Leo Gura

@Lenny Of course. Because they lead you beyond the mind.

@cetus56 Certainly if you can do an all-night sit, that's some real good training. Takes balls to pull that off in a non-retreat environment. I don't like all-night sits because it just screws up your sleep cycle. I'd rather meditate during the day, when I'm alert.

You can certainly learn to astral project. Just takes some rigorous practice. Don't confuse it with enlightenment however. Enlightenment is outside all experience.

@Bodhi123 Of course, that's the nature of teaching & leadership. I keep trying to cation you guys to use great nuance and ground everything in your own direct experience. How many people get it? Only a handful. Such is the nature of ignorance. Like water, it always finds a way to sneak its way into every crack and corrode the truth. It could not be otherwise. It's the ego's job to corrupt truth.

It's not that you can't or it won't work. It's that if you have limited time, you want to use it effectively. 5 minutes of strict meditation is worth 5 hours of sloppy meditation. @cetus56 Doing an all-night sit in a retreat setting is a very different thing than doing a 30 min sleepy, mechanical daily session. Working through sleepiness is it's own kind of skill you can develop. It can toughen you up, but it doesn't produce actual contemplative insight. You can clearly see this by doing 30 mins sleepy meditation and 30 mins of alert meditation. The alert session will be 10x more powerful.

Would you let your surgeon operate on you if he was in a sleepy condition? Why not?

Don't turn "paradigm" into some buzz work that refers to everything. A paradigm is a word that refers to a specific category of things. I gave a precise definition at the beginning of the video. Paradigms are large, cohesive conceptual frameworks. Most things in life are NOT paradigms. A simple thought like, "I want to buy some food." is not a paradigm. Not every concept or belief is a paradigm.

That is a very large dose. It will blow your mind. Make sure you've done smaller doses first. 10mg >> 20mg >> 25mg >> 30mg

Plugging is your best bet. Don't eat it. Vaporizing it is possible, but challenging with HCl. You'll most likely burn it.

@Kloof It's not something you can believe. It's so radical it's unbelievable. You can only believe things your paradigm can imagine. And no paradigm can imagine Absolute Infinity or Nothingness. It's way too big for a mind to handle. The only way is by transcending mind. This is very challenging because everything you've ever experienced has been mind, so you don't know where to turn. You're stuck in mind for the time being. But inquiry will slowly unravel your mind.

@Salomon Tolosa 12mg is a baby dose. It won't alter consciousness very much.

The forum IS the chat room. We don't want to dilute the discussions across multiple platforms because we are still a small community.

Of course once the supernatural and paranormal become a part of your worldview, they are held at perfectly natural and normal. Words like "supernatural", "paranormal", "mystical", and "pseudoscience" are just dismissals/demonizations of various phenomena of which one is ignorant. They are always circular definitions whose function is to preserve the old paradigm. Once the ignorance is removed, those words become meaningless.

@John Do a 10 day Vipassana retreat, and you will understand what mindfulness is.

Sure you can. Learn to lucid dream and use it work on various aspects of yourself. Don't expect it to be easy.

The problem only rises if you have false expectations. A psychedelic is a temporary glimpse into Truth. Temporary of course. But not without lingering shifts in your mind. If you expect one trip to change you much, of course that's foolish. No one has seriously made that claim. So all this talk against psychedelics because they don't cause an instant permanent enlightenment is a straw man. Meditation or self-inquiry doesn't cause instant permanent enlightenment either. So that kind of expectation is silly in all cases. And the idea that just because you do some psychedelics that now you can't also simultaneously be working hard towards enlightenment is also a straw man. If you meditated or self-inquired for as few number of hours as you tripped on psychedelics, you would NEVER get enlightened. So it's really an unfair comparison. If you did 5000 hours of psychedelics for example (which might be analogous to 5000 hours of self-inquiry), well... who knows where you'd get. So be careful comparing apples and oranges. It's very easy to poo-poo any spiritual technique simply by pointing out all the ways people fail to get enlightened. All enlightenment techniques are 99.9% ineffective. Not because of the technique. But because the person using it is ignorant. Osho, Mooji, Eckhart, Buddha, Jesus, etc. all have 99.9% failure rates with their students. It couldn't be otherwise.

@The Universe Everything isn't a paradigm. A paradigm is ultimately just a set of concepts, and is itself a concept. There is an entire reality out there which is independent of concepts. Go find it. It's right there under your nose.

@jse Wouldn't it be nice if enlightenment was an infectious disease, like herpes?

@SC GM Ain't nothing "reasonable" or "logical" about your life. 99% of everything you do is emotional. Including any considerations of suicide. The problem is that you don't have sufficient awareness yet of just how powerfully your emotions control you. You are like a puppet of your emotions. And you are never going to change that with logic. Logic is the backwards rationalization you make for your emotional prejudices.

The Dalai Lama once came to my university to give a speech. I was gonna go but then got lazy and didn't.

Yes, basically. Although technically being and experience are different. If you stopped holding experience as separate from you, you would literally be it.

You are not going to enter nonduality until you deeply realize that duality produces suffering by design. Sounds like you're being shown this important lesson, but are sort of discounting its importance. The trap would be to sink back down into your old materialistic paradigm. The challenge of course is facing the truth head-on, without deflecting it. Chasing material objects will never satisfy you. This would be true even if you never started on the path to enlightenment. At least you know what to do about it if you are serious about ending suffering. Otherwise, suffer away and enjoy it. BTW, nonduality does not preclude success, money, sex, or relationships.

Consider... it's possible to be married and take marriage as a dogma -- a paradigm of do's and dont's. And it's possible to be married yet not make a big dogmatic thing out of it. You can create whatever kind of relationship you want. The difference is, are you making a whole ideology out of it? For example, I can eat a carrot without creating a "vegan" identity out of this activity. If I say to drop the vegan paradigm, does that mean rabbits now have to stop eating carrots and must now start eating meat? If you want to go to a club and flirt with girls, have at it. But be clear about what you're doing, why you're doing it, and how you're justifying it to yourself.

@100rockets Maybe there's nothing left to do but to enjoy being, until you aren't any more.

@Bronsoval Breaking out the paradigm of language has little to do with stopping physical speech or writing. Those are external behaviors which don't address the root paradigm at all. You can not speak for 10 years, but that doesn't mean you've escaped the language paradigm. Seeing through the paradigm is the key. There is nothing wrong with speech or writing as long as you understand what they are; that they are constructions; that these constructions come with certain consequences and shape your perception of reality. So the difference is between a person who is fully conscious that language is a paradigm vs a person who is not (99.9999% of people). Breaking out of a paradigm does NOT mean you stop all behaviors commonly associated with it. You can still eat, sleep, shop, write, reason, believe, speak, teach, read, learn, do math, do science, pray, etc. No external action is ever prohibited by reality.