Leo Gura

@egoless The problem you're having here with understanding "how" the truth is grasped is because you're forgetting the possibility that you ARE the truth. Absolute Truth is not something you know or experience or intuit or prove. It's too Absolute for all such relative and limited methods. You must BECOME it. By literally becoming it, it is you, with no separation. Being knows itself by being itself. Being is being. The most direct proof of truth is not a proof at all, it's a tautology: A = A Even that is too indirect! It's more like just: A You do not look upon the truth or grasp it with your mind. YOU BECOME IT. This mode of "knowing" is unknown to you because you've never experienced it before. And because our culture does not recognize that it is possible. Which is why this stuff is mostly just talked about in Zen monasteries and the like. Absolute Truth just IS. It's like a global constant in a computer program, which permeates every possible thing, and accessible all the time. YOU ARE IT RIGHT THIS SECOND. You're just not aware you are it. Because it is nothing, but you are attached to "somethingness".

@egoless Since ego was an illusion the whole time, it had really nothing to do with anything. Including character, passions, etc. It's like asking, what would happen if we amputated your 3rd arm? Nothing! Because you never had a 3rd arm to begin with. You just got confused and thought you did.

@Sukhpaal Tis the feeling of the Devil leaving your body Maintaining consistency of practice and mindfulness is the key. If it gets real bad, take a short break, then return to it.

@LaucherJunge A) Don't underestimate life's ability to fuck you up. Life is very creative about that. B) Enlightenment is not pursued for the sake of happiness. It's pursued for the sake of Truth. If you don't care about Truth, then enlightenment isn't for you. C) If you haven't actually awoken, you have no idea what you're missing.

Life is PLAY. It's a game. Why do you play games? For fun. What do you expect me to do? Sit around and cry? The point of life is to live it. I don't need some God to offer me cookies for living well. The motivation is INTRINSIC. Life is absolutely groundless, and that's the most beautiful design imaginable. @kieranperez The key it to become deeply conscious that "worth" is an illusion. Everything is ultimately worthless. But it's not enough to believe me. You have to actually SEE that this is true in your direct experience. If you want a more "practical" fix, you can do Nathaniel Branden's Self-Esteem Sentence Completion exercises. His book is on my book list. They are very effective for fixing low self-esteem, which is what you're describing. P.S. When your ex leaves you and you suffer, that's not "meaningless", that DEEPLY meaning to you. Which is the whole problem! If it was truly meaningless, it wouldn't even register in your consciousness. You're being manipulated by your concepts of reality. If you truly realized meaninglessness, you'd be the happiness person on the planet. Nothing could bother you. Not even your death. The problem is that you're assigning meaning to a bunch of stuff which is meaningless, and then you're suffering the consequences of living in this conceptual matrix of meaning. What you need to ultimately do is discover the beauty of being.

@TeamBills That's how this stuff works. It's not easy. Which is why it's so rarely done. You have to slog it out. In the link I posted above, there is a sub-section called: Most Important Habits To Build

When you trip, you drop all that monkey-mind and be TOTALLY open to ANYTHING. Your fear of delusion is -- ironically -- keeping you stuck in delusion. All that's required to access Absolute Truth is a 100% GENUINE intent for Truth. Set it as your highest priority to be shown the Truth. Drop all your judgments, worries, expectations, pet theories, ideologies, rationalizations, etc. Just the GENUINE intent for Truth. That's all that's required. Then you'll be shown the stairway to heaven. But first your cup must be emptied. You just have to learn to be epistemically very humble. Which is a topic I've covered a lot in past episodes. When you hear me speak or make claims about anything, you have to understand that that's just the surface. Deep down, I don't hold any of it as true. Reality is beyond all that. I think it happened for me on the 3rd dose, which was 30mg. Vaporizing is more powerful than snorting. You certainly can over do it. You have to be much more careful and skilled with vaporizing. The technique requires some trial and error to get right.

It's a good thread idea. Keep adding more to it. There are 1000s of inspiring examples to be found.

That's when you know you're making real progress

@kieranperez Well of course it's true: you don't matter. So what? Life goes on. Your problem is not that you don't matter. It's all the social and cultural expectations you've got about who you're supposed to be and what you're supposed to do, which have got you tangled up. Culture fills our minds with stupid, unquestioned notions like: "I'm supposed to matter", or, "mattering is good whereas not mattering is bad.", etc. These all need to be questioned deeply until they are seen to be the groundless absurdities that they always were. Meaning is a projection of the human mind. It does not really exist. You can project any kind of meaning you want unto the work. The world is like a blank canvas. Which means you're free to paint whatever kind of life you want. It's precisely because nothing matters, that life is great, and that anything can matter to you if you choose it.

@sleeperstakes That's all perfectly normal and how it should be. Have you seen this? https://www.actualized.org/start Sounds like you're doing good. You just now need to balance out your intake of theory with installing concrete daily habits. See above link for ideas on the highest leverage habits. Pick one and implement for 1-2 months, then repeat. All you need to start to see big changes is 1 high leverage habit successfully installed every few months. At that rate, in 2-5 years, you'll be killing it.

I would strongly disagree with that as well. I've spent over $20,000 on workshops and retreats in the last few years. Best money I've ever spent. But then again, I love this stuff and I've got some money to burn.

Binaural beats def work. The question is: what are you expecting them to do? If you're hoping they do all your personal development work for you, you'll be disappointed. If you're hoping they will make you enlightened, you'll be disappointed.

@username You gotta put this into proper context. Any industry you might want to work in -- not just academia -- is corrupted with unconsciousness. The whole world is! You're gonna have to deal with some constraints no matter where you go. There do exist some amazing academics. Of course they are rare. Anything amazing is rare by definition. If you wanna be an academic, go show them how it ought to be done by leading by example. The only way to stamp out corruption is from the inside out. Then again, maybe academia isn't for you. I just know that for me, for example, I would never fit in there. But that's just me. You gotta figure that out for yourself by closely examining your values and other options. There are so many options available. Martin Ball makes it work because he's found a nice liberal-as-fuck community there in Ashland Oregon. They're pretty much all hippies and New Agers around there. That's his niche. And if you read his autobiography, he struggled though hell just to barely get by as a part-time professor. The system screwed up his whole career.

That's the thing. It's impossible to imagine. That's the most amazing part of this whole journey. It's infinitely more than you ever expected to get out of life.

@cetus56 Imagine that lollipop is your head. Now we take a nuclear bomb and detonate it inside there, and the candy shards scatter out into space and to the edge of the known universe. That would still be infinitely smaller than Absolute Infinity as seen on a breakthrough dose of 5-MeO

@egoless Start with 1g of mushrooms or half a tab of LSD. So you get some idea of what psychedelics can do. Then you won't worry so much about "fatal side effects". It is not like psychedelics are some unknown quantity. They have been empirically tested by tens of millions of people all over the world, for over 5000 years, both in clinical settings and in real life settings. Psychedelic deaths are extremely rare, and almost always trace down to ridiculous levels of improper protocol, like taking mushroom on a rooftop.

There's no hard rule here. It would probably be wise for you to first do a guided meditation retreat first, like Vipassana, where you will have peer pressure on you to stick through the whole 10 days. Solo retreats require lots of self-discipline and planning. Otherwise you'll just quit when the going gets tough. Start to unaddict yourself from all forms of media: TV, internet, phone, news, magazines, etc.

If you want that, you need a very deep enlightenment. Start with daily self-inquiry and meditation, and then start doing 10 day solo retreats. By the end of one retreat, you should start to get hints of magic. Your mind needs to become very very present.

@ThirdEyeSees I never said you're wasting time raising children. Having children is a very serious choice and commitment. You need to make the choice consciously and then stick with it, otherwise you're gonna spawn the next Hitler. The problem is that people reproduce mindlessly -- as an escape from consciousness work -- and then once the deed is done, it's too late. And they of course don't have the capacity now to raise their kids consciously, so they do the best they can, but they end up making their kids as unconscious as they are. And then we all have to deal with the fallout. The Devil has an interesting way of procreating himself, doesn't he? If you're stuck in that situation, you're gonna have to work overtime to fix it. Just like any other situation you got yourself into unconsciously. And if you had kids consciously, then good for you. Raise them well.

Any career that chiefly resembles this

@Voyager Success is addictive fo sho. It's like ego crack No thing makes you forget about enlightenment/Truth as quickly as success.

@Shin Start with 1 week, or you'll be failing worse than your buddy LaBeouf Talk is cheap

@Voyager There are many paths up the same mountain. If you want to go ALL IN, you can, and that will be great. If you want to work on your career, and then go ALL IN, that also works. If you want to work on your career, and never go ALL IN, but still have a spiritual practice, that also works. Just depends on what you really want. It's gonna be a challenge either way. It's sorta like the difference between ripping off a Band-Aid quickly vs slowly. What's most painful (and I speak from experience with this) is not making a clear-cut decision and trying to do all 3 at once.

Then you shall remain unaware, as 99.9999% of people are, for that very reason. It's called a leap of faith for good reason. First you die, then you see what's up. You don't get to plumb "the mind of God" and stay yourself. The weight of that kind of knowledge would send an unprepared grown man running for Mommy. If you're not willing to face fear of death, then your mind has you by the balls, doesn't it? Sure it does! It can manipulate you into believing any kind of nonsense just by hiding the truth behind that one little fear. Trying to interpret Absolute Infinity at your current level of understanding and consciousness is bound to lead to all kinds of nonsense images of what it is like. It's not about vampires and black holes. It's more about how you constructed all of reality so that you could exist as your present self. But that won't make sense to you either. How could you have constructed all of reality???? Do you realize the significance of the questions you are asking? You are asking to understand ALL OF REALITY! ALL OF IT! Beyond life and death, before the Big Bang. You're asking to know the "mind of God". And yet you're unwilling to invest a couple thousand hours to do the work? Well then, you're not really serious about your inquiry. Your inquiry should bring you to the brink of tears. You should be willing to abandon food, sex, money, fame, family, friends, work, media, home, culture, science, religion, and everything else. If you were willing to do all that, then you'd be demonstrating the proper attitude of someone who cares about Truth. For all the disbelievers, I specifically went out of my way to find and promote 5-MeO-DMT. It is the most direct and scientific method of glimpsing the Absolute within 15 minutes. It will cut your learning curve by a factor of x1000 or more. And yet people still come up with excuses. You've been handed the magic pill to infinity, and yet, there's always a good excuse for staying yourself. Getting enlightened has never been easier. The problem is, no one really wants it. Hell, even I barely want it and I've glimpsed is fully glory. It's just so big.