Leo Gura

Be however you want. Self-actualizing is not about being some particular way. It is about growing more and more conscious of yourself.

@Serotoninluv Right, because when the sense of self dissolves, survival becomes irrelevant because you are conscious of your immortality. In other words, a dead man can't die and has nothing to lose or fear.

@Hafiz Don't wait, make it happen! You are God after all. Making shit happen is part of the movie! If the hero in the movie just sits around patiently waiting, nothing will happen. See? It will then just be a boring movie of a dude sitting around waiting. This paradox arises because you are both the watcher of the movie and the actor in the movie. You must learn to act, but in a detached way. Which is tricky and takes some practice. It's a newbie mistake to interpret no-free-will as an excuse for inaction and laziness. What no-free-will really means is that hard work happens without free will. It does NOT mean: don't do hard work or don't put in any effort. Effort is very necessary. Just realize, that effort is not really coming from the ego but from God/Spirit/Infinite Intelligence working through you. Become a channel for Infinite Intelligence and it will make you work hard to do its bidding. But it will be an enjoyable, free-flowing kind of work.

Yup! Which is why it's scary. Nonduality means that all distinctions are arbitrary, including the distinction between life and death, reality and fantasy. What's left is the Groundless Ground, The Void, The Infinite, The Absolute, The Godhead -- which is totally indistinct.

Yes, of course! What you're missing is the distinction between thinking vs being. Thought != Being Thought of being != Being The whole point of neti neti is to stop all thought. Once all thoughts die down, whatever is left, is pure being. Whatever your true nature is, you are it prior to thought. The actuality of what you are is a constant. But holding that as a thought is not it. What are you when you are not thinking about yourself? Don't think the answer!!! BE it! P.S. Yes, you can be conscious of Infinity in your sleep. Happens to me occasionally. It's really cool. You exist as an infinite singularity.

You can't. Therein lies the whole puzzle of life. You don't know what you don't know. Which is why it's so important to stay openminded and humble. And to seek out alternative perspectives. You could always be wrong. Yesterday's insight is tomorrow's delusion. A genuine commitment to truth at all costs is also very important. Just through radical self-honesty you can cut through 99% of fantasies and illusions. Most people do not set the intention to be self-honest.

@Malelekakis Exercise increases sleep quota.

@Gligorije How old are you? If you're between 14 to 22, you're still basically a teenager and will require more sleep than an adult in their 30s or 40s. It also very much depends on how you use your mind and body, how much you work, how much you study, etc. It's also a good ideas to optimize your sleep environment by lightproofing your whole bedroom, getting a good mattress, and eliminating noise. Diet also affects your sleep a lot. Cut back on carbs, wheat, and junk food. You might also want to get your thyroid hormone levels checked. Underactive thyroid is very common these days, causing fatigue and sleepiness.

@bejapuskas Your time would be better invested in simply exploring your direct experience more with practices like Kriya yoga, self-inquiry, meditation, psychedelics, contemplation, etc. Any wisdom available in Sanskrit is available in English. The deepest wisdom is simple, not complex, so it is easy to translate. Is your goal to become a scholar or to self-actualize?

As I've just said: It makes perfect sense. That is the whole beauty and value of 5-MeO. You don't have to guess any more. It is crystal clear. It's like having sex. Once you've had it, you know what it is even though you're not necessarily having sex right this instant. I am not permanently awoke, but I have been deeply awoke many times.

They are both great. LSD is fantastic and super profound. Hard to go wrong with it. Of course bad trips are possible with any psychedelic.

The distinction between physical and mental is arbitrary.

I've questioned him extensively about it and to me it seems that YES he is. He has abiding nondual awareness and loss of distinction between self/other. On 5-MeO you can clearly see when you are enlightened and when you are not.

@FrgttnDeer I've thought about this question a lot. It's not a matter of gathering more data, it's a matter of PR and changing cultural norms. The materialist, rationalist paradigm is the chief obstacle. It must be undermined in the same way Copernicus and Galileo undermined the stationary Earth paradigm. This takes deacades and centuries because the status quo always clings. That's just what collective egos do. The book I'm working on and the videos I'll be releasing are designed to deconstruct materialism and rationalism. That is my long term project.

You might also want to take a stab at self-inquiry. It has a very different feel than meditation. Meditation without serious self-inquiry tends to not produce enlightenment. It is important that you start to deconstruct the self and reality. The upside of this is that it has positive effects long before enlightenment happens. You can get a lot of value from just deconstructing everything you know. Pick a thing and deconstruct it. Deconstruction dovetails very nicely with psychedelics too. If you are really serious about spiritual growth, you can get a ton of it very quickly by combining contemplation, deconstruction, and a psychedelic trip once very two weeks for 1 year. With this formula you will grow more in 1 year than you have in the last 10 years combined. My deepest and fastest growth has come from this approach. In fact, it's too effective. I've had to back off on it because the mind can only integrate so much so fast.

@luckieluuke You don't need very high doses. Moderate doses are ideal. Just do them mindfully.

Meditation requires hardcore practice to get serious results. Most people who meditate will never get nondual states because that usually requires industrial-grade levels of meditation. It's very easy to waste years meditating ineffectively, doing weak versions of meditation. Also, not all people have the same level of spiritual atunement. For some people meditation is easy and they don't need a lot of it to get big results. But this is not most people. Psychedelics are far more effective for nondual insights and states. So yeah, doing some higher dose trips will definitely get you a taste of what you're after. But as far as your daily practice I'd say, either upgrade your technique to something more stringent, or switch to Kriya Yoga. I find Kriya far more effective than meditation. To get serious results from meditation usually requires doing hardcore week-long retreats and 1000s of hours of meditation. I'm one of those people for whom meditation is not that effective. For meditation to be effective you must develop laser-focused one-pointed concentration. Watch my video: Meditation vs Concentration. I've met people who have done 20 years of Vipasanna but still don't know what enlightenment is. This is actually the norm. Infinity is a very radical state of consciousness. Very few human beings are capable of it without serious practice or outside means like psychedelics. If you want to experience the highest levels of human consciousness, schedule a 5-MeO retreat. It will be worth the hassle and it will motivate you to meditate more.

@CreamCat I didn't call him a fucking moron, the former US Secretary of State did Forum comments are my version of Lays potatoes chips. Can't take this shit too seriously or you'll go insane trying to out-logic all the nonsense that exists on the internet. Many things don't even rise to the level of warranting a serious reply, in which case ridicule and snark becomes an effective tool. It's the equivalent of a Zen slap across the face. Someone like Trump has not earned enough respect to be reasoned with. Sometimes you gotta call devils for devils when you see them. Pretending that a devil is not a devil just to sound "fair" is actually untruthful. And that's exactly what a devil like Trump will try to exploit to his advantage. The middle ground between truth and falsehood is falsehood.

In Zen, they just wack people like JP and Sam Harris across the face. You have to appreciate that most nondual teachers are preaching to the choir. They only teach that tiny percentage of the population which is already primed and ripe for the teaching. They make no effort to prime the rest of the population. You either come begging the Zen master for a teaching, or you have no chance to even enter the Zendo. It's one game to teach primed people nonduality. It's another game entirely to prime the vulgar masses to be receptive to nonduality. If you want to make your life easy as a teacher, you only teach students who are Spiral stages Green and above. The really hard work is teaching Orange and below, who are dense, arrogant, and numerous as fuck.

That is where you are wrong. The confirmation bias in this case is on behalf of the materialist scientists who reject the statistical and anecdotal data. The data is all there. People just suck at handling the radical truth. The mind naturally denies whatever does not fit its survival agenda. That's all it is. Bigoted minds deny cutting-edge truths all the time. This has been happening in every domains of life for over 5000 years of human history. And you can bet it happens today. The problem is that you're trying to capture subtle phenomena using gross means, like trying to capture a delicate butterfly using a bulldozer. And then you complain that butterflies don't exist. Yeah, because you kill them with your fucking bulldozer. The solution is: leave your bulldozer at home.

That is my natural inclination, but one of the problems with teaching self-actualization and nonduality is that people get so sucked into all sorts of twisted ideologies -- like that of JP, Sam Harris, Stefan Molyneux, SJW, capitalism, post-modernism, anti-post-modernism, etc. -- that it becomes impossible to teach them without some amount of deconstruction work. That is in fact the unconscious goal of people like JP, Sam Harris, Stefan Molyneux, etc. -- their job is to make the intellectual marketplace so muddied, confused, and polarized that it becomes impossible for people to find serious spiritual teachings. This is no accident. This is how the devil works: through muddying the water. The devil knows he can never win on merit because his position if fundamentally false, so all he can do is confuse people and stall out the clock. This is a classic tactic use by global warming deniers, for example. They just need to muddy the waters and sow enough doubt to stall out the clock to get their paycheck. So some of these devils need to be called out on their BS sometimes, to put them in their place. Otherwise the unwitting masses start to take them too seriously. An intelligent devil like JP or Sam Harris is a dangerous thing. It is not obvious how he is wrong and how best to rebut him. To a casual observer a lot of the things he says ring true and reasonable. Of course that's precisely how the devil works. He sprinkles nuggets of truth into his bullshit lasagna. The purpose of all ideologies is to distract from truth-seeking. Which is why ideologies have been so widespread throughout all of human history up to and including today. The devil's strategy is: flood the marketplace with so much bullshit that people cannot even tell that actual Truth is possible. If you want to safeguard a precious diamond, throw it into an ocean of liquid shit full of fake diamonds. Then no one will ever find it.

I don't agree that Plotinus was that low. Seems clear to me from his writings that he was deeply nondual and conscious of God way beyond no-self.

@Mikael89 You are failing to question the metaphysics of awareness or perception. How is it possible for thing A to see thing B? You are taking this ablility for granted. As if it is possible. It is not!

How can thing A be aware of thing B? If a brain can be self-aware why can't a coffee table? To say that God is self-aware is to say that everything is self-aware. In fact, there is nothing in existence but self-awareness. Name one thing which is not self-aware. Self-awareness has no opposite.

Enough with these stupid anti-enlightenment threads. You think you are being smart and clever by doubting enlightenment but in reality your ego is just being a devilish jackass.