened Sufi masters. Then let's talk. To really understand all this diversity there has to be genuine desire to understand it. You can't just cling to your POV while maintaining that everyone else is deluded. This understanding is not strictly-speaking enlightenment. It is a side pursuit. But in my opinion it is highly worthwhile. We are living more and more in an integrated world. We must learn to understand each other better, otherwise confusion, delusion, and evil happen.

@Joseph Maynor The paradox is fully there. Then again, paradox does not really exist. Paradox only exists within the realm of mind, when mind tries to articulate infinity. If you just sit and look at reality as it is without thought, there is no paradox. So the paradox is that there is no paradox, until you start to think about it "=" has nothing to do with math. It's a way of saying two things are one. For example, I could say: you = me. That's not math. It's a nondual truth. I could say: I = God God = Love God = Intelligence God = Nothingness God = Infinity Ego = devil Fear = illusion Nonduality = Oneness Infinity = Zero Truth = Love Form = Formlessness God = Creation Etc. And these are all highly worthwhile realizations to have. You are not going to realize all these identities in one shot. This is why having multiple awakenings is so important. The above is actually a very elegant way of communicating the highest truths. In fact, I'll be doing a whole episode about these "equations". My formulations are just one way of expressing/communicating Truth. There are many other ways. Each way will be partial and emphasize different aspects of Truth/God. If you want the full Truth, then you must go beyond the words. The point here is: never take my words too literally. Always leave some leeway. Read between the lines. Grok the intention behind the communication.

Has been for the last 3 years since China's ban Oxalate is the new way.

What you must realize is this: Something = Nothing Infinity = Zero Form = Formlessness Illusion = Reality This is one of the deepest awakenings you can have. You will not understand this logically. Only at the moment of awakening. Asking if God cannot be without form assumes that form and formless are two, but they are in fact one. God is simultaneously without form (the Godhead) and all form which has ever occurred anywhere. It is both! It is ALL! The ultimate realization of nonduality is the unification of form and formlessness, so you see them as one. In this way, the everyday material world becomes nothing, like a divine hologram. Your body starts to feel light, like it is a ghost, like you are etherial. Etherial = ether = 5th element = nothingness = consciousness = love = God Ta-da!

This retreat was at least 10 times more profound and powerful for me. Maybe more. Words can't do it justice. The degrees of awakening and understanding are hard to capture in words. So to an outside observer it might all sound the same. "Leo, how many times can you say that you are God/nothingness/infinity? Haven't you said all this 2 years ago?" Yes, but the degrees of it are lost in the communication.

That distinction is somewhat moot. A Zen student strives very hard before and even after awakening. According to your logic you would say that all Zen is artificial. And by that standard all spirituality and all growth is artificial. Which is not a good view. Seeking to embody and to be more fully conscious of God is not artificial, it is a natural part of this whole awakening and self-transformation process. How else could it be? When transformation happens in you, you feel it. I am not saying that I am 100% transformed. It's not different than after any meditation retreat. You would be back, you would be somewhat transformed, but you would also still mostly be the old you. And you will have to work to embody the stuff you learned and realized during your retreat. Radical transformation does not happen over night. Realigning the mind is like realigning teeth with braces. In practice, to become fully God-realized will require some force and some contrivance. It is not going to be an effortless, purely organic process.

Isn't it interesting how much disagreement exists between people on this issue of awakening? I want you guys to notice that. How do you explain it? The very fact that this much disagreement exists -- and it exists not just on this forum but across ALL spiritual schools and teachings -- is evidence that there is far more than one degree and aspect of awakening. The Truth is Absolute and One, but there are many degrees and facets to it and very few people have accessed all the degrees and facets. Hence the disagreements. If Truth/God was one-dimensional, there would be no disagreements amongst enlightened people, but there are! Take any two deeply enlightened people and you will likely find some disagreements between them in this point. Sometimes very stark disagreement. If you disagree with what I just said, that itself is evidence of what I am saying. Be careful when dismissing other people's POV as delusion Every great spiritual teacher I have come across acknowledges that there are degrees of awakening. Zen masters acknowledge it. Not just degrees of embodiment. Degrees of awakening.

As God, you would realize your penis is Perfect and Good however it is. The desire for a bigger penis is devilry and lack of self-acceptance. EVERYTHING is as it should be! You only need to purify yourself enough to see the truth of this. Notice how you create your own hell by wanting a bigger penis. See? You are in heaven but you create a hell out of it. That is the core mistake of humans.

@Girzo That is yet to be determined. But that might be a wise move.