Leo Gura

There's only one thing, really: consciousness. Are you actually being conscious while you're meditating? How conscious? If you're thinking, you're not being conscious. If you're falling asleep, you're not being conscious. If you're lost in a day dream, you're not being conscious. If you're mechanically executing a technique some guru gave you, you're not being conscious. If you're whining and bitching and moaning about having to meditate, you're not being conscious. If you're waiting for the timer to ring, you're not being conscious. If you're eagerly sitting there waiting for enlightenment to strike, you're not being conscious. If you're bored, you're not being conscious. If you're suffering and struggling and ready to quit, you're not being conscious. Just pick one technique and go with it for at least a month. Then evaluate your progress. Don't evaluate your progress daily, but monthly.

That's what I call paradigm blindness. To be inside a paradigm is to be unable to see any other valid alternative. Paradigms are self-fulfilling prophecies. They validate themselves through confirmation bias while excusing and dismissing all counter-evidence as "not real evidence." What's not understood is that one's paradigm determines what counts as "evidence". Which is why you cannot argue a Christian, or a Muslim, or an atheist out of his belief that there is a God, or there is no God. No amount of reasoning will do the trick. Because the very mechanism of thinking has been corrupted by the paradigm. It's like trying to rid your PC of a nasty virus. A really good virus will disable all the mechanisms for uprooting it. It will block access to all administrative functions, it will disable CTRL+ALT+DEL, it will disable the task manager, and it will hide itself in a dozen different places so that you can never delete it. A really clever virus will infect your system so thoroughly that you will not even know you're infected because you will have nothing to contrast it with. And a clever virus will have you get passionate about infecting others with your virus all the while having you believe that you're not really infecting them, but rather curing them of other bad infections. That's how the Devil does his work. The Devil's first move it to make himself look like an Angel. He flips the script on everything so much that evil becomes good, and good becomes evil. If you think I'm talking about somebody else -- not you -- you're kidding yourself. This mechanism of corruption is actively at work in every single human being: especially YOU! And especially scientists. The more Nobel prizes they have, the more infected they get. Welcome to the world of epistemology

But they don't understand that "reality" is a theory! "Proof" is a theory. "Science" is a theory. "TIme" is a theory. "Space" is a theory. And all theories are NOT reality! The whole problem here is that there IS an Absolute. So a "this is the best we've got" approach is not nearly good enough. And it's not the best we've got. Human beings have been conscious of the Absolute for over 5000 years. The reason scientists aren't conscious of it is because they refuse to surrender their flawed paradigm. Scientists THINK they understand that theories aren't absolute. But they don't grasp the significance of that. Take a close look at people like Richard Dawkins, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Bill Nye, Lawrence Krauss, Sean Carol, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris. << These people claim to represent science but they have no idea what they are talking about when it comes to understanding the ultimate nature of reality. They are factually wrong. But good luck convincing them of their ignorance. The ignorance is so deep it's hard to even know where to begin curing it. It's like cancer of the entire mind. And precisely because the cancer is so total, it goes unnoticed. Every belief you have about reality is wrong. I don't think you grasp the significance of this.

What you're taking for granted is how much the materialist paradigm blinds the scientists. You cannot do an honest investigation into anything which your paradigm assumes as impossible from the outset. The issue with science is that it refuses to take seriously its implicit metaphysical assumptions. Science says, "Assumptions? What assumptions? Metaphysics? What metaphysics? We don't do any of that. We fairly investigate all of reality." No! You don't fairly investigate all of reality, you only investigate the stuff you think is real and only using the methodologies which agree with your existing paradigm. That is not objective, that's highly biased. To do science properly, one would have to have zero methodological preferences. Your methods and metaphysics literally limit what you can discover. You cannot discover a thing which you hold to be impossible. In such a case, the mind will just dismiss the discovery away by saying something like, "Oh, well, that's just a hallucination. It's just taking place inside a brain, so that doesn't count." I am not merely speaking about scientists not living up to some impossible ideal. I am making a point about a deep epistemic ignorance which permeates not only science but all human systems of knowledge. People do not realize how problematic their paradigms are. The enlightenment approach doesn't make sense. It's just TRUE. Truth doesn't care one bit about making sense, or about proof, or about convincing you. Truth is just what is true. It is actually impossible to access Truth through science because science is a symbolic system, and Truth is nonsymbolic. But good luck getting a scientist to understand that.

@AleksM Existence vs non-existence is a duality, a distinction. Reality is nondual. So all distinctions collapse. Since there are no boundaries in nature, every thing is made out of one thing: itself. (A strange loop.) That which exists, also does not exist. It's quite the mindfuck to look at a chair and realize: "Lol! It doesn't exist!" This takes a pretty big leap in consciousness to see. A good exercise to try is to sit down on your couch, take a pen in your hand, and stare at it for a long time, trying to notice that it does not actually exist. Try doing that on a psychedelic, otherwise it's really hard to see. You'll start to laugh once you see it. "LOL! Of course it doesn't exist!" It's the most obvious thing in the world.

Perceptions are to consciousness what matter is to empty space.

Most scientists seriously claim that consciousness takes place inside a brain and reduces down to nothing more than the firings of neurons. If you tell a scientist that paranormal phenomena are real, he will say you are nuts and tell his colleages to kick you out of the scientific community. If you tell a scientist that reality is mystical, he will call your a superstitious Creationist. If you tell a scientist that science doesn't access truth, but is a human invention, he will think you are crazy. There is an enormous difference between the ideals of science and the actual closedmindness of science. In practice science is not objective and it does not care about truth. It cares about doing science-as-usual.

@Nexeternity Thanks for the feedback

Yes, with every update I delete a few of the lowest books on the list so overall quality rises. I want the list to be tight.

@Finn If you get stuck like that, just skip that part and move on. Don't be perfectionistic. You can always revisit a part. The key is not getting paralyzed. That's the worst of all possible scenarios.

Eric Maisel has a lot of books around that subject.

The problem isn't so much about the eating of meat, it's about the way meat is obtained, through terrible factory farming. If you were in a rain forest hunting for wild birds, that would be a totally different story.

https://www.actualized.org/articles/grasping-the-illusory-nature-of-thought Clearly you need to start meditating.

Visualization is an ENORMOUSLY powerful tool when used right. Like any tool, it can be abused. It's not a matter of visualization vs meditation. Do BOTH! (at separate times)

@DnoReally Consider the possibility that the fabric of reality itself is intelligent.

@Monkey-man I will shoot a video about evolution soon. It's a deep topic. I didn't say 100% of all mutations are perfect. Obviously there are some bad ones. In fact, most of the random ones are bad. It's the intelligent ones that lead to progress.

@ZX_man The title says otherwise.

@RossE Good work!

The real paradox is that enlightenment is easy.

An appearance is that which doesn't exist, by definition. The problem is that you're attached to non-existence being some black void. No. Non-existence is the natural world. Look around you! You're inside of non-existence! Everything you see doesn't exist. That's what NOTHING is! Nothing is everything. You won't get this without enlightenment.

Of course. But it doesn't seem too hard. You can find guides online. You basically just chop it up, blend it up, boil it, and strain it. It's gonna taste nasty though, and mescaline almost always causes vomiting.

You can buy San Pedro cactus at Walmart, BTW.

Mescaline is supposed to be one of the most gentlest psychedelics. Although I'm sure it gets crazy at high doses. San Pedro cacti also vary in potency A LOT. Their mescaline content depends on the amount of sunlight the cactus got.

They don't.

No, it's ACTUAL dying. It's just that your paradigm shifts so much that you realize you were dead the whole time. The way to face that fear is with an overwhelming trust in Truth. You surrender to Truth until reality collapses and you just die. At the moment of death, you discover Nirvana. A peace and stillness the likes of which no human mind can imagine. It kills you with its beauty. It is infinite peace. Try to grasp it right now! You -- the thing which is conscious of all experience -- is death. You're dead right now. You just don't realize it. Death is conscious of life. Take a close look, if you dare