Leo Gura

It's not wrong because absolutely nothing is wrong. But it does create suffering, and you will regret it eventually as it comes from a position of ignorance. It is not wrong to be ignorant. But I would advise against it if you can.

@SageModeAustin You should draw a distinction between inherent objective value vs having personal preferences. Absolutely-speaking, everything has equal value. Relatively-speaking, some things have more survival value to you than other things. Value is a relative notion. A thing has instrumental value to you precisely because it helps the ego survive. You can be conscious that all human beings have equal Absolute value, but you can still be selective about who you hang out with. For example, even though a murder has the same Absolute value as a non-murder, it would be foolish and even dangerous to make friends with a bunch of murders. The mistake people make is that they then take the extra step of demonizing murders and denying that they have equal Absolute value. So, you can be very selective about who you choose to sleep with, but it would be a mistake to demonize and judge those women who you don't want to sleep with. Just be honest and admit to yourself, "I don't want to sleep with that person. But this does not diminish that person in any way. They can still be a good person even though I don't find them sexually attractive." The mistake that guys like you make is that they think like this: "That women is ugly to me, therefore she is a low, worthless human being." This is a narcissistic evaluation. You are saying that just because a person doesn't fit your survival agenda that they are somehow inherently flawed or lower. When the truth is, she just doesn't fit your survival agenda. Also realize that when you call anything in reality "ugly" you are actually disowning that aspect of reality, of yourself. Because the truth is, that ugly thing you hate is actually, literally, metaphysically, your very self. So you are placing yourself in an adversarial relationship with reality, with yourself! Which is the very definition of neurosis. When you call a thing "ugly" you are failing to become conscious of its inherent beauty. The beauty is there no matter what. But you are failing to see it because you are being too self-centered. It is possible to live in a non-judgmental way. The irony of chasing hot girls is that the karma of it always comes back to bite you in the ass and make you suffer. Just by thinking, "Oooooo... look at this hot girl, so much better than that ugly fat girl" you are causing your own misery without realizing it. When you lose that hot girl, it will hurt all the more. I'm not saying you should sleep with girls you aren't attracted to. But you might want to reconsider the way you objectify women and use them to gratify your most base, most low consciousness desires in a purely materialistic fashion. Maybe rather than basing your attraction purely on looks, you give more weight to her personality and her level of consciousness, and you focus more on how you can give her love rather than how she can please you. The only reason a hot girl has value to you is because you crave her. And yes, it is possible to let go of craving. The trick is convincing your ego to do it.

Careful, it is a cult-like organization. You can find non-cult-like forms of meditation or yoga which are just as effective if not more effective, and without the cult ideology. Many cults have legit spiritual techniques that they offer to newbies, but they are still manipulative cults.

The downside of hardwiring anything is that you then become inflexible in a rapidly changing environment. The most effective survival strategy is not mechanical, but highly intelligent, fluid, and conscious.

@Serotoninluv Awesome!

@Tom T Wow! Very cool to hear. Happy for ya

@brugluiz You should be very careful and clear by what you mean when you say "psychosis". Spiral Dynamics is not a model for diagnosing or understanding legit mental disorders. So watch out. Spiral Dynamics is based on "normal" or "average" people.

@kieranperez Christian monks famously wore hairshirts -- shirts made out of coarse, itchy, irritating animal hair -- as a means of self-inflicted suffering for purpose of spiritual purification. The reason spiritual traditions all over the world use suffering as spiritual practice is because it awakens the mind, while pleasure and comfort usually dulls the mind into unconsciousness. Same idea as cold showers. Of course this is often done is a dysfunction, pathological, moralistic manner, which is the opposite of consciousness.

Depends of course on the particular skill. There are so many! Lynda.com is great for all sorts of technical computer skills. You can pretty reliably create a six-figure income just from mastering a handful of the skills on Lynda.com

You're lucky you're not in a Zen monastery, as that kind of question would get you a hard kick in the nuts. Like I said, you haven't really suffered yet.

Cough... Cough...

@Scholar There is no reason to avoid anything. Rather, you are being invited to become conscious of how you are creating suffering. That is all. Don't turn consciousness work into some sort of normative morality guilt trip. You don't have to do anything. If you want to kill yourself, you are free to do so. There are no shoulds here. It's a question of how you want to live life. It would be pretty stupid to live life kicking yourself in the nuts everyday. But of course you are free to do so. Just think about how stupid what you are saying is. If you had to power to stop your own suffering, you would do so without hesitation. It sounds like you live a cushy life without having suffered deeply. One day, you will face suffering so deep you will rethink your compacent position about it. You have no good sense yet how deep humans can suffer. Let's see how you will feel after you get into a car crash and half your face burns off in the fire. At which point you post your whiney victim story here and we will respond with: "How is this any different than joy? Why is suffering bad?" Then you will rethink your position. The ego loves to talk shit and act aloof while it is safe and comfy. But then, as soon as it gets a scratch, it cries and whines about how life is terrible and unfair.

Yes, it still has its old memories, beliefs, langauge, etc. You don't all the sudden start thinking in Chinese.

People seem to enjoy playing FPSes, which always ends with a bullet in the head and a respawn. Maybe God enjoys FPSes too?

I'll release a video about cults in the future.

Depends on why you're doing it. What is the point of your investing? Also, keep in mind that just because something qualifies as a life purpose doesn't mean it should be YOUR life purpose. Your LP needs to fit you like a glove.

@kieranperez Sweet! Happy for ya

Not really. It's best to just treat them arbitrary.

Strong Determination Sitting is a good way to work on consciousness of pain. This isn't easy to do, but try to sit for so long that you get to the point where the excruciating pain of your sit turns into pleasure. It's a very distinct inflection point that happens during long, serious sits. As you sit there in pain for an hour or more, you have ample time to contemplate: What is pain? What is suffering? With pain and suffering it's very important to try to contemplate it WHILE IT IS HAPPENING, not after the fact. This cuts through speculation and theorizing. My guess is, you'd have to be pretty deeply enlightened to be able to deconstruct pain in the way Ralston talks about. Because so long as the ego is intact it will bitch and whine and moan and resist too much. A deep surrender is required. Ralston is talking about super-human levels of consciousness. So don't be discouraged if you can't get it fast.

It might be easier to do this using a much simpler image, like a red triangle or white circle or the yin-yang. Yes, these might bore you, but if you get bored easily then that's precisely what you must work through. Boredom is the ego-mind's resistance to truth and higher consciousness. Boredom is not easy to work through, but therein lies the spiritual purification.

@Andrea Maffioletti That's the mindfuck of it: perception does not really exist. What you presently think of as perception will eventually -- at high levels of consciousness -- get recontextualized into Absolute being. Perception only appears to exist because the ego is co-opting Absolute being as its own "perceptions". In truth, you are not perceiving anything. Absolute Infinity is being itself but because you believe you were born, you are misinterpreting Absolute being as "my perceptions of reality". Without a belief in a separate self, there is no perception. The notion of perception carries with it a hidden implicit metaphysics: subject/object (duality). When you become really conscious, this duality collapses and you realize that perception was never taking place. Absolute being was taking place. This may sound like a semantic word game, but I assure you its not. It's a very radical and palpable shift in consciousness. You will feel it like getting struck with a lightning bolt. Your whole sense of reality will flip inside out as your consciousness up-shifts from relative perception to Absolute being. Visually, nothing may change, but your understanding of what you thought your visual field was will radically change. It's like if what you thought was a shrub swaying in the wind, upon closer inspection, turned out to be a creeping grizzly bear

@NoSelfSelf Only buy from places that get great reviews. Never buy from an unknown source. And on top of that, use drug testing kits to verify your substance is a genuine indole. Be especially suspicious of substances which don't look pure (brown, grey, yellow, pink, dirty-looking, chunky, etc.).

As far as interpreting imagery goes, the human mind can only understand reality via images and symbols. That's what understanding is regardless of whether it is scientific or spiritual understanding, literal or poetic. There really isn't a difference between literal and poetic understanding. So the mind, especially during a trip, will use whatever images it can to understand the vast complexity of reality. All sorts of strange symbols and images can arise, and they are all relative to that mind's intellectual framework. Truth and wisdom will be communicated in whatever way works FOR THAT MIND. To a Christian mind it might be the face of Jesus, to a Hindu mind it might be the face of Vishnu, to an atheist mind it might be a mathematical formula or a logical axiom, etc. All of it is just arbitrary symbols which only have meaning relatively, WITHIN the framework of that person's mind. It's like a language, which only makes sense and has meaning to those people who speak the language. To an outsider, it is just noise.

Of course dissociatives can be used for accessing profound mystical states. The only problem is, they tend to be physically harmful to the body, and also addictive. Ketamine can become very addictive and prolonged usages destroys the kidneys I believe. Which is why I do not recommend them. Why take those risks when you can have mindblowing mystical experiences on totally safe and non-addictive substances like LSD, mushrooms, or DMT? After a 5-MeO breakthrough, even small doses of LSD or mushrooms will be fully nondual, infinite experiences. I don't need more than 125ug of LSD to take to me to full God-mode. With so many safe psychedelics to explore, I would leave dissociatives for last on the list, after you've explored 2C-B, DMT, 5-MeO, MDMA, mushrooms, etc. BTW, once you try 5-MeO, you will not want anything else. It is a psychedelic in a league of its own. It makes LSD seem like a toy (and LSD is no toy).