Leo Gura

@MarkusSweden There was never a sub-forum for politics. I think it would be too much of a distraction as people get very heated and ideological about it, and it ends up worsening their consciousness. This doesn't however mean that politics are unimportant. Government is a very important facet of life. Just not in the way that people discuss it on TV news or online forums.

@Charlotte Sounds like Matt Kahn is your savior.

That's a non-issue. Learn to be independent. Why are you letting your gf's ignorant opinions influence your spiritual path? You can find DMT which has been extracted using harmless, organic solvents.

I'm seeing too much cockiness on this forum. This is going to come back to bite you in the ass. This work is much deeper, broader, and more nuanced than you guys think. Just trust me on this. No one here is even close to mastery level.

@Faceless So do it un-mechanically. By your logic the most advanced yogis, monks, and Zen masters would be unconscious mechanical zombies merely because they have strict daily practices. Mechanical routines CAN stifle consciousness when mindlessly executed. But they don't have to.

@MarkusSweden It's fueled by money and corporate interests, which are money. But avoiding news is also not a viable option. You need to be an informed citizen. The better alternative is to subscribe to high quality news sources, serious publications rather than flimsy partisan ones, and to read books by serious authors and investigative journalists. There are many great books which expose the problems with society and government in a way which you will never see or hear on TV. Democracy hinges on a well-educated populace. Which is precisely why we see the current "fake news" epidemic and Russian disinformation campaigns. This problem is going to get worse before it gets better, so now is the time to increase the quality of your news sources. The next decade is going to be rocky as far as disinformation goes, so brace yourself.

@Kevin Dunlop By practicing consciousness and love every day. You must have practices in place every day which build up your consciousness and ground you in the Absolute.

Psychedelics come with some serious risks. If one is unwilling to accept the risks, one should stay away from psychedelics.

@Shin This too shall pass. Don't call it depression unless it has persisted for 6 months+ What you're describing is a temporary meh-state. The key to dealing with such states is to reassure yourself that they are only temporary. And then just try to enjoy it. You don't need help. You just need to allow what you're feeling.

@Alien It's a prerequisite of being alive. Nature is brutal. It will kill you really quickly if you're not selfish. At least to start with. Later selflessness can emerge upon the foundation which selfishness built. The problem is, people really take life for granted. Life is such an amazing phenomena! How a creature is able to stay alive for 10, 30, or 70 years is totally remarkable and baffling! It's no easy feat of engineering. Ego was the solution to that engineering challenge.

@Patang Good job! Have you reached the Absolute?

One way would be to do a daily yoga practice and purify your lower chakras, which are responisble for base cravings like sex. Another way is to burn thru some karma by having lots of sex and becoming aware of how unsatisfying it is. Another way is to alchemize your sexual energy into a big important creative pursuit like your life purpose. Another way is to experience God through a deep psychedelic trip, which will rewire your drives in life away from petty materialism.

There are many dogmas. Not one, but dozens. Start off by reading Rupert Sheldrakes book about science. He enumerates some of them there. Not ALL scientists of course. I am speaking about general trends. Like if I were to say that most religious people are dogmatic. That would be true, even though some relgious people are deeply enlightened and non-dogmatic. Generally speaking, the same criticisms one can make of religion, one can make of science. Only the content will be different. For example, most scientists believe evolution is purposeless and unintelligent. This is a dogma. The evidence indicates just the opposite. As another example, if you start talking about paranormal phenomena to most scientists, they will dismiss you as a crackpot. But in fact the evidence for paranormal phenomena is massive, if one is openminded and willing to abandon the materialist paradigm -- which of course most scientists are not willing to do, so they have no option but to dismiss the evidence as crackpottery and illegitimate. It is a dogma of modern science that no paranormal phenomena are possible because there is no model to account for it. This dogma is held a priori, without empirical investigation.

There could be a meta-self which persists across indvidual lifetimes. This meta-self might purposefully stay hidden during the present lifetime so as not to interfere with the lessons that this lifetime is supposed to teach. Sorta like how you can go to a movie theater and watch several movies back to back. But each movie stands on its own as a self-consistent world. But you can still think about all 3 movies and draw lessons from all 3 of them combined in a sort of meta-analysis. This meta-self could even be responsible for deciding which world/life it will inhabit next in order to gain the necessary lessons. For example, your meta-self might decide to become a crippled child or the next Hitler. So it could learn the joys and struggles of that. Just a theory. I suspect the universe might have a higher purpose of self-understanding which surpasses anything the human mind can conceive of. After all, if you were God, your #1 priority would probably be to understand yourself. But this is a tricky problem for God because God is infinite. So God is then in a sort of prepetual struggle of self-understanding. I have become conscious of certain things which fit with that vein. For example, I've become conscious of why everything is happening as it is. Or why humans are as they are. But it is such a multi-parallel understanding that it cannot be articulated or even thought. I can't even think it to myself let alone explain it. Imagine for example a mind which is 1 billion times more powerful than a human's, and what kinds of things it might understand. The possibilites are quite radical. It helps if you start thinking of human understanding of the universe as ant-like.

That's key the lesson of epistemology: you do not know who to trust. And you don't even know if you can trust yourself. Hence you must investigate all these matters for yourself from scratch with a totally open mind and see what your investigation will reveal. If you assume ahead of time that you know what will be revealed, that is a mistake. That's closedmindedness. So, for example, if you've never tried a psychedelic and you think you know what it is or isn't, you've made an epistemic blunder. Because nothing can be know a priori without 1st hand investigation and empirical validation. This sort of mistake is extremely common even among the most intelligent of people. You cannot even know that 1+1=2 until you sit down and actually do the math and see what's what for yourself. Hence Actualized.org teachings are not to be believed, but investigated and validated or falsified by YOU, personally, intimately, using utmost care.

Correct. Science is a very general method. You even use science to determine how to troubleshoot your PC or how to best take a shower or how to have anal sex. Yoga and Vipassana are sciences, even thought they aren't formally considered as such.

@Outer Stephen Hawking, for example is a major scientist. Or Sean Carol. Or anyone else. You haven't investigated this issue deeply enough. Philosophy of Science is a very nuanced and deep topic. Stay humble and open. There is way too more this nonduality stuff than meets the eye, or than most nonduality teachers teach. The applications of nonduality are very far-reaching. Just be willing to investigate rather than arguing. Be thought, patient, and careful in your research. Go read 20 books about epistemology and philosophy of science. Take a few university courses on it. Then we can talk further.

@Jedd Definitely get Novocaine. Hope you feel better.

@StephenK Mouse and I don't really disagree on much. It's mostly just a difference in emphasis and style. He wants you to take a very narrow approach, pure neti neti -- because that's the approach that apparently worked well for him. There is value in that if your only concern is the direct pursuit of the Absolute and nothing else matters to you and you are 100% motivated to get to the Absolute. For a few people that will work. But for most people it will not simply because they have a lot of psychological obstacles to deal with first and they won't resonate with neti neti. Each path has its pros and cons. And then there are issues outside of the domain of strict nonduality, like epistemology or philosophy of science or mastering your emotions or how to be a good human being or what you should do with your life... none of which will be adequately addressed by neti neti or any other one method or teaching. The fuel of all these spiritual debates is that one person tries to push his spiritual path onto everyone else because he feels his path is the best, assuming it will work for everyone else. This assumption is totally false. But that doesn't stop the person from trying because he's a firm believer in his one path. Because most people haven't seriously walked multiple paths and they have been radicalize by one teacher or another and turned into zealots. There's nothing new about this. It's been happening since the dawn of time. Everyone believes their path is the best and should be adopted by everyone else. You have to appreciate that reaching enlightenment is a totally separate matter from effectively teaching and spreading enlightenment. The greatest spiritual achievers are not necessarily the greatest spreaders and teachers. The teacher has to meet the student where the student is at. And many enlightened people don't know how to do that. In the same way that the best physicists are rarely the best physics teachers. To whittle all of life down to neti neti is extremely short-sighted in my opinion. And as a teacher, it doesn't make sense to me. As a teacher, I have to be open to a variety of tools and methods. There are SO many amazing tools for raising consciousness and personal development that I would never want to abandon them all for neti neti. Some spiritual paths are very narrow, emphasizing only the Absolute. Other spiritual paths are very broad, emphasizing diet, right conduct, compassion, psychological development, paranormal abilities, right relationships, etc. Neither one is best. There are tradeoffs to each and you have to choose for yourself which is right for you at which time in your life. Personally, I employ both types of teachings, narrow and broad. I find both incredibly worthwhile.

@Emne Depends on how deep and pure your LP was to begin with. This sort of question is best left open. Walk the path and trust that it will all turn out for the best. Your LP will evolve and perhaps radically change. And that's all good, as it should be. @Nahm Great answer. That's exactly it. Really, no different than before enlightenment (if you were careful to think about how life works). It should have been pretty obvious that with death all accomplishments get wiped away, so they are of course purely relative and self-justifying. Life is just one grand jerk off session. Exactly as it should be. Therein lies its beauty.

It's not bunk. It accurately predicts certain kinds of patterns within this dream. Which is good and useful. Not everything needs to be about escaping the dream. There's a time and place for escaping the dream, and there's a time and place for exploring the dream. You don't want either/or, you want BOTH!

@Joseph Maynor Dude, notice your black and white thinking. That's not gonna cut it in this work.

No, the problem precisely lies with dogma within their narrow fields of specialization. Name me one major physicist, neuroscientist, evolutionary biologist, psychologist, etc. who isn't dogmatic.

High quality science is a specific thing. It is openminded and dogma-free empirical investigation of the patterns within the dreamscape. This is a very valuable and necessary thing. Don't just dismiss everything as a dream. Nuance is important.

Of course real high-quality science is not in opposition to spirituality, and vice versa. Science just needs to be purified of its metaphysical dogmas and to clearly understand its limits. That's all. Science has always been corrupted by dogma, and it will continue to be for centuries to come. Science is in the process of weeding out its own dogmas. But this process takes millennia because people are so stubborn. In the next few centuries nonduality will to incorporated into science, and after that happens, every scientist will say: "Duh! Of course the universe is nondual. Those scientists in the 21st century were just stubborn materialistic fools."