Leo Gura

@Ilya The brain's Default Mode Network is constantly operating in the background, generating your current level of consciousness. Your current level of consciousness is the problem. It must be broken out of. Just being "present" with your Default Mode Network running, doesn't break you out of ego. You're just present as ego.

@How to be wise Contemplation doesn't just reveal Absolute truths, it also reveals relative ones. I have a strong suspicion that the mechanism of evolution is insight at the cellular level, not random mutation. The same insights happening in your mind are happening within individual cells, which is the source of creativity.

@egoless Stop asking conceptual questions, and start doing self-inquiry. You cannot get answers to these questions by asking people. You must get them directly from the SOURCE -- reality herself.

Yeah, the whole notion of culture is downright absurd. It's ignorance on wheels. All of it is pure fabrication of the mind. None of it has any substance whatsoever, which is why people fight over it so much. When you build a castle in the sky, you gotta constantly do mental gymnastics to keep it afloat.

@Real Eyes At high enough doses it is likely and potentially lethal. So don't screw around.

@egoless Ask yourself what happens to the triangle below, when you realize there is no triangle:

There is no "I" or "my". You do not exist. You cannot die. Death is a conceptual fabrication.

@Real Eyes Yes, that is very common. It's a physiological response.

@username Both ways can work. It all depends on you. Large chunks of uninterrupted time are great and important for breakthroughs. But so is daily practice.

@How to be wise Just like regular experiences, there can probably be infinite different ones. The key is extracting the INSIGHT/TRUTH from the experience. The experience is just a container delivering the deeper Truth. Like an envelope vs the message inside it. The envelope you throw away.

Sounds like you're doing awesome. Good work!

Yes, it does. It helps A LOT in my experience. It makes all the difference. The better my conceptual understanding of things, the easier and deeper my trips. The less fear. The more insight. Existential thinking is the key. Learning how to think about reality from scratch without any cultural biases or assumptions. If you study a lot of mysticism and nondual teachings, tripping becomes so much better and easier. Everything clicks perfectly.

@egoless Of course, you conceptually create and cling to "others" to keep from realizing that you are all alone. God has no one but itself to play with. But God doesn't feel lonely either. Awakening is a good word for it. It's like dying but with a happy ending. You wake up from "life" and realize it was just a dream the whole time. And you laugh. Life, physical reality, and history were never real. Just a magic trick.

It's not personal, but it's not mechanical either, and it's infinitely intimate. It's as intelligent as a motherfucker too. Hence it's called God. It really feels like experiencing God, not some dry mechanical void. It's full of life. It's full of love. It's organic-feeling. Like being inside a giant infinite mind. If you took the minds of every single genius human being who has ever lived in the last 5000 years and multiplied them all together and raised that by a power of a million, you would not even have 0.0000000000000000000000000000000000000000001% of its intelligence. It's intelligence is infinite. Divinity is the best word to describe it. Nothingness is literally divine. The very fabric of reality is self-seeing.

@cetus56 Sweet!

That's the beauty of Absolute Truth. The Absolute is none other than the Relative. Form is formlessness. Formless is form. The Absolute is not anything other than what's in your direct experience right this second. But it's also none of it. This very sentence you're reading right now is Absolutely Infinite. And also Relative. There are many illusions of separation (egos) within Nothingness. Like vortexes within one pool of water.

Contemplating one's own death is very different from speculating about what happens after death.

@Costa7 There is nothing to say about Neti Neti. You either do it, or you don't. It's like a mathematical proof. You must do it to see the truth. There is no trick to it. You just sit and do it for many many hours, very patiently. Do not expect quick results. You're gonna have to burn through a lot of beliefs, paradigms, and assumptions which you never even knew existed in you. All of it will come up as you just do the method. Psychedelics can help a lot in clearing out your false attachments. Them plus Neti Neti make for a powerful combo. My version of Self-Inquiry is very similar to Neti Neti. You cannot get a leg up on self-inquiry or Neti Neti by talking about it. Only by doing. The truth is, you don't wanna do it. Nobody wants to do it. Hence all the questions and blah, blah, blah...

@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.