Leo Gura

@Mrkvn8 Yes, you're right. Taking copious notes is not necessary and sometimes too cumbersome. Trust that as you read, your mind will connect the important dots. You don't need to go out of your way to memorize this material as though it were a high school history class. Read, enjoy, connect the dots, and apply. Take notes on only the KEY GEMS. Underline passages in books, which is much faster than taking notes, and almost as good.

People learn about enlightenment and then start engaging in this sort of black and white thinking: books are just mental masturbation. If you don't know how to make use of books, you aren't avoiding mental masturbation, you are just swinging your pendulum in the opposite extreme. This work requires nuance.

There is Absolute truth and relative truth. Absolute truth you've never encountered even once in your life (if you had, you'd know). And relative truth is the domain of all other human knowledge. All science is relative truth. Physics is relative truth. That you were born and that you will die is relative truth. Etc. It's relative because all of reality is absolutely relative. A truth can only exist relative to some arbitrary standard which you designate. Without any standards, there is nothing true. Which is Absolute Truth -- utter groundlessness. This is difficult to understand unless you have a direct consciousness of the Absolute. Relative truth (like science) is useful stuff. It's important and necessary for survival. But just keep in mind that's not ultimately true. It's true only relative to your survival and present state of consciousness. Once your present state of consciousness is altered (like if you die), all science and other relative truths fly out the window. They become untrue because all along they were predicated upon you being alive as a human being. Yeah... this is heavy heavy stuff. Consider this: if you were an ant, which truths of yours would survive? Any?

Be more specific if you want serious advice.

The job of science is to grasp relative truths, not the Absolute. So as long as you keep that in mind, you can do good science.

@ItsAvi A lot of good advice here already. I'll just add, have you tried psychedelics? They can show you a more positive version of this process. They can connect you to the magic of life and give you a higher vision for your new life. After enlightenment, you're gonna want to sit down and ask yourself, "Okay, so that's that. But what next? But what do I want to create with my life?" Life is an opportunity to participate in the beauty of creation. If you choose to create nothing, that's what you'll end up creating. Also, whatever awakening experiences you've had up to now, it sounds like you have yet deeper to go to hit the infinite love facet of the elephant. That's what saves you from getting lost in nihilism.

@Staples Here are a few practical applications of epistemology to scienctific research: Question all your assumptions Don't confuse your models for the territory Be much more openminded Learn to admit "I don't know" when that is the case Study epistemology Study paradigms Study the history of epistemic blunders within science Be more holistic and synthetic vs analytical Learn to tap into your intuition vs overthinking your problems Take psychedelics and contemplate your research from that state of infinite mind Etc.

@Cjaryo Sounds like regular run-of-the-mill egotism then

@Naviy Brutal self-honesty there! Love it Great to see that you were able to become mindful of all that self-deception.

@Ocean Too flippant, too simplisitic. What you call a place of knowing, could be your blindspot. The point is you cannot know until you have tried a thing. And you cannot try a thing until you have researched it with an open mind.

Not all thoughts are automatically bad. There is a sort of higher intelligence at work in you, guiding the mind. For example, you might get the thought, "I should really start to eat healthier." And that can be a message from your "higher self" which would be wise to listen to. Thoughts may not be absolutely true, but they can be relatively true, which is important from a pragmatic perspective. You need healthy thoughts to set your life straight. Only at the very advanced stages of consciousness can you start to transcend thoughts altogether. And even then, you'll still return to them for pragmatic reasons.

If it's a repeating dream, you gotta ask yourself what the core fear is there which you have. And then work through that consciousness, and that should help stop those dreams. Those repeating negative dreams have a lesson they are trying to teach you. So contemplate what the lesson is.

Try doing a 30-days no music challenge. You are not allowed to listen to any music. And you must even tune out music in stores over the loud speakers. I've done it. A very interesting challenge.

@Vipassana He's too furry. Probably wouldn't work on him

I dare any so-called enlightened master to snort 30mg of 5-MeO. Then we can record the look in their face. I've already succeeded in getting one enlightened guy vomitting so hard on 10mg he never came back for a second dose.

Except there is a difference between reading "a book" and practicing Kriya yoga as taught via a book. Sadhguru basically teaches his own form of Kriya yoga. I find it ironic that every yoga lineage tells you to strictly obey their school's practice without any deviation. And yet, there are hundreds of these lineages, all with their own arbitrary variations on the same core techniques. So how much of it is genuinely for your safety, and how much of it is them trying to save their own asses by creating a monopoly on spirituality? It's not really in their interest to say, "Yeah, you can tinker around with this stuff without us." With that said, yes, I do believe there are dangers to awakening your kundalini without knowing what you're doing. So if you're gonna do it, learn about nuclear physics

Yes, judge for yourselves folks. I'm just offering my opinions based on my research. Your conclusions may be different.

Hehehe.... That's like going to a channel that teaches fitness advice for ordinary people and asking, "But what about Arnold Schwarzenegger? Why not be like him? He can squat 700 lbs! Why tell people to squat 200 lbs? It's nowhere near!" Dude... most people can't even stop playing video games or put down their smart phone. Forget about enlightenment. Ravi Shankar is a once-in-a-generation individual. You ain't ever gonna be at his level. And if you are, you certainly ain't gonna do it watching YouTube videos or hanging out on this forum. You should be living in a cave and meditating 24/7. You are talking about a COMPLETE surrender of your life. Who is prepared to do that? 99% of people will not reach the bar of Actualized.org. If you're in the 1% who outgrows Actualized.org, then by all means go do it.

That's a great question. The answer is nuanced. Ultimately, if all your care about is 100% truth, then by all means go balls to the wall with uprooting all your beliefs and go straight for the Absolute. But even so, keep in mind that it might not be so simple. The technique you choose to do that might not click with you, and you might find yourself stuck. What do you do then? What do you do after you've done 2000 hours of self-inquiry but still haven't broken through? You start wondering that maybe you need a different technique. Maybe this technique you've been doing does not address all the obstacles in your way? Maybe your 2nd chakra is blocked so you can't stop daydreaming about sex? Maybe you're addicted to food, or porn, or internet. Maybe you have ADD and can't focus long enough to have the technique work. Maybe you need a more heart-centered, less logical technique? And the technique you're currently using doesn't address that. How would you know which technique to use in the first place? Based on who's authority? Will you trust Jed McKenna? Or Sadhguru? Or Echkart Tolle? Or Neo-Advaita? How will you know who is right? And how will you go about integrating your awakening experiences even if you have them? And how will you know when you're done? And what will be your attitude towards all the other spiritual teachers and students? Will you become a curmudgeon like U.G. Krishnamurti? Will you throw everything in the trash like Jed McKenna? Will you tell people that meditation is bullshit? And how will you explain kundalini energy? How will you explain channeling? How will you explain out of body experience, near death experience, entities, deities, people seeing auras, healing, siddhis, paranormal phenomena, etc? Will you just say all of that is ego-delusions and unworthy of any attention? And even after you attain the Absolute, what then? What about all your bad habits? What about your relationships? What about your career? Are you now instantly conscious of all of the nuances in all of these areas? Have you mastered your emotions? Have you mastered consciousness of your body and energy? Guess again. My approach is to take all these factors seriously, rather than hand-waving them away. Because I do not know the true nature of these things until I have thoroughly researched and experimented with them. For me the point is accurate and broad understanding of life. Some people consider Charles Manson woken up. Some people consider Sam Harris woken up. And? So? What does "waking up" really mean for you? How you do know your notions of "waking up" are correct?

@Outer Very interesting. Thanks for the share! Seems like he's not a lost cause after all. Although 700ug is an epic-size dose. I go deeper than he went on 125ug. So this seems to confirm my theory that people can have radically different brain chemistry, which gives them different access to reality. Although in the end, he was still able to reach the Absolute.

@Mighty Mouse I guess we'll agree to disagree.

@Mighty Mouse Of course it's not about Jed McKenna. I'm talking about his message. There isn't even a guy there. He used a fake name and persona. I got nothing against the guy. I question his teachings. Although I'm also grateful for his books. He has helped me to cut through the bullshit. My point is, that can also go too far.

@Mighty Mouse I don't hold Ra in any special regard. I take a holistic snapshot of over 100 enlightened masters and cross-reference all the their perspectives to form a sort of meta-perspective of the field. I'm not saying this approach is infallible, but I think it's pretty solid as a guiding map. And then of course comes direct experience. JM's models don't actually explain the entire field of spirituality very well. He just throws it all in the trash, and for me, that's way too flippant of an attitude. To say, for example, as JM does, that meditation doesn't work, is pretty silly, IMO. It shows that he hasn't actually meditated seriously.

You have some valid points. Of course I expect to be mindfucked some more and errors to be expunged in this process. But I cannot hold JM in such high regard as you do. From everything I've studied and experienced, what he says just doesn't ring fully correct. As one example, he says in one of this books that there are a single digit number of enlightened people on the planet. This is patently false to me. Of course I could be wrong. People will have to judge for themselves. I can only judge as best as I can judge. But I don't see JM as the highest realized master. I smell closedmindedness in him, despite whatever awakening he has obviously had. And I smell that you have drank his cool-aid a little too much. As far a "further", I'm all for that. The thing I try to get across to people the most is that "you do not know how deep the rabbit hole goes, so don't rest on your laurels, thinking you've completed the journey."

@pankoo Good for you. Why would I think you're trolling me? I'm happy to see people getting enlightened, or having glimpses. That's the whole point of what I do: sharing the profundity of these insights with people. The whole point is that no one is in control of when these insights dawn. It's not up you or me. For some people it happens in 3 days, for others it happens in 30 years, and for others it never happens at all. I've seen old ladies who hardly know anything about enlightenment have big breakthroughs very quickly while more serious students of nonduality stay stuck. It actually helps to be a newb at this. The more conceptual knowledge of enlightenment you have, the worse it can be. Keep in mind, you probably have deeper to go. And beginner's luck tends to run out.