Leo Gura

He was a she, but yes.

@Sahil Pandit Watch out of bears. I had a bear creep up on us in the woods while tripsitting a friend.

Chimp wants his metaphorical banana

@Serotoninluv That's just cause you're still at baby doses and you have lots of prior experience. 25mg will be a totally different beast. And at 30-35mg God will skull-fuck you to death. It will be the mindfuck that ends all mindfucks.

Of course nature pulls at our heartstrings. There is something innocent, beautiful, and powerful about it. Nature reveals the pettiness of most human aspirations and chimpery. Nature is awe-some and gargantuan beyond the mind's ability to comprehend. Which is why people love looking at sunsets, mountains, rivers, and the night sky. The human brain is actually hardwired to connect with nature on a spiritual level. They have verified this in the lab by showing people line drawings of some hills, a stream, and a tree. This picture is universally preferred over pictures of city-scapes, for example. Your brain actually releases pleasure chemicals just from looking at nature. It should also be easier to get enlightened out in nature, for this reason. But also, don't confuse an awesome emotional moment out in nature with a true enlightenment experience. A true enlightenment experience is so big and out-of-the-realm of conventional reality, it's in a league all on its own. Your experience was probably just 0.0000001% of what a really deep mystical experience can be like.

@Dodo You're never going to get an absolute perspective, unless you're at the very peak of an epic enlightenment experience -- and even then, there would be no self and no universe at that moment.

Learn focus. You will not actualize anything unless you learn to be specific, concrete, and focused. This is not in conflict with having a high-level, abstract vision.

Reading books is not a replacement for spiritual work, it's only the beginning. This whole debate is like a group of doctors debating: Should we read books? Or practice surgery? Of course BOTH!

Cut the gossip. Do your work.

It's important that people know who the Mods are. And as for me, well, people know me too well already to not be biased by what I say.

@Echoes Exactly. But the point is, you cannot know that until you've read at least 50 books. The point is, you do not know which sages are truthworthy until you've read about 50 books. And even then, it's dicey. And that week of direct transmission of energy in the ashram will do you jack shit when you come back home. The wisdom learned from books at least sticks around in your head and gives you daily guidance.

I disabled the reputation notifications yesterday. I didn't even know that was enabled until you guys mentioned it in this thread. That's obviously over-the-top distracting.

No, just the opposite. Derrida's philosophy fails to go far enough. Buddhism takes deconstruction much further. Derrida is the exact opposite of "clear". I mostly just brought him into the picture as a segue into negative theology and nonduality. And I wanted to share his insights about language, which are quite nifty. And I wanted to mount a critique of Western intellectual tradition as a whole, for which Derrida is a nice launching point.

As Shinzen Young once said, "Next you'll be asking, Am I allowed to breath?"

Wow! Lots of opinions on this issue. I've read them all and will take them all into consideration when making my decision. As of now I'm leaning towards pulling the trigger and killing the entire reputation and Thumbs Up system. We can give it a test run for a week, and if it really sucks, we should be able to go back to the old system ats any time without losing data. Changing 8000+ usernames is not an option. Usernames must remain as they are. And it's important to be able to distinguish usernames for purposes of weeding out spammers and trolls. It's too hard to police randomly generated usernames. Some of your other suggestions are also not technically feasible. While reality may be infinite, this forum software is anything but. Daily posting limits are doable. We could set of limit of like 5-10 posts per day, to keep people from mentally-masturbating too much. It's a rather radical limitation. Not so sure about this one. Part of the problem would be that there won't be any clear indicator of how many posts you have left per day, and most newbies wouldn't even know there was a limit. It's very rare that forums has such strict posting limits, so it would be counter-intuitive and confuse most people. They would bitch and moan about not having enough posts. And ironically, that would only eat up more of their posts. The "Featured" status is not dependent on reputation or likes, that is a tag which Mods must manually apply. So that isn't going away. 5-star ratings at the top of each thread are also an option.

Changing usernames has been disabled for over a year. Username changes are definitely not allowed. (Way abused feature). Of course you would say that, you're merely a Babbling Baboon

@Max_V The member's post count stat (basically the only one which would be left), would reflect how long the member has been active on the forum pretty accurately. It's hard to fake that number.

@NJM50 Yes, I think that's possible, but the chief sin is the social proof which accrues via the Thumbs Up on individual posts. The idea is: It might be refreshing to read a thread with just pure text, no likes of any kind distracting you. No thought of checking who liked what. No thought about deciding which posts to like. You'd just read the text and judge for yourself, rather than relying on social proof, which is rather lazy.

Derrida is best plugged

@Psyche_92 That is the challenge of life purpose work. Just stay mindful of it and carry on as best as you can. Pace yourself, but don't go too slow. Keep reminding yourself that trusting in your highest self will be worth it.

We already discussed this topic last week. Watch your gossip and projecting. The fact is you do not know any other person's mind. So focus on your own psychopathologies. Any nondual school can be easily shown as a cult to a casual observer by cherrypicking things. Nonduality sounds insane to any ordinary person. If you spliced together snippets from all my 300 videos and showed it to a psychiatrist, he would call me an insane dangerous narcissistic psychopath and recommend immediate clinical intervention. And of course, if Ben turns out to be a Zen Devil, that shouldn't surprise anyone either. Plenty of them around. By now you should be aware of the infinite trickery of the mind. No one is immune. NO ONE!

@Sletty Good! You're asking the right questions. Very, very simply: "physical reality" has precisely the same ontological status as last night's dream. If you want to claim that last night's dream was "real" and "objective", go ahead. But my guess is, that's far from what you're trying to do here. You're trying to cling to duality. Objective/subjective is a duality which must collapse. Science is utterly inadequate to lead you to Truth. But it's good for manipulating the dream. All of existence is a farce. That's the essence of enlightenment. Yes, you need to come to terms with that. And you ain't gonna like it at first. Whatever you've experienced with Vipassana practice so far, is like 0.0000001% of the radicalness of Absolute Infinity. It will destroy the floor beneath your feet. Life as you know it will cease. You will be dead from that point on. Maybe try a strong psychedelic to blast all your resistances away. You are too stuck in your own logic and it doesn't sound like you will make it out without serious help. BTW, if you're doing Vipassana properly, you should be clearly seeing that "brain" is just a concept. What is this nonsense abstraction called "brain"? It doesn't hold water. There is no such thing in your direct experience. It's just a dogma. Look very closely.

@Joseph Maynor You've also been influence by McDonalds Doesn't say much.

@Deep Limiting belief. I've personally met plenty of enlightened people who live a normal Western lifestyle, have sex, have kids, go to work, etc. You don't need to live in a cave unless you want to. P.S. If enlightenment ends up creating less bankers, good riddance! That's sorta the point. "Conscious banker" is an oxymoron. Hopefully that banker would quit long before enlightenment.

@Jonson As close to raw organic whole foods as possible. Try as much as possible to avoid: Proceeded foods Packaged foods Sugar/Syrup Processed meats Products containing wheat Non-organic fruits/veggies Soda Junk food Candy Fried food Blackened food Transfats Artificial butters/oils Artificial colorings and chemicals Products containing dairy: milk, cheese, butter, etc.