Leo Gura

@tarek1945 Not so fast! You've only scratched 1mm into the surface. Are you conscious of what you are? What are you?

@Epiphany_Inspired Blah, blah, blah... Monkey mind, monkey mind, monkey mind... Sit down and discipline yourself. That needy ego has made you weak and soft and fearful. Stop feeding it. Now is where the mind needs to realize the limits of thinking, and just start taking action. You're not going to think your way out of this. When you're this weak, your creativity is lame.

What do you actually want your life to look like? Why do you hate those jobs? Get very clear and specific. No vague, bullshitty answers. Contemplate deeply here! P.S. Buying a house when you don't have your work situation handled is a terrible strategic move. If you can still back out of the house purchase, that might be wise. I always try to keep my financial commitments as low as possible, so I have room to change my life. If you lock yourself into a bunch of stuff: house, marriage, kids, expensive car, job, etc. You're gonna have very few options.

@electroBeam Of course all 10 values are not actively at the top of your mind 24/7.

@Rocky What you're talking about is sentience, not consciousness.

@Max_V Contemplate the source of the fear. Why is it there? What are you really afraid of? What are you hiding? Fears need to be made conscious and then faced. Facing a fear blindly isn't so good.

@Echoes It's not a nightmare. It's a work of high art if your mind is clear to see it. No, the Buddhists talk of other hell-realms. Way, way, way worse than Earth. You don't want to visit there. Humanity ain't so bad after all.

@bobbyward I'm actually a fan of Spira's. He's very good. The teachings just need to be properly understood and put into full context.

@vikisss1 No, flow state is another thing. You can be in flow state playing video games or watching TV. So it doesn't say much about your quality of consciousness. You can teach yourself to get into flow state doing pretty much anything. Flow state is nice, and it can be one clue to your LP, but it's not the only factor. You could be in flow state raping corpses.

@Shubh_5S I would recommend doing something like a solo journaling retreat. Isolate yourself for a week from all addictions and distractions and just sit there and be by yourself. Think things through. Get clear about what's going wrong in life and why you keep shooting yourself in the foot, and what you really want for yourself. Be kind to yourself but also try to kick your worst additions as soon as is reasonable. Your goal now should be to relax and stabilize. Find your grounding. You can use personal development to fix all those issues, but you have to do it in a grounded way, with patience and a long time horizon.

It's a paradox. It's dead serious, until ego death, after which point, it's all a joke. Seriousness is a function of ego. And yet one can still be serious without ego. Try laughing at your own death. Kinda hard, eh?

@Mike Bison You're thinking of consciousness as human awareness. That's not what is meant when we say everything is made of consciousness. What's meant is more like: The substance of everything is no-substance, which is consciousness. Think of consciousness like atoms making stuff up. Except the atoms themselves have no qualities whatsoever. And therefore, they cannot even be called atoms. And there is not many of them, but one. Look at your arm right now and notice that it's not made out of atoms or "physical stuff". It's made out of consciousness. Right now! Do it. Touch your arm and feel consciousness. That's it! Right there! Your entire visual field made of consciousness. Look carefully at it.

@unknownworld I don't say they're invalid teachings. I just make fun of the way newbies misinterpret them. Buddha was definitely seeking. He sought so hard he nearly starved himself to death. You cannot even begin to appreciate that kind of seeking. Seeking is the whole path! You seek until you can seek no more. Telling people not to seek is worse than telling people to seek. The oldest Indian scriptures tell us to seek like our hair is on fire. What the Buddha called the Middle Path would make you shit your pants, it was so hardcore. Don't go romanticizing the Buddha, or Jesus, or Mahavira, as some softy Ekhart Tolle figure. They were certainly not that. The non-seeking is the organic END RESULT of seeking! You cannot skip the seeking part and go straight to non-seeking. Your logic is so silly! It's like saying, "Don't go to school to become a doctor. You already are one!" Yes, it's true, once you're a doctor, you no longer need to work hard at being a doctor. Of course! But you don't tell that to newbies. What you're doing is taking a nuanced piece of advice -- "Stop seeking" -- which was meant for highly advanced practitioners and hardcore seekers who've been seeking for years like their hair was on fire, and you're dolling it out to newbies who haven't truly seeked a day in their lives because they are so addicted to internet, TV, food, porn, shopping, success, family, work, ideologies of all kinds, etc. and expecting that to help them get enlightened. Well, it will have the opposite effect. All nonduality pointers and advice is contextual and individual. You need to match the medicine to the disease. The mind entangles itself in many ways, both to the right and to the left on the spectrum. The advice is only useful when it helps people mitigate their personal excesses. Excess of seeking is NOT most people's problem today. Complacency is the overwhelming problem. The proof is always in the results. If the Neo teachings worked as they are advertised, the whole world would be enlightened. And yet we have Trump for president. So it just doesn't pass muster. So much for Tolle's New Earth. The New Earth might turn out be nuclear winter. The problem you, and Ekhart Tolle and Rupert Spira, have to explain is why the whole world isn't enlightened, if no seeking is required. And also why the vast majority of the most-enlightened masters where such hardcore seekers that they abandoned their careers, houses, wives, and children. This whole non-seeking debate is just absurd. Just factually false and confuses newbies. The problem is not that they're trying too hard, it's that their trying too little. The 100 million Ekhart Tolle fans out there are trying too little. Which is why they aren't enlightened and don't even have a clue how serious enlightenment is. They are dabblers. And that's fine. But don't go spreading that dabbler mentality around here. You can go to Ekhart Tolle for that.

@username It might help you do your inquiry on paper. Journaling it out. Like Jed's spiritual autolysis method. If you're a conceptual person, you need to get all the bullshit concepts and pet theories out of your head. Writing them out on paper can help.

You have no idea what you're in for yet with enlightenment, hehe. It is your very death. All your fears << now there's something worth being skeptical about! Who'd of thunk! Isn't it interesting that "skeptics" are skeptical about everything but what's going on inside their own minds and bodies. Hmmmmm... is that just an accident?

@SLICKHAWK You'll never have 90 Rolls Royces with that attitude.

I wouldn't be surprised to see a photo of Sadhguru helicoptering into Osama Bin Laden's hideout with a grenade launcher and a big shit-eating grin on his face.

Time is much less important than quality. 20 minutes of high quality is better than 3 hours of sloppiness. So tighten up your practice if you are past the newbie stage.

@username I find that self-inquiry is quite difficult. Meditative techniques can be more effective for getting first glimpse. For example, mindfulness meditation with labeling is how I got my first glimpse. But that glimpse was nowhere near as deep as is necessary. Still, an important step. No matter what technique you do, you need enormous focus and momentum to break through. Just doing a few hours per day is not enough in most cases. You need overwhelming momentum. Like 100 hours straight of self-inquiry or meditation. Non-stop, non-stop, non-stop. That's when you really have a decent chance of a breakthrough. At least that's been my experience. If you just want a glimpse, psychedelics make it SO ridiculously easy. You can accomplish in 10 minutes what you couldn't accomplish in 2 years. Yes, dabbling in techniques will get you nowhere. Eventually you gotta pick one and go balls to the wall with it. Doing retreats is the key to breakthroughs. The stuff you do at home is child's play by comparison to the work accomplished at a retreat. Stick with it. Remember, it took the Buddha 6 years. And he was going at it HARDCORE. If you're really serious, you need to be much more hardcore with your practice. Most of ya'll here are WAY too soft and lazy. You haven't yet felt what true seeking feels like, where your mind is ready to explode from effort. All those Neo-Advaita people like Ekhart Tolle and Rupert Spira have filled your minds with fairytales of effortless instant enlightenment. Common sense should tell you that if it was that easy, every damn fool would be enlightened.

The problem is that you're putting the cart before the horse. If you care about consciousness, you first gotta experience the depths of it, before you make plans for how computers may play into it. It's sorta like you have found a magic egg. You don't know what will pop out of it once it hatches, but since you know chickens pretty well, you assume it's gonna be a chicken. So you make plans for this chicken to hatch, building it a little chicken house, etc. But once it hatches, it turns out to be Tyrannosaurs Rex, not a chicken. Now what good is that chicken house? Maybe you can use it to raise chickens to feed him This reminds me of foolish folks like Ray Kurzweil who thinks he can invent a computer singularity while never realizing that he never existed in the first place! It's just a sad farce. If he just bothered to pursue conscious he would have realized a long time ago that the singularity is already what he is, and all his attempts at immortality are utter nonsense. The amazing thing about consciousness work is that tends to flip everything upside down and inside out. So if there's one thing you can be sure will happen, its 180 degree shifts in your perspectives. Which makes conventional planning rather challenging if you try to do it ahead of time.

Yes, it's called CONCENTRATION! Practice it. You cannot think your way into concentration, you must concentration your way there. With bird sounds it's actually quite easy. Just focus on the other thing.

Until you die, you will not understand that reality is absolutely perfect. That, and only that, is Buddha-mind. All your human squabbling about what is right for reality means no more than the squabbling of turkeys.

Idolizing me is counterproductive. Just take whatever info makes sense and grow yourself. That's all. There is nothing special or important about me at all. Although I appreciate the thought.

You can do anything consciously, I suppose. The question is, will you? Where there is a vision, there is a way. When I denounce coding, I'm mostly talking about the typical way it is done. That doesn't mean you can't find a better way to do it. You have to be creative and think outside the box if you want your career -- no matter what the career is -- to align with higher consciousness. Working 8 hours a day at a computer is a problem for everyone these days. Fundamentally, it's anti-human. You were not designed to do that. It's not healthy. Are you noticing how you've domesticated yourself, like a factory farm cow? If you spend some time living in a good ashram, you'll see just how toxic and dysfunctional your entire lifestyle was. And you'll never want to go back to it. None of this is to say you can't do it. I'm just pointing things out here to people who claim they want high-consciousness living.

@username Organizing all this material in a comprehensive way is extremely challenging. There are so many traps and nuances and depths of understanding, all of which need to grounded in direct experience. It's really a life's work. I am trying to do it, but it will take a good 10-20 years. If you notice, very few teachings or teachers give you a comprehensive, big-picture view of anything, not even their one specialized domain, let alone all the important domains of life. They just give you tidbits. Because organizing it all in the right way takes 100x more work. For example, before one can talk about psychedelics properly, one has to try at least a dozen different ones in different ways. Almost nobody does that. They just speculate and give excuses. Show me a guru or teacher who has dozen 12 different psychedelics and understands nonduality. They don't exist.