Leo Gura

It's easy to get overwhelmed when you start. Pick one thing and focus on it for a few months to build up some momentum. Maybe it's meditation. Maybe it's eating healthy. Or whatever will make the biggest difference for you.

@Ayla Not sure what the big deal is. That is the entire path. The mind struggles and through its failures it learns the way. How else could it be? You can't just jump from addicted, ideological monkey mind to enlightenment in one fell swoop. It's gonna be messy in between. With of course many traps and false starts. My approach is to just keep learning, practicing, and pushing through it a bit each day. If you want the most direct path, go rent a cabin in the woods and sit there questioning everything for weeks and months until the mind shuts up. But who is prepared to be that hardcore? Maybe 1 in a million. Most people need a more gradual process, or at least to build up to that. I think the best we can do to help people with enlightenment is explain it clearly, tell them all the traps, given them actionable techniques which they can use every day to become more aware, and finally just inspire them to do it.

Well... it's true that the world is not real and not significant. That's called awakening. You don't need professional counseling. Professional counselors need awakening. So what exactly is the problem?

@Jordan wang Eventually you'll find that such over-the-top stunts are unnecessary and don't grow you that much. You have plenty of real fears to tackle without resorting to childish ones like orgasming in public. You want to tackle some real fear? Do some self-inquiry. Or find your life purpose and try following it. That'll be much more growth-inducing. Don't chase fear for its own sake. Plenty of fear will naturally arise as you pursue Truth. Fear like you've never imagined. When you do stunts, people will clearly see it as such, and you'll probably look like a fool, cause you're being inauthentic. Ask yourself, "Why am I drawn to doing stunts?" If you were just being yourself, would you be orgasming in public? Being yourself is often scarier than pulling a stunt.

@Visionary You just need lots of preparation and rehearsal. Practice, practice, practice at home. Get a camera and record yourself. Toastmasters is great for beginners.

@oysterman A quality problem. Don't theorize too much about it. Pick a thing and start making your first small bet. That will yield feedback within a few months, allowing you to gain more clarity. There is only so much clarity one can get through sitting and thinking about these things. Your small bets don't need to be perfect. They just need to be within the right ballpark. If the best thing you can think of is working with plants. Roll with that for the next 6 months and see how it feels.

@Ritu Not only is it fine, vacations are mandatory!

@BeginnerActualizer If this is your first time thinking about your values, your current progress it great. You don't need to nail them 100% to move forward. It will take months or a few years before your values fully gel in your mind. You don't have to sit and wait. You just get started on executing on whatever you've currently got. That will spur on the gelling process. Try to do the course well, but also keep moving forward. If perfectionism is paralyzing you, drop it and keep moving forward.

@street19 Yes, it's frightening. But again, what have you got to lose? Where do you start? Google your nearest monastery. They take new people all the time. Easy-peasy. I'd do it myself if I had nothing going for me. A healthy environment can change a lot. It won't do the inner work for you, but it can put you on track so you can start doing the inner work. Your only real problem is that you've lost touch with yourself, nature, and with BEing. Mainstream society has discombobulated you. That can fixed faster than you'd think if you really put your heart into it and exit mainstream society for a while.

@OnceMore No words can describe it. It is the universal cure to all of mankind's problems.

@LetTheNewDayBegin Hehe... such a methodology is called life. Stick with it. Who says you're doing it wrong?

Great insights. Good, proper use of this substance.

@AlldayLoop Look what the world has come to. Where just being by yourself for a week is considered a life-threatening ordeal.

If it's all pointless, why are you making such a big point of it? Notice that your theories and your actions/emotions are totally out of wack. Spiritual theories will not help you. In fact, they'll only make the gap wider, creating more suffering. You have to actually start practicing spirituality. ACTUALLY. Not logically. ACTUALLY. The fundamental problem here is that you're out of touch with reality. You're living inside a conceptual cage. And of course you feel like a slave and want liberation. But you're confused into inaction and apathy. If you don't like your life, you can always start over. Go join an ashram, monastery, etc. What have you got to lose? Your life will be thousand times better in a good ashram.

@OnceMore Rent a motel room near the woods and just there for a week or two doing nothing.

Stop associating enlightenment with behavior. It has nothing to do with that. You can be an enlightened axe murder. EVERY behavior, without exception, is God. You could destroy the entire planet with a nuclear holocaust, and it would still be love. True story. Happened not too long ago with the dinosaurs.

Shrooms are so easy to grow it would be harder to fake them than to grow and selling the real thing. You might as well ask for a test kit for bananas.

No more discussing good vs evil in this thread. Start a new thread if you want that. Edit: I've moved all the Good vs Evil discussion to a new thread.

Great stuff! Keep 'em coming.

@AlldayLoop More like, there is no needle. Which is why it's so hard to find! How can you find something which is nothing? And who is the one doing the finding?!!

@Seeker_of_truth Notice that you cannot experience Nothingness. Because an experience, feeling, or perception, is Somethingness. What you have is a subtle conceptualization of Nothingness -- some kind of image of it in your mind, or a feeling, or an intuition, etc -- which is actually Somethingness, not Nothingness. Also, notice, how can Nothingness be inside you? It's nothing, so it cannot be limited to physical space. Why don't you assume it's everywhere? All that said, what you're doing (trying desperately to grasp at Nothingness using the mind) isn't wrong per se. It's the essence of self-inquiry. I just want you to know ahead of time that it will never work. Mind (somethingness) cannot grasp Nothingness, ever! Because somethingness is not nothingness. You cannot think Nothingness. You cannot feel Nothingness. You cannot conceptualize Nothingness. You cannot intuit Nothingness. Because it's not a thing. Now you might wonder, "So should I stop?" That's tricky. This is the process of self-inquiry. You're being asked to do the impossible. It takes hundreds of hours of wrestling with this problem until your mind starts to learn why it can't grasp Nothingness, and then eventually your mind starts to shut up, and actual Nothingness might dawn. Whatever you presently imagine Nothingness to be, it is surely NOT that! I suggest you keep looking into this matter. Keep wrestling with it. You need to grasp what I'm saying here at a bones-deep level. It's not enough to theoretically know it. You need to experience the futility of the mind for yourself. And the only way to do that is by spinning your wheels a lot in this process. Have patience.

I've closely re-read this whole thread several times and taken notes on your issues. Good stuff guys! Keep 'em coming.

@Socrates I said what I said because I'm reading between the lines of what you're writing. The very fact that you're writing it and thinking in this way reveals a lot. You're underestimating how powerful these "mere words" and "mere paradigms" are for you. They shape your reality utterly. This is no mere philosophy. Your very life is wed to these worldviews, words, and paradigms. So watch out. Your actions and emotions stem from your worldview. So saying the Buddhist worldview doesn't matter, what matters is their actions, is a big trap. Worldview matters way more than actions. Because it creations all actions. Your reasoning here keeps taking many things for granted. You use concepts like "right/wrong", "good/evil", "creating an ideal world", "problems", etc. The reason you're struggling here is because you're still looking at life from the perspective of how it can best serve you. So you're pursuing self-agenda, not Truth. Which is the root of all the "evil" you're trying to eradicate. In trying to eradicate it, you create it. "How am I going to make accurate decisions" << Just as a thought exercise, imagine for a moment that you're NOT. Imagine that the Truth will kill you. And yet you pursue it happily any way, just because. Also, just for a moment, imagine that the world is perfect exactly as it is. So what now? What do you do in a perfect world? Who says the world is imperfect? Could it be just your monkey mind? For whom is the world imperfect? For YOU? And what if there is no you? After all, try as you might, you are unable to find what you are.

@Revolutionary Think I have no idea. You're asking a question about social science. But all of this is a distraction. See? Seek out consciousness and Truth for yourself. Forget about trying to manipulate reality for now. You've been manipulating your whole life and look where it's gotten you. The whole trick here is STOP focusing on agenda and manipulation. You're not going to solve your life problems through more manipulation. It's like you keep pouring gasoline on a small kitchen fire by telling yourself, "But we really need to put out this fire, it's so bad!" And then you wonder, "Why is whole world on fire?" Take your own psychology, multiply it by 7 billion, and now you see where the evil came from.

@Revolutionary Think You need to clearly distinguish here between what's reality, and what's agenda. The entire first half of your comment is concerned with agenda. In other words: how do we manipulate reality to function in ways that are favorable to humans at large. This is has nothing to do with reality or Truth. In fact, the situation you've set up is going to lead to the following: Let's invention bunch of bullshit which will allow us to manipulate reality into behaving the way we want. And so we do. We create inventions like morality, ethics, philosophy, justice, liberty, government, taxation, law, money, science, language, etc. All good stuff. But it has nothing to do with Truth, and is in fact the OPPOSITE of Truth. All this because you set up the whole issue in a way where you're asking how to manipulate ourselves away from reality. Now you might say, "Ah, but Leo, isn't what's most important is to create a good life for human beings? So what's wrong with manipulation?" But there's the rub. In manipulating reality, you broke the cardinal spiritual law. You've abandoned Truth. So now you have no compass. So now what's to stop you from constructing whatever the hell you want to manipulate reality to serve your ego? Well... nothing. And so what results in practice is a conceptually constructed playground of the ego. And to top it all off -- to secure this house of cards -- the final master stroke is to conveniently forget that you constructed the whole damn thing. "But Leo! I didn't construct it!!! This is just how reality is." And now you're fucked. Now you've created all the evil in the world which you wanted to avoid with your manipulations. Now you have become the slave of your own entangled mind. And you don't even know it yet. Notice how easily your manipulations backfire and produce the VERY thing you were using them to avoid. What is keeping a dog from biting through your throat? By your logic, we need to teach all dogs a moral code, otherwise they might hurt somebody. Yes, if your top priority is your self-agenda, then you will do all sorts of silly things to manipulate Truth. You will lie, cheat, steal, kill, and confabulate. When you really dedicate yourself to Truth, the problem of morality and ethics is instantly solved. Nothing wrong with having a justice system. So long as you understand it's a set of rules created by humans to preserve order. The rules are neither good nor bad, neither just nor unjust. They are rules. Like rules in a game of Monopoly. What stops the powerful from abusing the weak? Nothing. Just thousands of years of war and the fruits of those wars which have resulted in relative peace. All the morals and rules you think are holding back the barbarians at the gates where actually settled years ago through bloody hand to hand combat. The Barbarians have already sacked Rome. Those rules are simply the current evolutionary point of the powerful. The powerful set the rules. But power is a tricky thing. Power isn't just military power. The "weak" are often more powerful than the powerful. Tens of millions of African Americans lobbying for civil liberties is more powerful than generations of Southern racism and segregation. Power is whatever prevails. And consciousness always prevails in the long term. Consciousness is the key to everything. Because it is everything.