Leo Gura

Nothing of substance about his response that I can recall.

@Wouter Yes, that sounds like a small Samadhi experience. Definitely a good sign. You want to not only have an experience here, but to understand what it is that's going on. Why did it happen? What does it mean? Where did it go? Enlightenment is the knowing behind the mystical experience. You gotta get very clear about what the hell is going on.

@Afonso It's not ideal. Your spine is probably not too straight and your knees are probably above your legs. I meditate on my couch too sometimes, but it's not ideal for formal meditation. You can start there, but then you wanna evolve to more strict practices.

@Afonso Direct questions are the only ones worth asking

@Afonso Ask him if he's personally encountered people with paranormal abilities and how he makes sense of that. Ask him why most people are not enlightened, and aren't even close. Whatever they lack, why do they lack it when others don't? Ask him if he's willing to try 5-meo-dmt in the name of science. Ask him, what if enlightenment itself is just a dream within a dream? And his conviction that this isn't possible, is also a dream. Ask him why science works if it's a conceptual activity of the mind and doesn't track truth.

@Outer Public/private is a conceptual distinction which you invented. If the self/other distinction is conceptual and unreal, surely the public/private distinction is so. Meaning is something you also invented. Being has no meaning. That is nonduality. Meaning only exits for egos.

@wavydude Just look around you. What do you see? Chimpery. How you gonna avoid being a chimp? It won't happen by accident. By accident is what created all the chimps in the first place. Maybe nature gave you a brain so you could use it to stop being a chimp

@Shan I can tell just from looking at it that that foam pillow thing will be painful for your shins and ass if you plan to sit for longer than 20 minutes. You're gonna need way more padding, or just brave through the pain. A Seiza bench would work just as well, if not better: http://amzn.to/2sWaliM Although even a well-padded bench will get very painful after 40 minutes. @Gabriel Antonio It really is worthwhile to learn proper cross-legged sitting. It's superior to using a chair. It just requires training and flexibility development. Full-lotus isn't necessary. Siddhasana isn't so hard to do and works great with a bit of training.

@Outer A "public" experience is just a private experience which your mind labels "public experience". See? Everything is literally a hallucination. Because the substance of everything is nothing. The various categories humans invent just attempt to hide this fact through sleight of hand.

This is true not only of the news, but of virtually EVERYTHING sold in the marketplace. Take a close look. It's very hard to make a commercially viable product/service without doing this. This is the true evil of rampant capitalism.

@Loreena Identity doesn't exist. It's a hallucination. Does Santa Claus exist? Or is he just an idea? Ditto for you. You have the exact same physical status as Santa Claus.

@Socrates Nobody controls it, of course! Who controls the sun? How could anything control anything else? There cannot be any controllers in existence. Because who would control the ultimate controller? This is the essence of mysticism. Nothingness is in control. Of course it's weird. It's irreducibly mystical! An infinite chain of groundless surfaces.

@Gneumatics Think about this now... It's very simple: Maybe you are the body, but if you are not the body, then you are mistaken about what you're taking the word "you" to refer to. See? So when you say, "Why do I follow it (the body) everywhere its ever been" what are you actually saying? What is following the body? If you're the body, as you insist, then there's nothing to follow the body. There's just the body being you. Nonduality doesn't say you follow the body. Nonduality says, You do not exist! The body just walks around like a zombie on its own. The problem is, it thinks there's someone inside it. You are like a robot who's been programmed to believe it's a human. When you think, "But I'm a real human." << that's just a program running. That program has no one behind it. In the same way that when you look at your computer, you don't think of it as having a "soul" in there somewhere. It's just a bunch of mechanics. What you REALLY are is the empty field of Nothingness within which the body walks around.

It's hard to escape the rat race without working for yourself. The catch-22 is, when you start working for yourself, you will be working longer hours for the first 5 years than you worked for your boss. But once you succeed, you'll have the possibility to truly be free. Of course the next catch-22 is that by that point, you will have become so addicted to success that you will likely never go minimalist. At least not until after another 5 or 10 or 20 years of really feeling the pain of it. This issue is veritable Sarlacc pit. Freedom ain't free. All that said, deciding to work for myself was one of the best decisions I've made in my life.

@Adam M The spiritual marketplace is subject to forces of self-survival, just like all other marketplaces. Even more so when money tends to be eschewed. The currency then becomes occupying people's mind-space. If you're a spiritual school with no mind-space occupied, you're extinct. It is suicidal for a school to tell you explore other schools. It would be like your wife saying, "Sure, honey, go ahead and sleep around with other women. I don't mind." Think about it.

That's a big maybe. Maybe. But often not. I've had deeply enlightened masters tell me that yoga is a bunch of bullshit, and that yogis are not enlightened. Of course after enlightenment you don't need to go back and do other kinds of techniques. That's not the issue. The issue is, will Vipassana actually trigger enlightenment in you? That's a big maybe. The dishonesty of these Buddhists is that they don't admit this. They pretend that it works for everyone. Obviously not, since so few of them are actually enlightened. Once you admit that a technique doesn't necessarily work for all people. Then you have to admit that it is improper to tell people to only use your technique/school. Because that assumes you know what will and won't work for them. Which is just arrogance and can be very misleading. Everyone has to find their own way. And you cannot predict ahead of time what your way will be. That is why the spiritual path is so tricky. People keep trying to sell you their way rather than genuinely wanting to help you with yours.

@Afonso People are generally very closedminded and dogmatic. They stumble into one thing in spirituality and they cling to it just like they do with all their other beliefs and perspectives, and so they are ignorant of all the techniques and teachings available. Unless one has made a conscious effort to study this field very openmindedly and very carefully, investing years and thousands of hours, one will become dogmatic about techniques and teachings. This has been the case for over 5000 years. Every religion misunderstands every other religion, because they don't care to understand. They care to create an identity out of it. And mindfulness with labeling is not by any means required. There are a dozen other ways to raise mindfulness. Depending on your culture and personal preferences, you may or may not resonate with it. I recommend it because it's very straight-forward and was effective for me.

Unraveling the self is serious business. Then again, not unraveling the self is even more dangerous. How many people committed suicide this year because they DIDN'T go to a meditation retreat? All such things need to be understood in proper context.

@Afonso 1) Thousands of hours of questioning. 2) Thousands of hours of silent meditation. You awareness is just too low right now to see your way out of this pickle. If your mindfulness skill was higher, you'd be able to clearly see that a tension has nothing to do with you. Tensions are just feelings, which come and go. It's like you're a level 5 elf trying to win a battle with a level 100 dragon in an RPG. It's not gonna work. He's gonna one-shot you. You gotta go back to the newbie area (mindfulness with labeling) and level up your skills, son

Of course, that's what almost all schools will tell you: We are the best, ignore everyone else. Of course mixing practice is more challenging than blindly doing one practice. But the fact is, if you ask most people at a Vipassana retreat what enlightenment is, they won't even be able to tell you. And some of them have been doing Vipassana for 20 years! Vipassana is a great practice, but it is weak without self-inquiry.

Ya'll are just wasting time.

@Afonso No, that tension is a sensation/experience. But the True Self is beyond all that. Are you a tension? Is that what you're saying you are existentially? A tension?? So a tension has a body? A tension is thinking? A tension perceives life? A tension experiences emotions? A tension is reading this sentence right now? Cause that's what you're basically saying: I AM A TENSION. Rather silly, when you inquiry into it a bit, no? The point is not that the tension needs to disappear. The point is, why are you identifying with it? You might as well be identifying with a coffee table. Doesn't the coffee table in your living room need to disappear before you realize it isn't you?

I think we'll allow this topic because it is well-written and reasonably put. Hence we're unlocking it. But keep your discussion from veering off into character assassination or debate. Over all, James is a pretty good teacher, whatever issues you might have with him. Not all teachings will appeal to all folks. Yes, James likes to be critical/dismissive of some traditions/teachings which don't line up with his style of teaching. But that's true of most teachers. I've seen some of the most enlightened teachers being overly dismissive. This is a common issue. The best thing to do in these cases is to the listen to the overall thrust of the teaching, not getting caught up in nitpicking details. Because details can always be nitpicked, and end up distracting you from your own work. It's quite easy to criticize every single non-dual teacher in existence, from Buddha to Jesus to whoever.

@Revolutionary Think I supposed, if you really care to be alpha chimp

Modern court systems are God's justice. Because there is nothing which isn't God.