Leo Gura

Precisely because it's too direct. The problem with enlightenment is not that one can't do it, it's that one doesn't WANT to do it. To want enlightenment is to already be 50% of the way there.

@Serotoninluv Right, the key thing we're really saying is that reality is groundless. There are no fixed anchor points, except for the Groundless Ground itself.

@Serotoninluv Going even deeper, "different wavelengths of light" also do not exist. That is also a limited perception/interpretation.

@Gligorije You live pragmatically, just to survive and meet your basic needs. This is no way to live. This is like being a zombie or a slave. So of course that will lead to depression. It's a guaranteed recipe for misery. Imagine instead living as though you are inside a dream or a work of art. Full of wonder and passion at every turn.

@Widdle Puppy Nothing = Everything

That guy don't know jack about creativity. The whole key to creativity is that it produces entirely new things. Yes, it builds on itself, but true creativity is always new. Creativity created the entire fucking universe from scratch! Creativity is infinitely intelligent. P.S. And he's wrong about love too.

Time to upgrade to LSD If you're gonna be using substances, might as well use the best, purest, and clearest ones. The least addictive ones.

Happiness is being conscious of the magnificence of existence in every moment, your mind uncluttered with conceptual baggage and petty "human stuff". As a child, that was you natural state. Then as you aged, your mind was brainwashed and corrupted with the petty human concerns of your society and culture. To see the magic in every moment of existence independent of external conditions is what you really want. It's the only thing that will truly satisfy you. Which is where spiritual practices come into play. Spiritual practices help you to develop a metaphysical connection to reality, rather than the utilitarian, transactional mode from which you currently operate. As a kid, your mode of interaction with reality was non-transactional. Which gave you genuine joy.

It makes all the difference in the world. Take a psychedelic and see for yourself what you are missing out on.

@Joseph Maynor You have yet to discover God

It all depends. Of course the vast majority of people are not mature enough to handle enlightenment work. But you won't know until you try.

@PhilGR Good, keep at it. Contemplation is life-transforming. It takes some practice to do it well. Keep pushing for more depth. Get metaphysical on that bitch

You are God, just like everyone else.

@tsuki The trick is that the notion of "facts" is itself already theory-laden. To believe in "facts" is already to buy into the false idea that there is an external objective reality independent of the subject. What is a fact? That is a good thing to contemplate. The problem with facts is that they are always entangled with one's mode of perception or the questions one asks. This was the fundamental discovery of quantum mechanics: there are no actual facts. There are only responses to measurements. Change your measuring stick and the facts will also change. Facts are in a casual strange loop relationship with who you are and your perceptual system. Such that if we change your perceptual system, or your beliefs, we can change everything you consider a fact. The reason people disagree with and misunderstand each other so much is because they naively assume that everyone shares the same facts. This is false. A person at one level of development & consciousness will literally inhabit a different reality than a person at another level of development & consciousness. The mind is co-creating "the facts", but denies that it does so. This is a radical paradigm shift from the conventional materialist notion of reality. To put this very starkly, when you look at an object like a tree, there is in fact no tree there. You only see a tree because that's what your perceptual system pulls out of it. If you had a different perceptual system you would see something radically different in its place. The "actual" tree is in fact a cloud of infinite potential which crystallizes based on how your nervous system pings "it". You can get a taste for this by just walking around the tree and noticing that that tree "object" contains every possible angle from which you're viewing it. Such that what the tree really is, is all the infinite ways one can look at it (not just human, but all possible creatures).

Why mention the brain or chemicals? Whatever you do, you're using concepts to make sense of reality.

To the amateur, mastery and excellence look like randomness.

That is correct. The bias runs very deep. It is existential. But not so deep it cannot be undone. Our life's work is undoing this knot of self-bias.

Since it is infinite, there are no bad directions. All directions are equally great to it. I keep telling you guys that "bad" is a projection for your ego. Sit down and contemplate what "bad" really means when you say that word. It is an egoic word. Things only appear bad to you because you have a horse in the race. You are biased. But God has no biases because it has bet on every horse in the universe. But you bet on only one horse. If you bet on every horse in the universe, would you care which one wins? P.S. If it was not free to evolve in all the "bad" directions, it would not be truly free.

For you, a double dose of Green!

@herghly It doesn't matter. You don't focus on that. You focus all your attention on doing a nice slow quality breath. The timing will take care of itself. It takes however long it takes. Don't do yoga mindlessly. You must understand the intention and purpose of each technique. Learn WHY you are doing it, so then the technical details becomes far less relevant. The point of pranayama is to pull the prana up the spine. Everything else is secondary and must serve this end. Whatever that takes. Your top goal is to do the highest quality pull possible with each breath. Learn to think about yoga as though you are inventing it for the first time.

@NoSelfSelf Is looking into a microscope pure luck? Is weightlifting pure luck? Is doing math pure luck? Is learning to play guitar pure luck?

You blindly believe other people exist. 99% of all your beliefs are blind faith. So what's one more gonna do? No one is asking you to believe in chakras. Yoga is a practice. You do it and see what happens. It's like looking inside a microscope. No one cares what you believe. You just look in the damn thing with enough openmindness to accept whatever shows up. It might take you a few years of looking to really see what's there. In the meantime, be radically openminded. Notice, you never asked this question about all the current nonsense you believe. You just swallowed it gullibly. You never asked: "Why should I believe in the number 5? Does it really exist?" 99% of the things you think exist, don't. So what? Somehow you are still able to wake up in the morning and get things done.

@WorknMan That's not contemplation, that's mental masturbation. Contemplate that which is in your direct experience, like, What is suffering? And stop infecting your contemplations with scientific concepts. You have never seen estrogen. You may as well be talking about the Flying Spaghetti Monster. You are not being asked to quantify anything. Looking at what a thing is is not the same thing as quantifying it. These are two very different activities.

Right I visualize the prana flowing up to the crown chakra (very top of the skull). And that's where I try to focus. Although sometimes I just defocus instead of focusing up there. I don't count anything. I keep track of my pranayamas using the fingers on my hand. 4 fingers x 3 parts each = 12 = 1 set of pranayama. Use the thumb to point to each part of the fingers. I am not doing Navi or Om Japa as they take too much time and my routine is already over an hour long. I prefer to do more pranayamas instead. Navi might be good later on if you feel like you have an energy block in your 3rd chakra.

@Timotheus The entire universe is infinitely intelligent. Look, it's reading this sentence right now and understanding it! But that's just the tip of the iceberg of how smart the universe is. It was smart enough to create itself. Think about that for a moment. Then notice, you are the universe thinking about how it created itself! It really helps to reframe your entire metaphysics of what reality is. Rather than thinking of reality as a dumb box of bouncing balls, think of it as an infinitely intelligent disembodied mind. Once you make that reframe, it's no longer puzzling that the universe should be intelligent. Intelligence is just fundamentally what minds do. The universe was not born as dumb matter. It was born fully intelligent. Because that's what reality is! There is no option for reality to dumb, other than by acting stupid through application of infinite intelligence to trick itself. Rather than thinking of the universe as a thing which starts out at 0%, think of it as a thing which starts out at 100% and dumbs itself down. So it's not that intelligent apes evolved, but rather than infinite intelligence was dumbed down to create apes, ants, humans, etc. Imagine that God is a really good method actor playing an ape. That's you! The method actor is so good he can dumb himself down to any level below infinity, precisely because he is infinitely good. Another way to think of it this: try to imagine why the universe wouldn't be infinitely intelligent. And then realize, there's nothing that would stop it. So it became infinitely intelligent. And here we are. Everything exists because there is no one to enforce any rules upon reality. So reality overflows into an infinite number of directions and dimensions. When you realize that dumbness is equally as impossible as infinite intelligence, you'll understand why infinite intelligence exists. The question you should really be asking yourself is: Why did I ever assume the universe was dumb? Your mind might protest: "But how was intelligence created?" To which you should tell it: "But how was dumbness created?"