Leo Gura

Yup, in San Diego. It was a growth experience for sure. But I still don't know which is better. I just know that I like spinal breathing, pulling prana up my spine. Sadhguru aparently doesn't teach that.

@Salvijus I've done his initiation. Then I replaced most of his techniques with Pranayama. Different strokes for different folks I guess. Yes, the question is not whether his yoga is good, but whether Kriya is better. I cannot say definitively, but I had to make a choice. I like Kriya more. But I have not done Sadhguru's advanced trainings, so I cannot speak to that. Maybe he has some killer advanced techniques? I dunno. Also, I interviewed one of his advanced students and when I asked him about enlightenment, he said, "I don't know what enlightenment is", which was a big red flag for me. I highly doubt most of his advanced students are enlightened. But I could be wrong. There is a big difference between doing yoga and being enlightened.

@onacloudynight All his books are good.

No, what I am trying to communicate to you is that Nothingness is existence. Nothingness is NOT non-existence. This is a very important point: Nothingness exists! You're still not realizing that non-existence is a concept, which is occurs within existence.

@Jed Vassallo Yes, it's not an easy thing to do. Which is why so few folks are enlightened. You should figure, if something is so rare that 1 in a million people have it, there must be a catch. And that's the catch. The good news is, there's nothing to fear about death. It's a marvelous thing. Your experiences of suffering were not death, they were life! Be careful not to project that onto enlightenment. Whatever suffering or fear you experienced, that was not enlightenment. Your entire post is an expression of fear. That is perfectly normal, but start to notice that it's just fear. You fear pursuing enlightenment, and you fear not pursuing enlightenment. Yes, that's normal. That will need to be resolved with time. Be patient. Allow yourself time. You are more powerful than you give yourself credit. The way out of your dilemma is to keep doing the practices and growing. As you grow, your fears will dissolve more and more, gradually. Do more trips and see that death is nothing to fear. Just because right now you feel that you are not strong enough to surrender, doesn't mean it will always be that way. Right now you are weak, but a month from today you might become strong. You don't know how strong you are yet. So don't worry about it too much. For now, just very practically, I would say: focus on your daily practices: yoga, meditation, self-inquiry. The beauty of yoga is that it will build up your strength and gradually dissolve your fears, so that surrender becomes easy.

@Jed Vassallo The Absolute is self-knowing. It's actually beyond knowledge or experience, you are it. You are the Absolute. You can't get any more direct than that. When you're at infinite consciousness, there is no doubt. Doubt is an activity of the mind. Yes, you can go to the Absolute and then fall back down into the relative. That's mostly what happens after a trip. But the Absolute was nevertheless the Absolute while you were in it. And really, it's still here. It hasn't gone anywhere. You're just disconnected from it. Like clouds temporary blotting out the sun. The sun is always there shining. Even on a cloudy day. Even if I achieved full Buddhahood, nothing for you would change. You would still not know if I was deluded or wrong. There is only one way for you to know the Truth, and that is to awaken for yourself. That is the only way. Yes, from your POV I could be wrong, mistaken, deluded. Then again, maybe it's you who are wrong, mistaken, deluded? I'll tell you what the rest of life is like after I live it. I am a work in progress and there is still much I have to discover about this whole process of awakening. But I can tell you for sure that the Absolute exists, and you can discover it for yourself, and it's more amazing than anything you could imagine.

Full lotus requires lots of stretching. Many probably not everyone can do it.

The books we're talking about. I think they can be life-changing, although personally, to me, I found his yoga not as potent as the Kriya we're discussing here. It probably gets more potent as you go to his advanced programs, but his introductory program didn't seem potent enough for my liking. It would make sense to me that he, being very responsible, would save the most potent techniques only for his most advanced students. And I don't like jumping through all those hoops to get the most potent techniques. I want something I can learn at home on my own. Hence I prefer Kriya. But this not to say you shouldn't do his programs or that his teachings are bad. He's knows what he's doing. He has to be very careful about taking his yoga to millions of people. At those scales, a lot of things can go wrong, so you have to teach very responsibly and focus on safety. Generally speaking, the more mainstream a teaching gets, the more watered down it gets.

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There is no such thing as non-existence, only existence. Non-existence is a concept existing in your mind. Consciousness, existence, and Nothingness are all the same thing, but this "Nothingness" is not non-existence, it is existence. Existence is, and it is empty. Then it can get filled with all kinds of forms, one of which is the concept of non-existence. Existence has no opposite. It only feels like it does because the ego-mind creates a conceptual "should", telling itself, "But why doesn't X exist?" But that is existence! "Non-existence" exists within existence.

@herghly Yes, that's usually what they do. I don't like that cause it's too drawn out and beating around the bush. I don't like watered down yoga. But hey, that's just me.

There is no such thing as non-being. Even after the body dies, you will still not escape being. Being is infinite and eternal. So you're stuck being whether you like it or not. So might as well surrender to it. By "Being" I don't mean "your life", or some way that you are, I mean the substance of reality. Experience - ego = Being It's not dumb. It's what is. Meaning and value are inventions -- and you are still obviously resisting this by playing these clever mind-games. You haven't yet become conscious of what Being or meaning are. Careful with that arrogance. It's keeping you from growing. You would greatly benefit from doing that exercise for a month or two. Yes, what we are talking about is switching orientation from living from the relative to the Absolute. Which requires becoming conscious that meaning is an invention of your mind.

@The Don Push yourself to socialize more. It's a skill that must be developed with practice. It's hard to solve this problem by sitting at home on your couch. Psychedelics can also be helpful. They will reveal to you how to be authentic. Then you can carry those lessons over into social life. I found mushrooms to be good for this issue. They make you more playful, uninhibited, and goofy.

Yes, it's a bit paradoxical. I like to experiment and tinker with stuff and do things my way. I accept the risks. For newbies I suggest you pick a book/school and stick with it. I don't think the differences between the two books is as great as it might seem. It's variations on the same basic thing. There are dozens of schools of yoga because in practice, people end up making tweaks and variations to suit themselves. Because most yoga is taught dogmatically, many schools sorta lie to their students that "You must do it perfectly the way I teach it, or it will not work". But this seems obviously false since there are many different masters from many different schools. So there's clearly some degree of leeway. The question is, when have you taken it too far? And that cannot be easily answered. You will only know by trail and error.

The key to happiness is awakening, the end of conceptualizing, and being fully present in the NOW with whatever happens.

Life is suffering from the ego-mind's POV. What the religious people meant when they said "Life is suffering" is "Ordinary materialistic life is suffering" and that this can be transcended with deep enlightenment. BEING is pointless, valueless, and meaningless. This is not an emotional statement. This is as factual as it gets. This is really not different from what physics would tell you: atoms do not have value or meaning. It's actually a very important milestone in the spiritual journey for you to realize that BEING is meaningless. The ego-mind creates meaning to enable self-preservation to happen. Suffering cannot end unless meaning is realized to be an illusion. Suffering comes from the mind's pursuit of meaning and value. Here's the 1st exercise from A Course In Miracles Workbook: Look around the room and notice that every object has no value or meaning. Like, you see a chair. What does a chair mean? Nothing. It's a very simple but powerful exercise. Keep doing it.

Yes, it's challenging to rewire your motivations. At deep levels of consciousness you realize that everything is pointless, valueless, and meaningless. So there's really no reason to do anything. And this can feel depressing and demotivating for a while. But that's true detachment. You just have to give yourself time and find ways to ground yourself. You can build up some healthy ambitions over time which are based on a higher purpose, even though you know purpose is an invention. It can be tricky. Make sure you give yourself time. Don't make any rash decisions or actions. And trust that if you're in a depressive funk, that will not last forever. You will pull out of it with time. The biggest mistake people make when they are depressed is that they assume this depression will last forever. It will not. I think the way this problem is overcome in a tradition such as Zen is through rigorous habits and discipline. After enlightenment, the laundry. It's a grounding exercise.

I do a mix of Pranayama 2 + the Pranayama described in Gamana's book. You can play around with different versions, the essence is the same. I like to visualize energy flowing up the spine to the very top of the head through all the charkas. I think the more precise your visualization gets, the better. Gamana says not to visualize the energy flowing up each chakra, but I feel it's more powerful to visualize it. I find that doing a detailed visualization also helps stabilize and focus the monkey mind. Experiment around and see what works best for you.

@MarkusSweden You are just wrong. You're still trying to reason this out intellectually, and that will not work. Stop theorizing and do the practices with an open mind. (Right now, your mind is not open.) The situation is the exact opposite what you think: Truth is all there is. There is no such thing as non-Truth. Non-Truth does not exist. The whole point of spiritual practice is that it IS possible to transcend experience. Experience is not all there is. Experience is a 2nd order phenomena. 1st order is BEING, which requires no experiencer. Experience is a dualistic notion, which is why it must be transcended. At higher levels of consciousness, experience will become recontextualized into Absolute Being. Nothing visual will change. But a radical recontextualization will happen once the ego is seen to be non-existent. You will realize that what you used to call "experience" was really Absolute Being the whole time, you just weren't conscious of it because the ego was in the way.

I would tweak that to say: the goal is to be joyful with whatever is. So if you're feeling crummy, be joyful about it. It sounds paradoxical, and it is, but it's not.

The why is, you want to feel good, feel complete. If you felt complete right now, you would not want anything. Notice that every day, you feel incomplete. Your entire life, you've felt incomplete. So you chase things which you think will make you feel complete. But it never works, because completeness is an existential insight, not a material object. This is because, you are disconnected from who/what you are existentially. Completeness can only come with existential understanding. It's sort of like if you imagined you should have 3 arms, but you only saw you have 2. So you'd go looking to acquire a 3rd arm to feel complete. But the counter-intuitive move is not to go chop off someone's arm and stitch it to your chest, but to realize: "Oh!!!! Duh!!! I should only have 2 arms! So everything is perfect! " Happiness is wanting exactly what you presently have. Unhappiness is wanting something you don't presently have. It's that simple. But not easy to really grok. The mind will not just surrender its wants. That requires enlightenment. Your very life is tied to your wants. The reason you want anything is because you want to stay alive. So the really counter-intuitive move is to say, "I want to die."

@TimStr Great report! Great work. Some powerful insights there. P.S. I don't advise 5-MeO for people who have never done milder psychedelics. AL-LAD is great for newbies but still very powerful.

Thanks ya'll. Lots of deep stuff to share coming soon. I'll post some videos of my retreat to the blog soon, and usual-style videos on Sundays.

For those of you into Kriya, I would highly recommend that in addition to reading the original Kriya book I suggested, you also read the books of Santata Gamana. I now prefer his more simplified techniques. It's a much more streamlined version of Kriya which I think will be even more effective. I found too much needless complexity and variety in the other way. Right now my technique stack is very simple: Mahamudra x3 Kriya Pranayama x24 Kriya Supreme Fire x3 One-pointed Concentration for 5 mins Eventually, with lots of practice, you should aim for something like the following stack: Mahamudra x3 Kriya Pranayama x36-x72 Kriya Supreme Fire for 10-20 mins One-pointed Concentration for 10-20 mins (Bonus: Yoni Mudra x3) (Bonus: Kechari mudra) EDIT: ideally, do this stack twice per day. But if you don't have that much time, at least once per day. Don't attempt to do this second stack right off the bat. It will not be sustainable. You need to gradually build up to it, like with heavy weightlifting. I think the original book I recommended is still very good as an introduction and foundation because Gamana's books are so short and thin that they do not provide enough information about Kriya to a total newbie. They are aimed at people who have already been initiated in one school or another. If you are strictly following the original book, that is okay. You can keep doing that if you want. Or you could switch to this more streamlined version like I decided to do. I don't like learning too many complicated techniques. But that's just me. Both ways should work in the end. It's mostly a matter of style. Although I actually think the streamlined version will end up to be more effective because it concentrates your limited time on the most powerful techniques, and less time is wasted on learning new complex techniques.

https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2018/03/wild-wild-country-the-mindboggling-story-of-the-cult-next-door/555791/ This should be an interesting watch. Sounds like they have some rare behind-the-scenes footage. Haven't seen it yet, but sounds like Osho fans will be disappointed, although I doubt the documentary makers understand the power of what enlightenment is. How could they unless they have awoken themselves? P.S. I am still waiting for you guys to buy me my first Roll's Royce