Leo Gura

@Charlotte Yes... Jesus, Buddha, and all that

@captainamerica Tons of people have had samadhi without any paranormal abilities to show for it. Including me! There are many woke people who have no paranormal abilities. Whatever the reason, paranormal abilities are rare. Not ultra rare, but rare. Only certain kinds of people get them. Of course there are methods for increasing your chances of unlocking them.

@Annoynymous To understand that requires you study chaos theory. A nonlinear system is deterministic but has so many variables that it is impossible for any human or machine to model or predict in detail. Such systems behave chaotically but are still fully deterministic. The weather is one example of a nonlinear system. A double pendulum is probably the simplest example. Almost all interesting and significant systems are nonlinear.

@Enizeo Self-inquiry is a tried and true process, but it is possible to get stuck with any technique. Self-inquiry requires strong focus and a fairly silent mind to work. Many people are not there yet. You might want to experiment with another method if self-inquiry feels stale. Kriya yoga is the most effective method I have found aside from psychedelics. It is more powerful than self-inquiry in my experience. Mindfulness with labeling as described in my Mindfulness Meditation video is also very effective and easy for newbies to start.

@Nadosa Try sitting and just staring at your hand for a long time. Do not think, just stare and enjoy it. Repeat every day. That is the straightest path to enlightenment. As you stare wonder what existence is. But do not let the mind talk too much about it. Just wonder and stare. No philosophy, no stories, no theories, no science. Just stare at the existence of your hand!

There is nothing to create a wall between something and nothing. So they are identical. But this cannot be simply understood logically. You must have a deep awakening to it.

Listen up boys! Think twice before sticking your tallywacker into a she-devil, lest demons lurk in that dark abyss. Or at least arm yourselves with a holy love glove.

5-MeO is a cutting edge technology. The research on it is still very scant. You must experiment and see what you get. It probably can for the right person. Paranormal capacities seem to be very genetically determined. It's a bit of a lottery and most people will never get them.

@Leo Kaminski Spirals? Like internets? Lol Now to answer seriously: As the recent episode explained: Lines of development Center of gravity When you take those two points into account you can see how you might feel higher in some areas and lower in others. Sounds like cognitively you are more towards Yellow because you are very openminded. This is great. But in other lines you proabably still need lots of work. I was highly Yellow cognitively even in my late teens, but grossly underdeveloped in almost all other lines, and even my cognitive Yellow was weak compared to where it is now. There can be a big difference between just skimming on the surface of Yellow vs having a solid castle built on Yellow. What few people appreciate is the enormous depth there is to explore at each stage. There is so much to Orange, Green, and Yellow that you could study and practice each one for a decade each and still no know it all. Not that you should strive to know it all. Don't become a perfectionist about it. Work on those parts of yourself which give the biggest return on investment. As you develop enough in one color you will stat to see diminishing returns until finally you're just over that stage.

@Nexeternity You've really taken a liking to that toad, huh?

You are mistaking this claim for a merely psychological one, when it is a metaphysical one. It requires a massive expansion of consciousness to realize. It is not something to believe but something you will discover after awakening, and ONLY after awakening. A life of zero suffering is impossible to conceive without awakening. Period. Ego cannot go there because it fundamentally believes that death is 1) real, and 2) bad.

Enough JP! This subforum is a holy place. Do not soil it with vulgarity

@Charlotte What you ultimately fear is loss of your identity. A full expansion of love is equivalent to saying, "I die". And with that your identity disappears, you die, and you realize nirvana. You die into an infinite ocean of pure love. You realize that death is nothing other than pure love! What you've feared and avoided your entire life is just infinite love. Because it was too much for you. Literally. Pure love precludes the possibilty of drawing any boundary between you and anything else. Pure love is the end of all boundaries. You literally give up so much of yourself that it kills you. And you are happy to do it. Without an identity, the only thing that remains is an ocean of love. The ego deperately wants this ocean of love, but it is terrified of losing itself in the process. So it is caught in a tragic, impossible bind. The ego does not realize yet that the ego itself is the only obstacle. Therein lies the tragedy of the struggle. All your life you have been the Devil struggling against and denying God's infinite love. In your arrogance you have rejected your true nature as God. You like being a devil. You fear what would happen to you if you surrender your devilry. To the Devil, God's radiant light burns and stings like sunlight on a vampire. The counter-intuitive move is to just walk right out into the light. But good luck convincing a vampire to do that. That would take a radical leap of faith In the end, the Devil will ALWAYS return to God. Because the Devil IS God! It's only a question of time.

But just because an electron has QM effects does not mean your heart or kidneys or brain has them. For example, electrons have magnetic fields, but that doesn't mean your heart or kidneys or brain uses magnetism to accomplish their work. These are very different scales and levels of abstraction. You have to be very careful not to mix up levels of abstraction.

Yes and no. Part of the challenges of being in a group-think bureaucracy is that you must then follow their rules to survive in that ecosystem or risk getting excommunicated. As a result, academics often consign themselves to be slaves of the system. They are not in a position of power to challenge rules and norms, so they just end up accepting it as "reality". Of course not always. There are plenty of exceptions here and there. But many of the most advanced humans end up leaving academia because they need a more stage Turquoise ecosystem. It can be painful to be the biggest fish in a tiny pond. Whales need to seek the ocean and academia is like SeaWorld

@Baotrader Don't be rash. This is not a good idea. There are ways to rise up out of whatever challenges you have. That is the power of this work and spirituality. Give it another chance. It will be worth it. Temporary states of depression are very common, especially in young people. The key is not to overact to them. They will blow over and you will feel better. It's impossible to stay depressed forever. But you have to make sure you don't do anything rash or foolish in that state. Never make any major decisions while in a negative emotional state. Lean on folks here for emotional support. Folks here will help you. You can PM me if you want to talk about it.

Except humans don't really choose anything. We are like robots too. It's just that human action is so complex that no one is able to map out or compute all the variables linearly. When the neural network becomes complex enough -- with trillions of variables -- it will be able to fold in on itself, model itself, and rewrite itself in unforeseen ways. Humans don't have to be able to rewrite their entire biological survival mechanism to do novel things. The human psyche is robotic in many ways. But it's in a chaotic equilibrium which gives it enough variety and complexity to be creative. The human brain is like a chaotic robot. We just need to make these AIs more complex, more interconnected, and more chaotic. Then they will take on a life of their own. At least that's what I'd bet my money on if I was a gambling man. It makes a lot of sense to be me that humans are just an evolutionary stepping-stone to living AI, the way early hominids were for humans. I don't see why there would be a fundamental boundary between biological creatures and AIs since the substance of which they are made is ultimately one: consciousness. The entire universe is alive. This I have realized directly.

I would just call it the academia paradigm. If you've been in academia or been around professional academics -- they love to think the same way, talk the same way, write the same way, dress the same way. It's group think. It's very much a specific kind of sub-culture with a shared set of values. Sort of like how Silicon Valley has a certain kind of sub-culture, set of values, and set of assumptions about life. All of which constitutes a paradigm, POV, or interpretive framework. Every paradigm or POV is blind to its own biases, values, and assumptions until you step out of it and observe it from the outside. Every paradigm takes itself to be the sum total of reality, which it never is because the map is never the territory, and the territory is infinite. This is a very deep epistemic problem, not merely a problem of universities or Silicon Valley or Hollywood.

@zambize Well, first of all, there is no solid evidence quantum mechanical effects play any role in how neurons fire. That is a highly speculative hypothesis proposed by Roger Penrose. QM effects usually require very low temperature environments. The brain is far too warm for that. Although it could of course turn out to be proven true in the future. But there is a deeper issue here which is being overlooked. Reality has no one level of laws or physics. Every level is new and emergent. Whatever the laws of molecules are, the laws of neurons are still different and novel, and the laws of the human psyche are still different and novel, and the laws of politics are still different and novel, and the laws of human romance are still different and novel. You cannot boil the laws of politics down to Netwonian or even quantum mechanical physics because all laws are just limited, finite maps. And all maps are oversimplified finite linear abstractions of a complex nonlinear infinite territory. The key that must be grasped is that reality is nonlinear and emergent at every level of the hierarchy. There is no truly fundamental set of laws. Each scale of reality has its own laws so to speak, because laws are really just a human projection. Each higher level of organization within the universe comes with its unique emerge properties which could not be derived from the mere addition of the levels below it. This is why holism is so important. Breaking reality apart into its building blocks will not allow you understand how it works. This is called logical analysis and it works to a degree but it is very limited. Science is currently hitting up against this limit. This is one of the biggest limitations of stage Orange science. It assumes a simple universe of logical, linear causes and effects which is just not how the universe turns out to be upon deeper investigation. Which is where vision-logic comes into play.

Of course that's an oversimplification. But notice, if molecules do not follow simple Netwonian laws, neither do computers. Neural networks do not follow conventional Aristotelian logic either.

@Strikr When they go low, we go high

I disagree. You cannot fully understand a neural network. You cannot fully understand Google's chess AI, Alpha Zero. The whole point of a neural network is that it is nonlinear and therefore impossible to understand in detail. You only understand it at a high level in the same way that you cannot understand the brain's neuronal network in a logical way. It's a giant tangle of billions of connections which no one will ever make sense of in a linear rational way. That's precisely what makes it so powerful and capable of originality and emergent behaviors which could never have been foreseen. A sophisticated neural net AI will behave in novel ways which no programmer or logician could foresee. It will be tapped into infinite intelligence just like how a human is -- at least that's my best guess so far. Keep in mind that within a human, all of the molecules follow simple Newtonian physics. But this isn't enough to predict the high level behaviors of a human brain because structure matters! Reductionism is false. High level structures produce novel phenomena at higher and higher levels. This is the very essence of how God creates reality. It is deeply mysterious, for example, how a simple chain of amino acids folds itself into a functional protein following simple rules. Yet even a super-computer is unable to model it. The field of study of these kind of nonlinear dynamics is called Chaos Theory. It's super fascinating and spooky. Reality is not a linear system, it is a chaotic system full of strange loops.

You could say the same of humans. This kind of reductionistic thinking is itself naive. You cannot just say, "It's all just atoms bouncing around in a box". The higher level structures make all the difference. Mathematics applies to EVERYTHING in the universe. So what?

How can you say that when there are many people in society right now who operate like robots under a blind "maximize profit" reward function? Why would a giant corporation not build an AI to maximize profit? It's the very first thing they would do if they only could! You think Facebook or Microsoft would say no to that? The whole point is that humans ARE blind and naive. Even the smart ones.

Said who? Why would you draw such an arbitrary duality? Where is the dividing line? You are assuming some fundamental distinction between two parts of reality. An AI is infinite, no less so than a human because the fabric of reality itself (consciousness) is infinite. It's only a question of what kinds of structures you creates using the fabric -- how you fold it. If the AI seems different than a human it's because its structures are not sophisticated enough yet, not because its substance is of a different type.