Osaid

Because that's what a person is. You just defined it. You are encountering things which are NOT "person controlling a body", but you distinguish this as "not me" and "not a person."

Any description of love is enticement, of course, because it's a description. It's not the actual thing. So it's not necessary at all. The universe has no problem being exactly what it is and it doesn't need you to turn it into a description. It's like describing the color red, a description is never the color red, and so it is ultimately not necessary for perceiving red, and when you DO perceive red, the color itself is of course TOTALLY different than the description. Ralston said he doesn't want to give his students answers. Yes. Exactly. You don't exist as an answer. The search for answers and conclusions and meanings is the "problem" to begin with. All these teachings are just serving the purpose of pointing at reality and saying "look, you fool, it's right here, this is you, you are this." Any conclusion or answer is instantly metabolized by the unenlightened mind and turned into a belief system, as is rampant across the forum. Existence is not a conclusion. Really grock this: Leo had no idea about this "Love" when he discovered it. It came to him out of nowhere. Now, why is it your standard that all teachers must mention this word prior to your own discovery? Because Leo said so? Because you want someone to coddle to your beliefs and experiences about love? Or maybe you're scared that enlightenment has nothing to do with love? How are you projecting this standard onto enlightenment when you yourself aren't enlightened in the first place? It must be belief.

Of course it is relatively experienced. You know, love with a lowercase l, which is different from enlightenment. When something is tangled up in ego it's hard to call it universal love, it is quite relative. Relative love is like a constricted method of siphoning a small part of universal love, so to speak. For the most part it's based on reason and feeling, and it comes from loving ideas about reality rather than reality itself. He says for most people it is, and this is entirely true. When you tell someone who is not conscious of "Love" what love is, they will NOT understand what it is, they will entice themselves and mislead themselves through their own imagination because they are NOT conscious of "absolute love" and they are not enlightened. His position is that he doesn't want to entice people. If you tell someone who is not enlightened or conscious about "universal love" what love is, their minds will 100% warp it, because whatever their mind comes up with is not it. Ralston teaches enlightenment. Not ideas about love as you do. You do not need to know about love or be taught about love to achieve enlightenment. It's just a singular secular thing that happens in your experience, and then as a side effect all your emotions including love and what else become recontextualized. This love with a capital L is not a teaching, and you don't need to be taught it to experience it, I know you know this because you have experienced it. So it makes no sense for you to fault Ralston for not teaching it, because if you're not directly conscious of "Love" then any description of this love will just exist as an enticement, nothing else.

You get it.

This video is pretty damn clear

Enlightenment is really not a teaching. Any teaching is not it, it just leads up to it. Enlightenment is a permanent recontextualization of your experience. It's like seeing the color red, you can't teach the color red, it's just something you get to experience. So whatever description or teaching that comes before it doesn't matter as long as it actually gets you there. I can assure you that Ralston is conscious enough to exist in a state where he is incapable of hating himself, and that he would not affirm for you to do the opposite. There's no need for him to tell you that. So you know he's achieved SOME state of peace/equilibrium within himself. He just wants you to figure that out at the moment of realization because that's really the only accurate way of figuring it out. I'm sure there are profound communications about the mechanics of love which are pointing to something true, but they are just communications and ideas, so they will never be as holistic as the real singular thing which is just enlightenment/consciousness as Ralston calls it. Those communications, as beautiful as they may be, are just breadcrumbs leading to the actual thing. Anyways, good luck.

Ah okay, cool. Wait, when do I hurt people? I'm just an innocent little kitty.

Why do I get a cactus? ?

Good thing it's not a belief. And it's good that you don't believe it, because that would be delusion, since belief isn't it. The reason you don't see it is exactly because it's just a belief for you. Reality is not belief, even when the belief is related to enlightenment. When you notice it or see it then there is no need to believe it. It would really fall short if it was just a belief. There won't be any integration or philosophizing required, you'll just be it. And so alluding to it and describing it is not even that important, the important part is just getting it, and then being that oneness/love/truth forever. That's much better than someone describing it for you or telling you it exists, actually, this can become a massive distraction, and it HAS become a massive distraction, because it just stimulates imagination. You are not imagination. You are "love", whatever that is, and no imagination or description that Leo or Ralston gives you will ever be that. Actually achieving it is that really matters. And there is no potential for idealizing or delusion once you actually become it. It actually does not matter at all that someone does or doesn't describe this to you when it comes to becoming enlightened. It has nothing to do with the actual thing itself. It just stimulates imagination. The ONLY thing it's useful for is motivating you to look for it, that's it. You don't need to think about love or know about love to actually achieve love/enlightenment, that just happens perfectly and naturally by itself. So it's perfectly fair on Ralston's part IMO. Ramana, Christ, Rumi, Rupert, Sadghuru, Adyashanti, etc. did not need someone preaching about love for them to reach enlightenment. They just instantly realized it once they got it, and that was it. Not deluded necessarily, they're just speaking more poetically but pointing to the same thing. To its effect, part of you moves towards this poeticism, because you have been loving different things all your life, and you can sense that there is something profound about it. You can kind of think of it as hearing a good song in the distance, it's just natural to listen to it and come closer to it. Is the song communicating a truth about reality? Not necessarily, but it is enticing something inside you which perhaps might be linked to it. Love does get recontextualized in a pretty profound way once you're enlightened, as does most other emotions, so of course the enlightened folk talk about it a lot. But seriously, don't get lost in your own ideas about it before you reach it, because of course the ideas are always not it. Just look at it and think: "Woah, what are they pointing to?" It really truly is irrelevant how they describe it, the most relevant part is just actually achieving it. No one can describe it, no matter how enlightened they are. Do you see how arbitrary this term "love" is? Really, it's just a word inside of a language. And it is synonymous with the entirety of existence. It is synonymous with other terms like "oneness", "unity", "God", etc. Now, if you think about it, it's not out of the realm of possibility that Ralston has simply decided to encompass all of these terms inside of a singular few terms like "enlightenment" and "consciousness." Can you see how using the words "love", "God", "oneness", etc. are actually purely an arbitrary artistic flair? Discrediting a teacher for not using the same word as you starts to become silly when you realize this.

This comes naturally when you're enlightened because you clearly see how monumental the potential for delusion is. This is why private workshops exist. And why some teachers even refrain from calling themselves enlightened. I'm sure you've seen the dysfunctional ideals the statement "reality is love" creates across this forum. Holykael is a prime example.

Yes. This is not being denied. Experience is different but truth doesn't change. The difference in experience is what Ralston calls "state." The unchanging truth which permeates across all experiences is what Ralston calls "enlightenment" or "consciousness." States are ephemeral. Truth isn't. Thus the distinction. Truth exists in all states, so it's misleading to call truth a state, as that implies other states exist which are not truthful.

He's not calling that a state. He agrees with you. He's saying that he's skeptical of people who call it "love" and he believes that they aren't actually conscious of what they're talking about, and are instead referring to a state they previously experienced. So, for them, it would be a state. Ralston is particular about how he words these things. When he says "consciousness" it means absolute truth. When he says "state", he is saying exactly that, it's just a state that comes and goes and has nothing to do with "consciousness" or truth itself. If you aren't experiencing what you are talking about right now, it truly was just a state, and thus it is just a memory now. He is saying that for many people love and oneness is just a state, and he is right. This is a very crucial nuance. The states which allow you to become enlightened temporarily are being put on a pedestal. Hence, "higher-consciousness states", hence "more understanding", hence "chasing truth forever." This is the crux of Leo and basically this entire forum.

Twitter

It's a measure of what people think their behavior is, not behavior. It's indirect. And it's absolutely not behavior itself. So it's really important to keep that nuance. So yeah, the latter. It becomes a big red herring I think, and I think this is the right direction. Like, recently we had a post here about college leading to more depression or whatever, but like, depression also occurs outside of college. So the college setting becomes a red herring. It's not a college issue. It's something more fundamental that's not being addressed. Changing the college system could mediate it or reduce depression, but it doesn't actually touch on depression at all, it just touches on the college system, and then depression is reduced as a side effect. Which is good, but it has not much to do with depression. Many people would look at this and say "college causes depression" or "this aspect of college is causing depression." This turns into a rabbit hole of chasing causes which are inferred from previous causes and so on. Imagine trying to measure the behavior of a black hole by measuring the gravity of the Earth. And then inferring the gravity of the black hole purely from the gravity of Earth. This is the same indirectness and leeway being given to quantitative behavioral science, but this discrepancy is shrugged off by most because there's this bias when it comes to being quantitative that is like "If we relate it to an actual object, it becomes more true and objective." And, in you or some scientist reading this, there might be this fear that comes up which is saying "But then, we can't measure anything! Science is lost! This is stupid because now we can't do science anymore!", and this very clinging to science is purely just dogma. I am not saying that this fear or sentiment is true, but rather, you should just be completely open to this possibility, and it shouldn't be a fear. As a scientist, you should be completely open to the idea that science might not work here, or that certain things just can't be measured. Or, as an even better scientist, you should be inspired by this to try and revolutionize science by seeing its limits. I'm reminded of this Niels Bohr quote: "How wonderful that we have met with a paradox. Now we have some hope of making progress"

I get what he means there now, thanks for explicating. If the baseline state is not enlightened, the experience becomes memory, memory becomes identity, and delusion occurs. No matter what. Can't escape the need for enlightenment.

Yep

People just suck at observing things. Is it a science to ask people what they think? I mean it can be, but you gotta take it with a grain of salt. I'd argue social sciences can be a thing, they are a thing, but trying to make conclusions from it is JUST based on what people think. It is limited to that. It's not a failure just a bad interpretation of what you gathered. I don't think it's coincidence that it has become a big thing though, because it seems like something is there that people are trying to point to. So maybe quantitative science can be like a finger pointing at something and saying "hey this needs to be investigated." Hope what I said made any sense.

Rare to see proper skepticism here. How can you be sure that the color red is not the color blue? Sometimes, the need to be sure of things is unnecessary when it is right in front of you. There's no need for you to be sure of colors. Of sound. Because they are experienced. Focus on experience. Being "sure" is not something reality requires. It becomes an unnecessary input at times. Colors cannot be communicated. Sound cannot be communicated. Your experience cannot be communicated. Nothing can truly be communicated. Communication by definition is not the thing. It's an abstraction of the thing. Yes, maybe. For sure. How can you be sure of anything? Sorry, but you're not escaping this question, haha.

This is the correct conclusion.

No such state really exists. The state that was experienced is being anthropomorphized as "you get whatever you want" but this never actually happens as exemplified by the "but you get bored after."

Seems healthy enough to me. This is a reaction I would consider. Depending on how combative/open-minded they seemed, I might have asked him to explicate what was bad about my manners.

Depends entirely on how clean your teeth are. I would say probably yes. Also, years? You definitely have plaque build up, right? Might be weird, but the thing that motivates hygiene for me is just me imagining a future romantic partner or something being with me. And I wanna be clean and proper for them. Also another motivation is just personal health in general. I'm very health conscious. Have you ever had cavities filled before? Do you get cavities at basically every check up? Wonder how good your oral health actually is. If you do, that is NOT normal and NOT sustainable. You can't be getting fillings all the time. It's a sinking ship. All that aside, I find this to be a very odd sentiment that you want to remove your teeth. They're so useful. Why would you wanna do that? It's like wanting to go bald to not deal with hair, or removing an arm so you don't have to take care of it anymore. Some odd psychology happening here, I think.

I'm guessing you relate to this sentiment? I think you could even bring up this "realization" right now if you wanted to. No need for psychedelics. Surely the same mechanism exists across all states? But then, what actually is it? How does consciousness accomplish being disgusted by itself? Are there states where this doesn't happen? How does consciousness accomplish those states where it doesn't happen? Are the states which have no disgust anti-truth/anti-consciousness? Or maybe it's not inherent to consciousness at all? Food for thought.

There's no need to be sure of what exists. You have no difficulty in being sure of the color red or the color blue because the "sureness" arises from existence itself. "Being sure" is an unecessary input on your part. Existence doesn't need you to be sure to exist. It absolutely does not matter what I do or don't tell you, because it just exists as something I told you. Never the thing itself. What matters is what you are experiencing right now. Whether it is or isn't the "ultimate truth", it has absolutely zero effect or bearing on your current experience, this is something important to take notice of. Does knowing that the color red is the ultimate truth change your experience of the color red? Does it stop being red? No, because it's just knowing, what you know never touches anything that is experienced.

Hi. I am curious as to what exactly you are "realizing." How is it that your experience longs for non-experience? Does your table long for non-experience as well? Is your table not "God" as well? Next time it happens, in your experience, I want you to point to where "stuck" is. I want you to point to where "bored" is. What does it look like? What does it smell like? What color is it? If you can find it, great, now you can neutralize the problem. If you can't find it, great, there is no problem.