He had a very interesting interview with Lex Friedman not too long ago
 
Here are some famous quotes from Ray Kurzweil
"Artificial intelligence will reach human levels by around 2029. Follow that out further to, say, 2045, we will have multiplied the intelligence, the human biological machine intelligence of our civilization a billion-fold."
"By the time we get to the 2040s, we'll be able to multiply human intelligence a billionfold. That will be a profound change that's singular in nature. Computers are going to keep getting smaller and smaller. Ultimately, they will go inside our bodies and brains and make us healthier, make us smarter."
"Our intuition about the future is linear. But the reality of information technology is exponential, and that makes a profound difference. If I take 30 steps linearly, I get to 30. If I take 30 steps exponentially, I get to a billion."
"What’s actually happening is machines are powering all of us. They're making us smarter. They may not yet be inside our bodies, but, by the 2030s, we will connect our neocortex, the part of our brain where we do our thinking, to the cloud."
"We won't experience 100 years of progress in the 21st century—it will be more like 20,000 years of progress (at today's rate)."
"The singularity is near: When humans transcend biology."
"We are the species that seeks to extend our physical and mental reach beyond current limitations."
"Death gives meaning to our lives. It gives importance and value to time. Time would become meaningless if there were too much of it."
"Understanding something creates an appreciation"
 
Here are some of this predictions for the 2020's and beyond
2020s
Advanced AI: Kurzweil predicts that artificial intelligence will pass the Turing test by 2029, meaning that it will be capable of human-like conversation and cognition.
Health and Medicine: He believes that medical technology will be using nanobots capable of entering the bloodstream to "feed" cells and extract waste, thereby extending human life expectancy. Furthermore, advancements in genetic treatments will help cure many diseases.
Virtual Reality: Virtual reality will become a fully immersive, total sensory experience, indistinguishable from "real" reality.
2030s
Human-Computer Integration: Humans will be able to directly connect their brains to computers, leading to a significant boost in cognitive abilities. This will be facilitated through nanobots that can access our brains non-invasively.
AI Supremacy: By the mid-2030s, Kurzweil predicts that non-biological intelligence will outstrip human intelligence.
2040s
Technological Singularity: This is the point where artificial intelligence will be so advanced that it will lead to rapid, unpredictable improvements. According to Kurzweil, the singularity will happen around 2045. After this point, it's hard to make precise predictions because the world will have changed so much.
Post-Singularity (2045 and beyond)
Human Immortality: With the combination of genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics (GNR), it would be possible to stop and even reverse aging, effectively making humans immortal.
Cosmic Expansion: Post-singularity, humanity might begin the process of saturating the universe with our intelligence.
 

A Critique Of Actualized.org And Leo Gura
 
The intention of this critique is to make people aware of some of Leo’s limitations. It might save people time and unnecessary suffering. It is not meant to invalidate or insult Actualized.org or Leo. I think Leo is a great teacher in many ways, this is just healthy criticism. Please take it lightly. Since Leo likes to criticize everyone else, I thought why not do it to him this time.
It’s worth mentioning that I’ve personally never taken any psychedelics and I don’t consider myself some advanced spiritual person either. Some might consider this critique incomplete - which is fair. I have been watching Leo and other teachers for a long time. Nevertheless, I think it can still be helpful for people to read this. If anything, it can be an exercise in open-mindedness. 
It’s important to note that I will only be critiquing Leo on his more core and central teaching. So don’t expect much on minutia like his dating advice or politics. Although these thing can be important to some people, and you are free to level your own critiques on him, small or big, below this post, I personally won’t be focusing much on this.
So sit back and let’s being…
 
Freedom from understanding
 
This one is a little confusing and long but the most important. Stick with me please.
 
Basically, Leo takes psychedelics and shares his findings on YouTube.
 
Why am I telling you this? 
I am telling you this because there are things he doesn’t explicitly tell you:
What Leo does is pursuit of understanding. It is an endless process. There is no end to it. You can keep on accumulating new experiences and making your understanding better and better. Understanding is a limited process rooted in the ego-mind.
So during his psychedelic trip he has an experience of God. We can say he is in a higher state of consciousness. Once it is over, he comes back to his normal state of consciousness. The experience is stored in the form of memory which gets interpreted and communicated by the ego-mind. The memory isn’t reliable because it can’t be stored. Understanding is a limited thing, whereas Truth is unlimited it can’t be bound to such things.
So here’s what you need to know:
Most people don’t need to do what Leo does. Leo is like a scientist. It’s his profession and passion to have new experiences and create new mental models. This pays his bills.
Truth is beyond understanding. Truth is something living, it doesn’t come from a memory of a trip.
Understanding (and experience) is only needed to answer a few basic questions, beyond it you don’t need it. Questions like, “Who am I?”, “What is thought?”, “What is the limitation of thought?” Basically to quiet the mind and satisfy your curiosity. To become free from this as well.
The point of spirituality is freedom, but people get stuck in this cycle of accumulating experiences and gathering knowledge. They never become free from understanding itself. You have to use your understanding to get free from understanding.
Getting more understanding will not change you. Your personality will remain the same. Your habits and patterns will remain the same. Your base level of consciousness will remain the same. You will remain an idiot. (If anything too many fixed ideas you got from your trips might make your ego swell and make it hard for you to look at life afresh.)
You might regret wasting this time on understanding. It’s endless. It’s the same as exploring the physical world. You can keep exploring it deeper and deeper and arrive at new conclusions each time. Your time might be better spent on any number of things.
It’s important to tell you that it will not get rid of suffering either, in case that’s why you are following Leo. 
It’s important to tell you this because people have attached unrealistic expectations about this. If you’re an average person with a job and a career, you don’t need to do this. In fact this might not even be spirituality for you, it’s like a weird game of documenting peak experiences. He might say he made this clear to people, but I say he doesn't explicitly tell you this. Most people don't need this and they don't know they don't need it, they are lost and Leo doesn't help them out.
 
Lack of balance
 
Leo likes to talk about balance, but how balanced is his spirituality? 
How balanced is his self-help? It is overly intellectual (as he himself admits). 
All he’s trying to do is get peak spiritual experiences. He has completely neglected raising his base level of consciousness. As far as you know he is not doing anything to raise it. He inspires others to do the same.
 
Arrogance, ego and the forum
 
If you had asked me about Leo’s ego a year ago, I would have ignored it as minutia, but now I increasingly feel it is becoming a problem.
After an awakening his ego becomes inflated for several weeks. Every time he gets an awakening you can bet it will be like this.
You know something other people don’t. So what? What’s the big deal? What’s there to be proud about? You don’t even know it after the trip. I don’t see the point of inflating your ego.
 
Trap of solipsism 
“But it’s not ego, he’s trying to communicate solipsism. That’s why he says he is the best and the only one awakened.”
No, no. If he was he wouldn’t say it like that. It would be a matter of fact statement. Anybody with some awareness can tell that what he is saying coming from ego. He thinks there’s no one he can learn from. There can be no characters in the dream more knowledgeable and aware as him. Yet he continues to be in the dream. He thinks he is the most advanced, not because of solipsism, he actually thinks that. (For anyone that thinks otherwise, you can simply use the search function and look what he said in the past.) (I'm not saying solipsism is not true.)
 
It’s a one way conversation with him. There’s nothing you can say to him that will get through to him. There’s really no point talking to him anymore. It’s a misapplication of solipsism. 
 
“He’s just being authentic.” 
Being authentic doesn’t mean doing whatever comes to your mind. “I feel like murdering someone, so I will murder someone.” That’s not authentic. Again, I think it comes under a trap of solipsism.
 
“The other teachers are not as good”
He doesn’t know about other teachers’ methods.
Leo doesn’t know about all these things, he has never learned from an actual Yogi, Tantric, or a Buddhist monk from the places these traditions originate from. He has never gone too deep into this. He’s not qualified to talk about it.
He doesn’t know about devotion, about chakras, energy, and many other things. 
It might be because he has an autoimmune disorder which prevents him from exploring other methods fully. That’s why he likes psychedelics so much. They’re quick and easy. 
“Buddhism will never get you there.”
Sadhguru said Buddhism is a long, drawn out process. He said Buddhist masters tell you it will take you 12 life times of sadhana to become enlightened. Buddhism in the east, the actual Buddhism, makes it clear. It doesn’t give you false expectations.
"But re-incarnation and all that isn't real."
Just like everything else. The walls in your house, your ego-mind, your body, and your psychedelics. How do you know it's not as real as radio waves?
"But these teachers are genetic freaks! We can't be like them."
So it just didn't occur to these genetic freaks that other people can never advance spiritually like them. These supposedly genetic freaks who are juggernauts of awareness, just didn't realize other people are not like them. It slipped their attention. Obviously if these people are so aware they know what they are doing and what others are capable of. I've seen videos and testimonies of people who go to these people. People's lives have changed for the better. Obviously not all the people who benefit make a YouTube channel and say exactly the same things Leo says. People are private.
 
Being offensive and outrageous 
I am embarrassed to share that I watch actualized.org with anybody. With post titles like, brains don’t exists and pedophilia is love. I’m sure I’m not the only one. Leo has no regard for how others might perceive his loyal followers when he does things like this.
It’s coming from ego. The way he’s going about saying it is dumb. You don’t need to do all this to make your point. It’s unappealing, that’s why people move away from you and he feels they are moving away because they don’t understand his point. 
“Look at this video of a murder taking place. This is love guys! Look at this! Why are you going away? Surely you’re not as awake as me! I’m the most awakened person on the planet!”
 
Future
I think in the future, it is possible, Leo will eventually develop occult powers with the use of psychedelics. And his ego will be even more inflated. It will become even more ugly. This is all a consequence of not neglecting his base level of consciousness. 
 
Forum
The forum is not a great place. Partly because Leo himself sets the precedence on how to communicate here and he himself breaks his own rules and name calls people. Even when he’s not name calling you directly, that’s what he’s trying to do indirectly. He’s so snarky too. Other than that he’s doing some version of “everything is a dream”, “this is just a figment of your dream.” 
“It’s the internet” No. They look at Leo’s writing style and get inspired. 
The quality of the forum is quite low. Some members with mental illnesses should’ve been reached out and told to take care of themselves before posting again. There are posts which are quite low, like “why I hate men/women” or some other thing like that. Some members should’ve been kicked out a long time ago but Leo seemed to have a soft-corner for them. There are people who have shown no progress (or even regression) and have been on the forum for a long time.
For e.g, take Nahm’s example. He should’ve been stopped a long time ago. I come on the forum occasionally and even I noticed he was misleading members on the forum whether he meant to do it or not. And I have seen long term members being lost and no one corrects them. 
This is important ‘cause there have been incidents of suicide and people ending up in mental hospitals among Leo’s audience. It’s not far fetched to call what he does irresponsible. 
 
Better self-help teachers
 
In a sense you can’t even call what Leo does self help anymore. Over the years, he has become more interested in sharing his awakening from his trips than actually understanding his audience’s problems and solving them. 90% of the time he’s just describing his awakening and it’s not of much use because you cannot get to that point by just listening to him. Just do the psychedelics in the way Leo say, there’s no point listening to him except for entertainment.
I think, there are better more balanced self-help teachers out there. Those who don’t focus on journalling and intellectualizing too much. Intellectualizing is the number one trap today, people just sit and home and try to think through their problems instead of taking action. So that’s why I think it’s a big limitation of Leo. There is Sandeep Maheshwari for example who has a good balance of self-help and spirituality. His content is not in English however. 
And for what we know Leo is not a very productive person either. His life might be worse than most people’s for what we knew (partially because of his autoimmune disease). I don’t he’s the ideal person to teach a balanced self-help.
For e.g. take the difference between Sadhguru and Leo on concentration. Concentration is one of the most important things you need to become successful spiritually and materially.
Leo has a video on concentration titled: Concentration vs Meditation - How To Develop Concentration. I’m sure everyone has seen it multiple times so I won’t talk about it.
Now look at what Sadhguru says about concentration: he says don’t try to concentrate. Trying to concentrate is torture and you won’t be able to sustain it. Instead be involved in whatever you are doing and focus will naturally come. Not attached, not detached, but involved. Like you are involved while playing a sport. To meditate is to be involved. Involvement brings attention, and attention brings clarity. Personally this had changed my life. Here’s one article by him: https://isha.sadhguru.org/in/en/wisdom/article/key-to-staying-focused
I think Sadhguru knows much more about attention, concentration, focus, alertness, and the overall mind than Leo. 
 
Other minutia
 
If I were to say something else I would just say that Leo has a slight bias toward the “western” way of life and has wrong assumptions about people from other places. The lifestyle of the “west” isn’t all that great. 
 
They End
 
I may edit this post later for spelling and grammatical errors, or if I want to add something to it. 
 

Leo's blog post reminded me of this Australian guy that does things like these:
 
He also speaks about how everything is consciousness. Pretty rad.
Feel free to post any other videos/articles/personal experience about such phenomena .

I'm not sure about chakras but have you ever seen any of these telekinesis videos on YouTube?

 

@Prana_y4na There isn't one answer to your question. Consciousness is an infinite mind that can imagine anything.
I will offer one perspective based on hundreds of out of body experiences I have had. Several years ago in my pursuit of awakening I was receiving energy work and doing different spiritual practices when I began having spontaneous out of body experiences. At first it was very alarming and often I thought I may have died. It's very frightening to unexpectedly find yourself outside of your body. Once I realized I was ok and hadn't died, I was able to relax more. As I became accustomed to it happening frequently, I felt more confident to begin leaving my house and exploring other worlds and talking with different people I encountered, some who had once lived on earth. I was fascinated with what happens after we die, where we go and what our lives are like, so this was an incredible opportunity to answer many questions I had. Every time I encountered someone from earth I would ask them what their transition was like after they died and what their life is like now. I could write a book based on all my experiences. The general themes I found after interviewing many people is most people after what we call death find themselves in a world almost identical to the world and culture they just left. They have a body that is just as real and physical to them as their body on earth. They have all the same senses they had on earth but sometimes these are enhanced, like 360 degree vision. Many describe death like waking up from a dream. Some have a slightly expanded awareness, but I came across others that were exactly the same in personality and awareness. I even met some who had no idea they had even died. Their environment was so identical to their life on earth, they were completely unaware they had passed. 
I don't claim to be an expert on the after-life or have all the answers, I'm just offering one perspective based on my own direct experiences. You really don't need to fear death. You are an eternal consciousness that can never die. You will have all the same perceptions after death and most likely enhanced perceptions. Based on what I have seen and heard what we call death is actually something to look forward to. It's just the next chapter in an endless journey of exploration. 

This videos nicely shows the crude attempts some of the best scientists are making at understanding consciousness:
It's like watching a retarded child trying to solve a Rubik's Cube.
I found it entertaining and sad at the same time.

I've begun to read some of the classics of Spirituality such as the Bhagavad Gita, the Dhammapada, Tibetan Book of the Dead, etc. So far I have the Eknath Easwaran books.  I'm currently finishing Passage Meditation by Eknath Easwaran, and then The Three Pillars of Zen by Philip Kapleau. After that I'll begin going through the classics themselves. It's more for passive reading in my down time rather than a deep dive into them, but I would like to have a primer on how to actually interpret the texts. If you don't think such a primer would be helpful I'd also love to hear your opinions. 
Thank you so much for your help. 

Found a good video on digital minimalism. 
 

It depends on who you are, "where" you are and what you read into "postitive thinking", it could be in respect of law of attraction and that if you're just positive about something then everything will be alright. But somewhere along the road you have to hold the understanding that you have to to sow in order to reap. If you fail to see this relationship and somewhere think that you can just wish for things and they should magically appear or happen to you, then you are disillusioned. It is only after you "sow" that the universe seem to align with your intentions and things appear or happen seemingly without effort. If you come from the perspective that you should get stuff without having put some stake into it, it's easy to see that one would say that "positive thinking is projection bullshit". While this is just a lack of basic understanding.
If you put in the work that is needed, fueled but positive energies then it's a whole different matter. You get the energy you need to realign your reality to whatever your needs are and there will be a sense of it all being effortless - at this point events simply unfold. But in fact there is more to it than mere positive thinking. We tend to romanticise and neglect the not so romantic aspects of things. Doing that, it's easy to say or see only the positive thinking being the magical "fix all" component.

It's so already the case that it seems hidden because enlightenment is the recognition that the very individual that thinks it needs to find something special, isn't real in any way at all.
Sounds easy enough but it's rare and never what the ego/me thinks it will be like. 
Ordinary and extraordinary simultaneously seem to describe it well!
❤ 

Hahahaha.
The only thing that wants to keep going is the Ego, it always says Enlightenment is just up ahead around the next corner.... it literally never finds what it's looking for because it's the very experience of separation. 
What ego is searching for is an imaginary concept about Awakening or Enlightenment that simply never occurs... it's a fabrication of the ego, a dream story of what the ego believes Enlightenment must be like. 
The paradox is that meditation can sometimes allow a catching on to these endless dream stories the ego fabricates to keep the search going. BTW it doesn't seem to be working there.
Enlightenment has nothing to do with being able to tell a nice long spiritual sounding story to make the ego feel like it has really been getting somewhere & making progress on the so-called spiritual path.
Its the recognition that this individual or whatever identifying agent 'you' consider yourself to be, IS AN ILLUSION of self.
Honestly by now you would think you guys would have accidentally caught on to what is being pointed to.
It really illuminates how tricky identification with the ego/sense of self can be.
❤ 
 
 
 
 

Meditation isn't about getting somewhere. It's not about god-realization, ego-death or mystical experiences. There is no goal. There is nothing to happen. Meditation is melting away all those concepts. Meditation is seeing "goals" and "results" for what they are, thoughts.

Why does practically no one care about the intersection between physics and spirituality?
Leo, of course, has a very well prepared answer to this. The answer is that the modern scientific establishment, which is a giant mass of self validating authority, cannot move beyond its materialist paradigm and start to consider the importance of the observer as part of the physical systems they are studying. (Someone correct me if I didn't get this right).
The trouble for me is that even given this explanation, there are no "wackos", no "fringe" or "pseudo" scientist, no internet conspiracy theorists, NO ONE who have both a deep understanding of spirituality and physics, and also have a humble respect for truth and epistemology. Of course, you have to exert zero effort to find someone who claims to be studying, or has found some theory of everything which ties together biology, consciousness, the standard model, GR, and God into one self consistent theory with a nice little bow on top. Whenever I find someone with this type of claim though, the theory will be either utter speculation (neither based on direct experience nor experimental observations), supper narrow in scope (for example, a mathematical framework to tie together QFT and GR), or a leap from some physical phenomenon to consciousness with absolutely no logic or critical thinking in between (for example, Roger Penrose positing that consciousness arises from quantum effects in the brain. Anyone who has perused spirituality deeply will know that this is definitely wrong, because consciousness does not arise from physical phenomena but instead is responsible for those phenomena. Penrose is about as academic establishment scientist as you can get though). 
So like, can we please find one person who for example:
1. Knows that they are god, and all of reality is part of their mind. In other words they have discovered absolute truth.
2. Understands the mathematics and logic behind physical theories like general relativity and quantum field theory.
3. Seeks to use their understanding of these two fields to build a cohesive model of the universe. Starting from the one absolute truth and from there deriving all the relative truths that we know and love today.
 
I mean, this is definitely a big ask, but at the same time you would expect to see a couple people working on this. In reality though, there are NONE. I think someone might be able to to point out a couple contenders for people trying to work on this, such as Christopher Lanigan or maybe Joseph Campbell. But their theories are unsatisfactory to me. So I'm going to try to be as clear as possible as to what I'm looking for:
 
I want an explanation of everything, nothing less. I want someone to be able to take the unopinionated ground truth of all of reality, which is nonduality, god, consciousness itself, or whatever you want to call it. I want the theory to start from 0. From nothing. From the point of total nothingness and ending in the exact nature of the reality which we see before our eyes today. A theory like this would be totally logical and be based on subjective experience of absolute truth at the most basic level. From this point, I want to be able to describe the nature of our conscious experience, and the objective reality which we seem to be experiencing living in. I want U(1)xSU(2)xSU(3) symmetry to be explained, and I want every physical phenomenon in the whole universe to be able to be explained.
I don't really see anyone who has a really good understanding of the foundations of physics right now and at the same time has a really good understand of consciousness and absolute truth. Personally, I have what I would consider a surface level understanding of both of these things. I'm working on it myself, but I don't see anyone else who I would consider to be like me. I have spent some time at a Buddhist monastery so far, and I have bachelors in mathematics and physics, but I have waaay more work to do before I really even know the exact questions to ask.
Anyway, all the theoretical physicists today are materialists and if they are talking about consciousness it's because they want to be trendy, but really they have no idea what they are talking about once they get away from physics. All mystics I know of who know about direct experience of absolute truth seem to not really care about physics, or have a very lazy understanding of it.
So yeah this was just a rant let me know what you think.

2022-2024 have been some of the best years for movies. It's like a small golden age. You are watching wrong movies.
Here are some good ones:
Banshees of Inisherin The Zone of Interest Aftersun Saltburn Menu Killers of the Flower Moon Poor Things The Substance Also, there are dozens of good European/Korean movies out there, you just have to look for them.

Develop your capacity to feel your internal energy centers. That is where releasing happens from. Not the mind. Most people are too much in their mind to be able to release efficiently. You can develop this through doing a daily letting go practice where you just sit with yourself for an hour. Like a meditation. And in this meditation you let go of your mind and become one with your energy field in and around your body. Try feeling the heart, pelvis, forehead etc and get a feel for the region around those places as well. Expand from those places into the areas around it and feel as much as you can. Do not force, let it come to you. And never analyze. Let go of everything. If you can deeply feel, you can release and that will happen on its own. You will know when you release when you feel lighter after. 
And releasing is like peeling an onion. You keep removing layers. You do it everyday for a long time and after a while, you just feel lighter permanently. And then all the good stuff happens.

@Nahm It is a blessing.

Hard to know. I would say that's way too fast. If you're feeling them, you're good to go. Just keep at it. Maybe you're aware of them when you get triggered but then you are not aware of them when you're not so triggered. Triggers are useful in the way that they expose these suppressed emotions.

The mind is silent during flow states, the focus is on kinesthetic awareness. Awareness of body and motion. For example i play chess and calculate 10+ moves in the future in silence. Visualizing the internal board in the future is merged with the external world. Internal and external are merged. This greatly reduces thinking stress/effort, allows you to relax in the external environment while dreaming. The awareness/experience is on the motion of the pieces in my body. The body and pieces are merged. Often ill look at a chess position and sit there in silence with nothing happening, occasionally having a thought about the position, slowly the depth of understanding of the position grows and grows, see more and more, until  only fantastic insights flood the mind. Point the brain in a direction and remain silent, it will do all the work. 
Deliberate mental calculation is scaffolding that needs to be removed once the mind is trained, but people get stuck with this scaffolding and remain in exhausting focused states. If your concentrating its because your over using your brain. Relax and let the brain think on its own with out you. 
Also do more tasks/hobbies that are kinesthetic centered, this will train and strengthen brain regions associated with kinesthetic motion. Increasing kinesthetic intelligence slowly until your able to see the motion of thoughts and think with motion instead of words/images.
The brain knows what your thinking, we then inefficiently convert does thoughts into words and images. The conversion process is unnecessary, draining and kills flow. Instead work with the raw thoughts directly.
- Try keeping eyes perfectly strait in-front of you with out moving them while doing the task. If eyes need to move, lock it into place at the new position, robotic. Hard core meditators are known to have still dead strait eyes.
Note: it can take time to get into ridim, at first dullness might appear and no progress is made on the task, need to be patient and let the brain ramp up on its own subconsciously. Subconscious priming. 
Forgetting what you are doing/thinking or a broken line of thought will happen if your in the correct state as described above. Eventually with practice it will be consistent. 

1 - Learning and improving your skill set is part of generating a sharper mind through physical changes in your brain
There is no reason to create a separation between the two. One is part of the other. 
2 - “That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that history has to teach.”
Basically every single problem you have ever faced has already been faced by another version of you in a previous lifetime. 
Books are a Time Machine that transport you into the mind of a wiser, more accomplished version of you.
Books are also like sitting down with a mentor who has taken the time to choose his words as wisely as possible so that you grasp insights that took him years to reach.
Most importantly, Books are like a cheat sheet for life.
You can bullshit around trying to reinvent the wheel ... Or you can just read how another version of you did it and then adapt they solution to your problems. 
I could try to come up with the neti-neti method all on my own after years of meditation and then begin practicing it. Or I could read about the Neti-Neti Method and practice it years earlier because it only took a day to read about it.
So lets say reading wasn't going to make some "physical change" to your ability to think: the lessons reading gives you would make you "sharper" in that you would solve life's problems faster than a version of you who didn't read. Because again,  you already know the answers to the problems you're solving since you read the answer in book somewhere.
 2 - Books are a form of meditation thus they sharpen your mind
Let go of the idea of meditation as something you only do sitting with your eyes closed and legs crossed.
Anything that exercises your ability to concentrate + contemplate counts as a form of meditation.
And if you didn't guess it by now, books require a ton of concentration and they raise your ability to contemplate by giving you new perspectives. 
More specifically, reading can be seen as a form of mindfulness meditation. Instead of watching your breath, trailing off, realizing and going back to the breath, you read a book, trail off to consider what the book is talking about, and go back to reading the book.
Seriously, just do strong determination sitting while reading and you will see just how difficult it actually is. I have added this to my daily regimen and it's done wonders for me. 
So yes reading in and of itself gives you a sharper mind because meditation gives you a sharper mind. 
Overall, stop looking for excuses to not read. You should be reading far far more than you currently do. 

Hi @Samsonov
Whichever way you do it is okey because you benefit either way. Even if you're doing nothing lost in thinking that is still relatively okey and would still give you some benefit. Different people understand this "do nothing" practice differently according to their level maturity.
The highest and most powerful way of interprating "do nothing" is by dropping the intention even to meditate. Basicly when you're meditating there's an intention inside your mind and an effort to reach a certain state or goal. An earnest seeker can even become aware of that very subtle effort to become effortless. When you become aware of it you trancend all effort altogether. There you find an absolutlely effort-free space of awareness, untouched by anything, your True Self.
The moment you try to achieve awareness you're already not it, you become a seeker who's trying to get somewhere. But you don't need to make a single movement to be what you are. Awareness is not affected by what a seeker does or not do. It sounds like a riddle but it's very simple actually. And yet it takes a certain maturity to get it. I hope you get it someday.
Regards and good luck to you ?

It’s very simple: relax and surrender. 
That doesn’t mean you forcibly stop anything. Surrendering the mind and doing nothing DOES NOT mean you stop the mind. It’s means you stop and allow whatever that is occurring. If you’re mind is going crazy, allow it, surrender, do nothing. If you are driving in your car, you are driving allowing your mind to do whatever it does. 
THAT is surrender. 
The fact that you’re trying to make this complex is what makes this so hard. 
Sit down on a chair and let the mind go on, allow the mind to go crazy and bitch and moan. If you’re sitting still fine but that’s not the point. The point, as far “recognition” (and that itself is false because that implies cognition and enlightenment has nothing to do with cognition) of Truth goes is that you’re not your body-mind. 
Notice how you’re aware of all that mental, psychosomatic, physical, etc. nonsense. Who is that’s aware of all those thoughts? Whose agitated? Whose confused about this technique experiencing this mental state? 
The whole technique of doing nothing is the recognition is that what you are is that silent presence which is everpresent and is and has always been doing absolutely nothing. 
Good. Now, you’ve heard a cute little story, great. Now surrender and doing nothing moment to moment through out your day. 

Mid journey alternatives. 

https://pi.ai/  (Very emotional. It has a nice personality and voices, you can voice call it without limits) - If you're in a country they are not in yet, just download the Android APK file from APKmirror. https://duck.ai/ (Avaliable: GPT4o-Mini, Claude 3 Haiku, Llama 3.1 70b, Mixtral 7x8b) -- IT REQUIRES NO LOGIN. They don't store the conversations. They are privacy-friendly, you can even use it through the TOR network (you don't have to, but if you wished to keep it extra private) and ask it whatever you want and it's NOT possible to be banned or limited since you don't even login, and they don't even have captchas, and were extremely reliable to me. (From the DuckDuckGo privacy-friendly search engine) https://aistudio.google.com (You can use the Gemini Flash 1.5) to use its context window of 1 Million tokens, you can upload several books of text as TXT and ask it questions (Although, it doesn't work as good as you would expect, seems to be descent for large code bases and documentations, better than simply using RAG techniques). It's not as smart a GPT4o but it's still nice. You can also use it as an API for free. For example I use it in VSCODE as a free copilot. https://gemini.google.com/ The version of Gemini Flash but for the public in general. The free AI Studio from google there is a limited offer of this free one. https://labs.google.com/search/experiment/1 TURN ON for having AI responses (It uses Gemini Flash probably, just as dumb) in your Google Search. https://stablehorde.net/ - Crowdsourced AI for image generation and text. https://github.com/jhj0517/Whisper-WebUI (Transcribe audio to text, you can use fast GPUs in Google Colab for free) Perhaps try Kaggle for 30h weekly GPU time. Works in CPU Mode too.  

I did some research and found these:
Midjourney - Best for creating stylized and realistic AI art.
Gamma AI - Best for generating unique presentations.
Grammarly - Best for writing better.
Perplexity.ai - Best for researching with information from credible sources.
Consensus - Best for gathering current sources and understanding sentiment in your field.
NotebookLM - Best for Understanding and "Brainstorming With" Large Files.
Copy.ai - Best for copywriting and digital marketing strategies.
Otter AI - Best for transcribing and collaborating on meetings.
Descript - Best for podcast editing.
Suno – Best for creating AI songs.
 

Have you ever tried mind-mapping as you go? I've been experimenting with this and it takes way less time. Although the things it helps you remember will be different and less detailed than notes.
@Buck Edwards
I would recommend Justin Sung on Youtube for these kinds of things. He has a lot of videos on reading difficult texts, motivation, learning science, and more.