Leo Gura

You'd be surprised how well that can work. The trick is that you have to actually REALLY do the visioning and the wishing every day. It's not easy work. My changes of attitude about LoA concern its metaphysical foundations, which has almost no bearing on the practical application of LoA in everyday life.

@lucas_darby Try just sitting with the confusion and being very mindful of it, dropping the need to have the answer. It's easy to reject confusion. The counter-intuitive move is to bask in it.

@egoless There's good and bad news. The only enemy is yourself

I played it for many hundreds of hours as a kid. Helped to hone my long-range strategic thinking skills.

M.A.X. Deepest strategy game of all time: https://www.gog.com/game/m_a_x_m_a_x_2 P.S. M.A.X. 2 sucks

@egoless Congratulations! You have unwittingly re-invented Vajrayana Buddhism. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vajrayana Yidam visualization: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yidam Diety yoga: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vajrayana#Deity_yoga

Ahahahaha... That's cause you're still a dualist playing a nondualist God excludes nothing, not even exclusion. Keep contemplating, saucy Padawan.

@BobbyLowell Well, except for the hunchbacks.

@AdamDiC There's nothing wrong with selective focus for periods of time. Maybe for the next month you should just stick with meditation. Then once that habit gets locked in, you can come back and study other things.

@Ether It's like you're asking, "How come I'm not like Tiger Woods after a few hours of hitting golf balls?" If it was that easy, there would be no Actualized.org, no self-help, no psychology, no yoga, no religions, no spiritual traditions, no Buddha, no Jesus, no Ekhart Tolle. People would just sit down, shut off their mind, and all their problems would melt away as they died into Nirvana. The Buddha spent 7 years of full-time training to get there. That should give you some idea of what it takes to shut up the mind.

I'm not really interested in criticizing individual people or scientists. I'm more interested in science as a whole, as a culture, as an epistemic framework. My critiques are aimed at the epistemic framework which is governing all those people you talk about: Dennett, Krauss, Harris, etc. That said, all of them are dogmatic and wrong in various ways. I find it rather pointless to get into who is more wrong, or who is more dogmatic. That's rather irrelevant. What matters is that they have very obvious bindspots in their worldviews which could easily be corrected if they were more openminded and more willing to investigate the limitations of the scientific/rationalist epistemic framework. Dawkins & Dennett seem the most closedminded of the bunch. Dakwins especially is a crusader for materialism, without being conscious of just how mistaken his entire worldview is. I understand why he does it, but that does not save him. Harris has his own unique flavors of dogma. He's very wrapped up in rationalism, to a fault. His understanding of psychedelics is very limited. If he believes that consciousness takes place in a brain, well, he's very wrong about that. I'm not exactly sure what he believes, but a grasp of the Absolute nature of reality, and the inner workings of epistemology, he does not have. He's also very moralistic, which shows me that he is not conscious that all of morality and ethics is a human invention. Once you reach certain high levels of consciousness, it becomes extremely clear who gets it, and who doesn't. There are subtle but clear cues you can read off people. People who have never experienced such levels of consciousness cannot even imagine what they don't know and the cue they're giving of. A highly conscious person can read two paragraphs of any book written by a man and accurately gauge that author's level of delusion, consciousness, and grasp of reality. You can literally go down a bookshelf throwing 95% of the books into the trashcan after reading a page or two. This includes most science books and most of the works written by the people above. Sam Harris' book might be one exception which has some redeeming value because he's actually done some consciousness work. Although it only scratches the surface of consciousness. Saying "I don't know" is not enough. Beyond that there is actual consciousness of extraordinary existential truths. As far as I can see, none of these people has ever experienced Absolute Infinity. Which basically means that everything they think they know about reality is just a story. It works well for their audience who isn't very conscious. But it does not pass muster AT ALL with me, or anyone who's done serious consciousness work. A real yogi would just laugh at their ideas. The extent of their misunderstanding of reality is so massive, it would take a hundred hours to explicate it all. The mind is ingenious at self-justifying its worldviews and spinning air-tight-looking paradigms. It would take me a few years to write a book explaining all the ways in which such people are mistaken. And even so, such a book would just end up getting demonized by them. Don't expect such people to admit that they are wrong, no matter how much evidence you present or how well you reason with them. It's not a matter of reason. It's matter of self-preservation. Their entire lives and careers are at stake here. Their children's ability to eat is at stake. They would rather die than let that go. It's not their fault. They are not bad people. They are just not very conscious. As 99.999% of all humans aren't. Again, don't believe me. You must investigate the truth of things for yourself. I am just sharing my observations. If these people were really openminded, and we had like 10 hours, I could sit down with each of them and show them exactly where their metaphysics and epistemology is mistaken, and all the real-world consequences this has in their personal lives, professional lives, and their ability to understand mankind, history, science, evolution, medicine, religion, philosophy, mathematics, etc.

@AdamDiC Dismiss what nonsense? Meditation is just one component of development. You definitely will be missing out on a lot of stuff if all you do is meditation. That is not enough, and it will produce a lopsided, half-baked development. There's nothing confusing here. Meditate your ass off if you like, but also be learning and growing in other fields as well. This is just common sense. Meditation will not make you good in relationships, social skills, life purpose, career, communication skills, understanding of society, etc. Yes, meditation can be very powerful, but it shouldn't be your only tool. Self-help and nonduality are not really in conflict. They can dove-tail beautifully. Self-help doesn't have to mean that you drift from your mindfulness practice.

@Adam M Never re-dose during a trip. You're breaking protocol and that will come back to bite you in the ass one day. Being desperate to trip is asking for trouble. Decide on your dose ahead of time, then take it, and whatever happens happens. Do not re-dose. The point is to do a controlled experiment and see the full effects of whatever dose you decided on.

@realname Discover for yourself what is true. I'm just a guy sharing ideas.

@Samurai Y Well, you have to be wise enough to care more about truth than you do about people. Then, one day, you may discover that that will come full-circle Don't frame ordinary life as separate from truth. Rather, align your ordinary life with truth so that one reinforces the other. Talking about enlightenment all the time is not necessary. That's what I do because that's my job. For you, just do the self-inquiry and go about enjoying your ordinary life as best you can.

It's a rather loose term. But as you hit higher states of consciousness, you'll start to notice energy flowing through your body in weird ways. That's usually called Kundalini energy or Qi. Body energy work is an entire sub-domain of self-improvement. There's Reiki masters you can go to, energy healers, etc. They can actually manipulating the energy around in your body. It sounds New-Agey, but it's pretty cool when to actually experience them working on you. Stuff shifts for you. Energetic blockages are common causes of ailments like chronic fatigue, back pain, anger, etc. The body and mind are a highly interconnected system. Stop thinking of them as separate things. Most of your emotions transpire in your body, not your head.

@Edvard No... actually the situation with science is much worse than I have yet described. I have only pointed out the tip of the iceberg. The fact that people defend science so readily, just goes to show the depth of the problem. People defend science in precisely the same way that Republicans defend Trump or Roy Moore, or Catholics defend pedophile priests. It's not an issue of truth, it's an issue of self-bias and partisanship. Science is incredibly difficult to criticize and reform precisely because it is held by our culture as the one standard of truth that all sane, intelligent people agree on. But the fact is, 99.99% of all the science you know is purely hearsay, purely belief-based for you. It only feels truer than religion because it's YOUR particular brand of religion. And as you know, people defend their religions to the death. Well.... surprise, surprise! That's precisely what you and folks like Sam Harris are doing. You just aren't aware you're doing it, because you've set a double-standard for yourself which excuses all your unjustified, faith-based beliefs as "but that's science!" Science is an ever-evolving cultural norm despite it being highly useful for manipulating reality. Precisely because it is so useful, you are willing to defend it to the death.

@Soulbass There are literally thousands of body exercises to shift around energy and stuff like that. You could spend your whole life studying that field and still not know them all.

Let's see what tune you sing when someone pisses in your soup.

@Ether Yes, of course. You're free to do whatever you want. Just don't come here crying when you hate your life. Cause I will then say, that's just your opinion and you are free to suffer.

@Soulbass No idea what that is.

That is not real yoga. I'm not talking about physical yoga here. Yogananda's organization still sends out Kriya yoga instructions through letter mail. You can sign up for it. Although I think the book I suggest is better. It reveals Yogananda's personal techniques plus a bunch more.

@Greatnestwithin Search for "Kriya" in the Consciousness category.

@Max_V With that book, you could, because it is a step by step manual. But usually you'd want guidance. There are yoga centers all around the world. Probably even in your city. Sadhguru offers intiation trainings all over the USA for example. With yoga, you don't want to be lazy about it. If you're serious, it's worth going to a live training. It's a life-changing thing. You have to understand that the deepest things cannot be learned through videos.

@Greatnestwithin Yoga practices are usually kept secret and only disclosed through face-to-face training. Yoga is a highly technical art. You cannot learn it through videos. But lucky for you I have a book on my book list that discloses every secret Kriya yoga technique! It's a killer book. Could change your entire life if you actually do what it says. The only trick is, it requires radical openmindedness to comprehend.