Leo Gura

@Vignan You're not getting it. Yoga is not done for that. Yoga is your escape from all that monkey business. You're not doing yoga to become a more effective monkey.

No, it's more like life purpose IS you acting out your karma, but in a more healthy way. You can think of LP as Karma yoga.

Jordan Peterson on anti-depressants? For fuck sakes! Oh the irony... Do NOT take anti-depressants! They will screw up your entire system and are difficult to quit and they solve nothing. Psychedelics will actually treat the root cause, like your dysfunctional psychology, your rationalism, and your energetic blockages. Yoga too. Of course fixing even ALL the aspects of your life will never make you satisfied. It is impossible. Real satisfaction only comes with ego-death. Which is something Peterson doesn't understand because he's too busy waging an intellectual war with his favorite enemy, the post-modernists. It would be funny, but for the fact that he has to take anti-depressants to feel satisfied and is encouraging his followers to do the same. This speaks to the fundamental incorrectness of his method and his understanding of the human psyche. This is the kind of bullshit that academia and rationalism produces. If you want happiness, do not trust academics to deliver it to you. They have no idea what happiness is. They are lost in a world of mental concepts, which is a breeding-ground for depression. There is only one way to happiness: consciousness to the point of ego-death. P.S. You will be far better off micro-dosing LSD or mushrooms than taking anti-depressants.

Good stuff!

@Elisabeth There is no point is entering a field for which you have no passion. It would as silly as entering a marriage when you already know you don't love the person. That cannot possibly end well. And it will affect your mental and physical health. Look, it is already happening. Going through with this PhD will ruin you psychologically. If you could construct any dream job your imagination could muster, without any limits, what would it be? What would you do if you had zero chance of failing and all the money in the world? P.S. I quit a 2 year degree in engineering for the same reason: it was too dry. It was a huge relief. That would have been a disaster if I didn't quit, even though I was a straight A student. P.P.S. Why don't you become a sage and awaken the world? This doesn't have to be complicated Some mushroom or LSD will show you the way.

@Noah Do a forum search. Someone asked your exact same question before and I gave some detailed answers. The username who started that thread was: Seed

@Epiphany_Inspired For you the doctor is prescribing a 30 days no-music challenge. Wear earplugs when you go the store, so no music enters.

@Vignan You will die, and so will all your goals.

As always, both.

That's cause you're still addicted to stimulation and that ego of yours is looking for some kind of escape hatch. Enlightenment is silence. Face it head on. FYI, some Kriya techniques will actually have you close off your eyes and ears with your fingers to deepen the silence. Some Kriya schools actually give you a specially-designed armrest to hold up your arms as you block off your ears. Or just use earplugs.

@TimeGoat If your goal is to start a Kriya yoga practice, start with the Kriya book. If you want to raise kundalini and open chakras without doing yoga, read the kundalini book. These are two very different approaches to the same basic thing. When it comes to spirituality, there are many ways to skin a cat.

By dying. There is only one thing which all humans fear: loss of self. And then that gets manifested in a million different ways. To overcome a fear is to die (surrender) to that fear. To accept it. To realize that your true nature is beyond it.

@electroBeam That is because your general level of awareness is still so low. It's sort of like you've walked into a dark room full of objects and complain, "Am I expected to see anything in here? Are you actually telling me there are real objects in this room?" To which the reply is, "Yes! Once you turn up the dial on the light dimmer switch." At the start of Kriya your awareness of your body and spine is so poor that you cannot even feel you have a spine. "Spine" is just an idea for you. You only believe you have a "spine" because some human told you so. After some months of Kriya, you will discover, "Holy shit! I have a spine! I can feel my spine for the first time in my life!" I find that even more important that visualizing (in Kriya) is feeling into things. Feel into your spine. Feel into your chakras. You're just extremely numb to feeling. That's the problem. You cannot feel anything subtle. In the same way that a heroin addict cannot feel subtle emotions of joy and love and beauty because he's zonked out of his mind on heroin.

Yup, that's how it starts. But that's just the tip of the iceberg.

@Seed The changes are a reaction of your mind against real growth. It's trying to erase the changes you've been making, so that you stay the same. Stay mindful, take it slow, and stay the course. Don't give in to your mind's trickery. It will come up with a thousand tricks to get you to fall back into your old self. Your job is to outsmart your mind.

@mohdanas Hatha yoga is best learned in-person. Every city has hundreds of Hatha yoga classes available. Just join one of them.

@mohdanas You might like Sadhguru's yoga. He also has several programs of Hatha yoga which dovetail with his core routine. It get the sense that is more health-focused than awakening-focused, which is why I went with Kriya. You'd have to go and get initiated and trained in person. You cannot get it from a book.

You just gotta do it properly. It's very hard to awaken when your energy is all screwed up and blocked up. You can read about people who have random kundalini awakenings and are traumatized by them. That's because they didn't know what they were doing. They probably weren't doing a good formal yoga practice. Yoga isn't just about quickly creating a kundalini awakening. Yoga is a gradual healing and purification of your entire energetic system. Which is arguably more important that having an enlightenment experience. You are going to feel so much better and more grounded when your energy system is purified. This goes to the heart of embodiment.

Very important. Concentrate during those last 5-10 mins like a motherfucker. The result you can expect is yoga: union with God. Inhale very slowly from left nostril Pause Exhale very slowly from right nostril Pause Inhale very slowly from right nostril Pause Exhale very slowly from left nostril Pause That is 1 cycle. Yes, close your eyes and look up at 3rd eye. During Om Japa, as I recall, you let the breath flow naturally. You don't control it. The most important part would be visualizing the energy flowing up and down your spine and through each chakra. Focus your limited attention on that. As you get good at that, I think you'll develop more attention capacity. You don't need to do everything perfectly at the start. You will get much better over the months. Just focus on 80% that really matters. Yes, I experience this problem too. You can decrease your need for oxygen by first taking 3 short breaths before beginning one of the long mahamudra breaths. You can also try quickening the rate at which you pull energy up and down the spine, so it doesn't take so long. And your Oms should be fairly rapid as you bend down and hold your breath. Building lung capacity is part of this whole practice, from what I understand. You have to learn to breath more deeply and consume less oxygen.

Of course that happens. Ego backlash is to be expected. Every complex system exhibits inertia, otherwise it couldn't survive. If you read The Big Leap, you're experiencing the upper limit problem.

All emotions serve a very vitual purpose: they are manipulations of the ego-mind to fulfill its survival agenda. The only reason you are alive is because emotions have kept you from dying. And so your very life hinges on them. You use them not only to physically survive, but even more importantly, to maintain your self-image. Which is precisely why Truth and ego-death is the scariest thing you can experience. Emotions are no joke. Emotions are the equivalent of someone holding a gun to your head and telling you to dance.

No, anger is actually different. Expressions of anger is not "you letting stuff out", it's actually you hiding from the fact that you were hurt. Anger is a sneaky emotion. It's not really genuine, even when it feels genuine. It's rooted in deep ignorance. Anger is the smokescreen of the mind. Like a squid squirting a cloud of ink to get away. Of course if you cry for manipulation, then that wouldn't be a healthy form of crying. Cry consciously.

@Sri Ramana Maharshi It still baffles me that 5-MeO is a thing. It's like God created a cheat-code to himself and stuck it inside a frog.

Not too much. It will naturally happen within the next few centuries as society evolves. All this information will become freely available to all human beings, ultimately. But not in this lifetime. I have little interest in waging a war inside of academia. That is a painful bureaucratic game. Although someone will eventually have to fight it. But that is not my life purpose. 1) Camera makes it look that way 2) These days, very few. I'm sort of outgrowing books. Most of my time is going into spiritual practices instead. It's very hard to find a book these days which doesn't seem like delusion, trivia, or something I already know. 3) Most days I meditate for more than an hour. I try to do at least 2 hours (if you include yoga and various other techniques I do). I'm not sure why you're making philanthropy a stage. It's no more a stage than being a cowboy is stage. There's nothing wrong with philanthropy, and I'm sure it could grow you in many ways, but it is in no way necessary. If you are attracted to philanthropy, then it's probably part of your Life Purpose, in which case, knock yourself out. For me, the influence I already have is enough. If anything, I spend too much of my time helping people. The next stage for me would be to go totally solo, yogi-in-a-cave-style. First, create a hopeful vision for my life Totally clean up my diet Exercise Bloodwork to make sure there aren't any chemical/vitamin/hormone problems Get a qEEG and schedule neurofeedback brain training Holotrophic breathwork Psychedelics Kriya yoga Nathaniel Branden's self-esteem exercises Reading lots of self-help books and implementing the various exercises given there Finding my Life Purpose and aligning myself with it Solo meditation retreats I don't practice that technique much. About an hour. That's a complicated question to answer. People can use those terms differently. Psyche is basically your entire mind. The ego. The self-mind. All of your thoughts and emotions and how they manipulate you into action. Consciousness and awareness are largely synonymous. Although some teachers will use those words in a more technical manner and draw fine distinctions. Consciousness/awareness is the only thing that exists. It is the substance of everything you've ever experienced. Replace your notion of "matter/energy/physics" with consciousness. Yes, it was a culture shock. It was challenging and definitely forged my psyche and persona in deep ways. Perhaps the most important thing it did was make me much more openminded. I saw the relativity of all cultural norms quite quickly as a result. Although I still didn't go far enough into realizing that physical reality is itself a cultural invention. No Hilo Hawaii isn't touristy. Just the opposite. It's important to know who the Admin and Mods are. Sorry, trade secret I have tried LOTS of stuff with little success. I think my issue ultimately boils down to a blocked chakra, which I will work to clear using various techniques. I think the issue should resolve itself with full enlightenment. I will shoot a video in the future about how to deal with chronic fatigue and thyroid issues. There's a lot to say. It's a very complex topic with many variables to consider. It's highly individualized. Autoimmune issues have many factors. One solution does not cure everyone. Maybe this one: https://www.actualized.org/articles/increase-your-results-from-self-help-products-by-10x It's an old one, but the info there is life-changing if implemented. It's actually impossible to construct a nondual language because all language is symoblic, and therefore indirect, and therefore dualistic. There is no language at the level of nonduality. No, I'm not interested in language. I am interested in escaping language. All language is a human invention and not fundamental. Faster? Sounds like you're already going fast. You've only seem the tip of the iceberg of crazy It's gonna get worse before it gets better, so buckle up and set proper expectations and have a long time horizon. All your fears -- all the stuff you can't stand, all your worse nightmares -- you must eventually face on this path. There is no way around it. You must face death itself. You must be willing to surrender EVERYTHING! Ultimately you will discover that all fear is just a hollow illusion. Your very death is just a sham. Your life is nothing but a dream, and all your problems are dream-problems, like the problems of a character in a cartoon. He's a great teacher.

Crying is good stuff. That's when you know the work has really begun. Also, with emotions, make sure you're deeply feeling into them, not just escaping them with a phony air of detachment. The problem is not that you feel too much emotions, the problem is that you don't actually feel them with full richness and nuance. Pay attention to when you're trying to escape an emotion -- and surrender the desire to escape it (as best you can). It's not easy. You won't always succeed at it.