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.

Random question but if someone was born with lower intelligence genetically in this lifetime and heavily does consciousness work in this lifetime can they assure a leap in genetic intelligence in their next lifetime/s

Most of us are under the illusion that consciousness is localised inside the body or the brain or behind your eyes . But that's just simply an illusion. If you study your direct experience carefully enough ..you will realize that consciousness extends to the whole bubble of perceptions that you are experiencing right now .the problem is you identify yourself with your physical body .which is only a small portion of the entire experience. You are the entire experience that you are experiencing right now. So if you're experiencing seeing a tree over there ..you are the tree ..consciousness is localised in the tree itself not in your eyes .you don’t actually see the tree with your eyes ..you see the tree exactly in the place which it is occurring in .
 what you think is the world out there is actually you. The problem is you think there is me here and a world there and me is looking at the world. That's duality. The observer is the observed. And this is meant literally. What you think is a screen right now that is being perceived by you via a medium of perception system (eyes) is actually what you are. You are not looking at the screen right now. You are the screen. And this is the case for any other duality. You and your thoughts are actually one thing. You and your feelings are actually one thing. Meaning there is no you that is feeling feelings.. The feelings are what you are. Evident by when there are no feelings there are no feeler as well. Similarly when there is no perceiver there are no perceptions.  And since there is in fact no duality between the perceiver and the perceived.. There is neither a you nor a world out there.. There is one unbroken actuality. And this is it. In this actuality there is actually no "you" and no "other". If you try to pin point where or what exactly is" you" in direct experience and what is or where exactly is "other" you will fail miserably. Because this boundary is completely imaginary. It's all one thing. There is no you right here perceiving a world out there. It's all here. Here is there. You is the world.  So what you call other people are literally you. The entire actuality of what's showing up in consciousness right now is you. Not just what you are  identified with as your body. The entire field of consciousness is you. From this place there is neither  you nor a world as two separate things. There is only what is. And what is.. Is one unbroken actuality with no divisions.   you are literally the entire world. You are the totality of what is.