Leo Gura

@mathieu Sometimes haters gonna hate. If you don't go out of your way to piss people off, usually it's not a problem. Just ignore it and carry on with your life purpose and consciousness work. If you are surrounded by haters constantly, change your surroundings. Don't stay in a place where you aren't appreciated for being you. See my video about Toxic Relationships. Cut those out of your life.

These are teaching aids. Pointing towards something transcendental. Don't take them too literally.

@sgn Yes, it sure seems that way when you've not awoken yet.

Guys, watch your projections, name-calling, and finger-pointing. The Devil is going a great job working this thread

If you're already dead, nothing can harm you. That's presently the case. But you're not aware of it. You believe you have something to lose.

@Ilya Sometimes you have to act your way out of neurosis. At other times you have to realize your way out of neurosis. Both are complimentary. Watch out! Good habits done too rigidly, too mechanically, become bad habits. The secret ingredient is consciousness. Meditating mechanically is not true meditation. You must advance to a point where you meditate consciously. It might take a few years of trail and error to start seeing the difference. Rather than thinking of it as meditation, start thinking of it as: BEING CONSCIOUS. Watch out for inventing mechanical ways to be conscious. That's the Devil playing this tricks. Doing one thing but calling it another. Aping consciousness is NOT consciousness, it's aping! See?? Try to sit right now for 5 minutes and just being conscious. No meditation. That's really what meditation is trying to get you to do. And YES!, you can allow yourself to be neurotic. Allowing is the whole point of the process. You must ultimately surrender to the fact that you have no control of anything. If you're being neurotic, allow it whilst maintaining as much mindfulness as you can muster. Get used to letting the ego play itself out. Observe it happening. See my Self-Acceptance video. It will help you with accepting what is. There's no use fighting what is.

It requires a very big commitment. You gotta be his guinea pig for over 6 months, doing his exercises every day, filing reports every week. If not for all that, I would do it. I've already got a lot of commitments. And I've already got a dozen different techniques that I could use for enlightenment. I don't particularly need any more. If one of you guys wants to take the course and report back to us, that would be great. I would be interested to know what techniques he's teaching.

1) Material success != personal development. 2) Successful people are not happy (see my video by the same title). 3) Don't compare yourself to others. You have a unique path you must walk. 4) If what you seek is material success, then studying a lot of personal dev theory can indeed be a distraction. Theory is a tricky thing. The Devil loves to use theory as distraction from action.

@Cudin I remember reading about his statistical claims on his Finder's Course website. There he explains what the 75% refers to. I'm not saying anything bad about Jeffery Martin. I'd bet his course is great. Just make sure you go in with your eyes open. People tend to get overly-optimistic about such things. The whole "come follow my spiritual practice and you'll get enlightened in 2 days" is the oldest marketing gimmick in book. If it was true, a lot more people would be enlightened in the world. Of course, enlightenment is easy, and enlightenment is hard. All depends on how you look at it. Don't make a limiting belief out of "enlightenment is hard". What I mean when I say that is that most people must go through a lot of suffering to attain it. And 99.999% of people fail. If it was truly easy, this wouldn't be the case. As you get deeper into this work, and discover the Devil within you, you'll suffer enormously, and then you'll be able to appreciate why so few people are enlightened, and why enlightenment cannot be mainstreamed. At least not in our current era. Maybe in another 1000 years. If you want to test this, try doing 16 hours of straight self-inquiry. "Easy" is probably the last word you'll use to describe that experience.

How can it not be so?, is more like it. All dualities must ultimately come full-circle. All distinctions must ultimately collapse. The distinction between absolute and relative is itself dependent on one's perspective. From the relative perspective, the absolute must be separate from the relative. From the absolute perspective, they must be one. Zero is infinity, infinity is zero. Nothing is everything, everything is nothing. Formlessness is form, and form is formlessness. Heads must be tails, and tails must be heads. You cannot separate one side of a coin from another. This requires an enlightenment experience to see. It's not going to make sense from your current level of consciousness.

He uses the term properly. The reason that good is so powerful is because it's based in some good ol' spiritual wisdom. Which is not to say that following it will make you enlightened. That's not the book's focus.

Enough nonsense. New video coming soon.

If you just sit and focus on observing "What is aware of this present experience?" for 16 hours per day for 100 days straight, you're almost guaranteed to get enlightened. Doesn't have to be in a cave. The trick is that no one wants to actually do it. It's the hardest thing in the world to do. But still, plenty of people have done it.

A) Jeffery Martin's method/course doesn't promise 75% success rate at liberation. It promises 75% chance of at least one nondual experience within 6 months of practice. That is a FAR cry from liberation. Make sure you're reading the fine print. Yeah, if you do 2 hours of daily concentration and meditation practice very rigorously, you'll probably have a 75% of getting a glimpse. Don't expect it to be a deep glimpse. I can promise you a 99% chance of a nondual experience within 10 minutes of taking 5-MeO, or 60 minutes of taking mushrooms. But that's a far cry from liberation. Not even close. B) The problem is you cannot demystify mysticism, because reality is fundamentally mystical. The attempt to demystify it is grounded in ego. The ego holds biases against acknowledging the deeply mystical nature of reality. That's not a problem for spiritual teachers to fix, that's a delusion for you to overcome in your awakening process. The mind thinks it knows where enlightenment will lead, but it has no idea. You're trying to correct a process you haven't gone through yet, based on false assumptions which the process will eventually rob you of. Egos have been reinventing the spiritual process for thousands of years, trying to make it more mainstream and adapted to the historical era in which the ego resides. Nothing new about that. This is the history of all religions. Making enlightenment "scientific" is no different than what any other religion does. Because you cannot ever symbolize enlightenment. So every teaching cannot be better than a metaphor. Looking for shortcuts tends not to work. Because if it did, most people would be enlightened. But they aren't. Because the ego will corrupt the process, no matter how short it is. The problem of enlightenment isn't with lack of a straight-forward process. It's with lack of willingness. Which is something no process can fix for you. If you really wanted it, you could go become enlightened in a few months. But you don't want that. It's too much for the ego to swallow. C) You're not going to find good statistics on enlightenment because it's so rare, hard to quantify, and personal. Just to make sense of the statistical data, you'd already have to be deeply enlightened. Maybe 500 years from now, we'll have such data, but not in your lifetime, so don't waste too much time worrying about it.

@Monkey-man There ain't no external world. That's just an idea. You're assuming it exists, when it does not, which makes your line of reasoning misguided.

@Zippie Don't you wanna know what reality is? Don't make this journey about yourself.

@zenjen It's only the beginning. You can be pretty sure your high will burst, and new lows will come. So watch out and pace yourself. Just keep doing the work. Things will improve over time. Sell your stupid gun before you hurt somebody with it.

@Alexo45 Just do it. That is the only way.

It's best not to conflate enlightenment with any material phenomena. Enlightenment, strictly-speaking, is an insight. It need not have any physical or emotional ramifications, although it might as an after-effect. As for consciousness work (which is a more general notion), yes, that includes energetic shifts.

@B Clear The mind gets stuck on this whole game of looking for "reasons". Don't forget that reasons are the mind's BS apparatus. You can't trust any "reasons" for anything. Reality doesn't depend on reasons for its functioning. Reasons are secondary, not primary. It's an activity of the monkey mind to justify itself to itself. If all reason were wiped out tomorrow, reality would continue to run as it has for billions of years. Human beings are the only creatures which seek reasons for existing. No other creature needs them. And they survive just fine. Look at the lions on safari. They are just happy basking in the sun. They don't need reasons.

@Serazer I'll have a video about this soon. But no, we do not agree that rapists are evil. Contemplate why you feel rapists are evil. Notice, it's only because they do things which thwart your self-agenda. If you weren't in the process of self-survival, nothing would be evil to you. And of course rapists obviously don't consider themselves evil. They are doing what they need to do to survive, just like any other organism, including you. Evil just boils down to selfishness. That's all it is. When you break the illusion of having a self, all the selfish actions of others will stop bothering you. Notice that selfishness only bothers you because it gets in the way of your own selfishness! Hating selfishness, is ironically, selfish! Evil isn't in you. Evil is the story you make up in order to justify your own selfishness.

@Ryan_047 Step #1: Create a compelling vision for your life. Step #2: Discipline yourself to start acting on it every day. You haven't taught yourself the basics of self-survival yet. So get that taken care of before you get too existential. Don't get stuck in mental-masturbation and self-pity. Go out and take lots of action. At your age, you have tons of energy and health, you need to be working your ass off every day. Build your foundation.

No! There is no point. And no value to anything. Your ego is still looking for a point. Hoping to salvage this. It cannot fathom what it would be like to live otherwise. That's why a leap of faith is required here. You are surrendering everything for nothing. Do not try to do a cost-benefit analysis on that.

Yes, good connecting of the dots here. That's what happens when you build something based on illusion. The illusion tends to collapse at some point. A lot of energy must go into maintaining the appearance of solidity despite the obvious fact that its an illusion. This is as true of our economy as it is our sense of reality. Both are illusions which we must keep denying are illusions. The ego, the economy, "reality", science, culture, religion, etc are all houses of cards. For a thing to exist, is for it to be a house of cards. That's how anything gets built. The mind sort of fantasizes it into existence through sleight of hand. If you insist on no houses of cards, you're left with absolutely nothing. Which isn't conducive to life because life is a commitment to somethingness.

@Akshay Try a few weeks of both and you tell us which worked better for you.