Leo's Blog Discussion Mega-Thread

[Daniel Balan]

Atheism ( for me ) means rejecting religion, not being affiliated to any religion, not operating on belief, not believing that God is a old human in the sky, not believing that God is a magic like entity that controls the universe via his own wills and desires etc. By this definition @Leo Gura, you are an atheist too! If the US government would do a census to see how many percents there are Christians, Muslims etc , you would be put in the atheist category because you don't follow any religion. So why so much shit being thrown at the atheists? After all being an atheist is by far better than being a religious fundamentalist!

[RendHeaven]

3 minutes ago, Daniel Balan said:

God is a magic like entity that controls the universe via his own wills and desires etc.

this description is somewhat accurate

[Leo Gura]

7 minutes ago, Daniel Balan said:

So why so much shit being thrown at the atheists?

Because their worldview makes it impossible for them to realize God.

[MuadDib]

20 hours ago, Natasha Tori Maru said:

Are you a fellow aussie?

I have so much gratitude for being born and raised here! I love the outback. I love the bush - I have always ensured I live close to the Yarra river/Merri creek. The heartbeat of Melbourne. 

Every day I see Galahs, Cockatoos (Sulphur and MajorM), Owls... sometimes Platypus and wallabies. Snakes in the summer. And I live inner city! 

I often read the horror of what actualizers in the USA live with -  and I feel so lucky <3

Enjoyed the video above from the blog also

Yeah, currently living in the Lockyer Valley region. My extended family are all farmers, so I've always lived close to nature. I couldn't stand Vegas when I visited, but the surrounding deserts there were breathtaking. Also, I feel that Australia's reputation for deadly animals is a bit overhyped. Statistically, cows are the most lethal animals in the country.

There is no shortage of great spots to visit here. Here is a popular rope swing I've been to, among many other lesser-known spots.
 

Brisvegas ftw!

[Aether Phoenix]

@Leo Gura, amazing stuff you are publishing in relation to how the mind creates your external world. 

 

Do you recommend any efficient method, excluding psychedelics, to remove the boundary between mind and external world? 
My parents are schizophrenic so I am more cautious with drugs. 

[Leo Gura]

3 hours ago, Aether Phoenix said:

@Leo Gura, amazing stuff you are publishing in relation to how the mind creates your external world. 

Thanks!

Quote

Do you recommend any efficient method, excluding psychedelics, to remove the boundary between mind and external world? 
My parents are schizophrenic so I am more cautious with drugs. 

Here Daniel Ingram talks about intense meditation techniques like Fire Kasina.

To remove that boundary you either need psychedelics or intense concentration/meditation practice. Kriya yoga could also work.

There's just no way around hardcore practices because that boundary is very serious and deep. If it could easily dissolve then everyone would be mystic and no one would be a materialist. So it has to be hard and rare.

 

Edited July 11 by Leo Gura

[ExploringReality]

@Leo Gura

I've been seeing this video from him after combing through his massive book, you know which one I'm talking about. I will definitely be doing these practices more seriously

[Dayo]

Neoplatonism is an awesome way of approaching spirituality because it sees God as Reality instead of a Supreme Being separate from its creation as proposed by the Abrahamic faiths. Atheism is afraid of any notion of God, so it provides a road block for people who are serious about spirituality. I saw the blog post about the atheist spiritual director. I first heard of her when she was on John Vervaeke's channel a few weeks ago. 

[Rafael Thundercat]

14 hours ago, Daniel Balan said:

After all being an atheist is by far better than being a religious fundamentalist!

Comparing oranges to apples will not lead to God-Realization

 

[Guest Nilsi]

@Leo Gura (in response to Quote #245)

The real question here isn’t whether some experience can temporarily light up your brain and make you go, oh, so that’s what you meant by “God.” Sure, maybe you have that mind-wave moment and it feels profound - even life-changing. And I want to be clear that I’m not trying to trivialize that. These kinds of experiences can be enormous in their impact, and I have no problem acknowledging that openly.

But what exactly are you going to do after that? Because the whole approach you’re proposing is basically weak sauce in the sense that it assumes the experience itself settles anything. You’re narrowing a person’s imagination and their capacity to explore by framing everything around this one supposed reference event. Even pragmatically - let’s say you convince someone to go chase this experience, and they succeed. Congratulations. They can now nod solemnly and say, Ah yes, I get it. But what have you actually given them? A fixed little island of recognition? That’s it?

Sure, you can keep repeating the mantra that “there is no end,” but when you elevate the experience into a kind of Master Signifier and center your whole rhetoric around it, you’re essentially creating a set of false standards - low standards, actually - because you’re suggesting to people that once they’ve hit that threshold, they’ve somehow “arrived.” And when someone is encountering something so intense and transformative for the first time, they’re likely to accept that framing. They’re likely to believe that this is the whole point.

It’s like being the creepy uncle telling your nephew, „Hey, there’s this thing called an orgasm - just keep rubbing and you’ll see.“ Sure, the kid figures it out eventually, but that doesn’t mean they now understand sexuality as such. If anything, the experience is the very beginning of any meaningful engagement, not the end of it. And if you repeat that experience over and over - what then? Is it always the same? Does it dissolve into something else? Does it fracture into different intensities or problems? The model you’re proposing doesn’t even have the conceptual range to handle any of that.

And just to be clear, from a linguistic and semiotic perspective - and honestly from any poststructuralist perspective - what you’re saying here is deeply problematic. We don’t have to get lost in quoting Foucault or Derrida line by line, but it should be obvious that framing reality this way amounts to a kind of naive Platonism: the idea that there is some abstract ideal form, some transcendent template, that all these diverse and singular experiences are supposed to be subsumed under.

My question to you is whether you’re doing this purely for didactic reasons - to make it easier for people to latch onto a simple concept - or whether it’s actually symptomatic of a more unexamined metaphysics you’re implicitly committed to. Because if you press everything into one ideal reference point, you’re not clarifying anything - you’re just shutting down creativity, possibility, and any capacity to think or explore beyond your own framework.

And sure, I get that you admire Plotinus or other metaphysical traditions that trade in these universals. But honestly, I find it extremely limiting. For me, Deleuze is important exactly because he breaks this up - yes, it complicates everything, it makes it harder to teach, it obscures the neat categories - but it also respects the singularity of events and experiences instead of reducing them to an abstract universal.

So this is why I consistently refuse to participate in these kinds of discourses - not because I don’t understand what you’re proposing or because I haven’t had comparable experiences myself, but because the very language you’re using already constrains what can be thought or created. And I genuinely wonder whether you see that or whether you’ve ever engaged seriously with these critiques, because so far, I haven’t seen any sign that you have. And ultimately, if you really care about helping people appreciate the depth of what they’re encountering, you’d have to give them better tools than just circling a Master Signifier and implying that’s the goal.

Edited July 11 by Nilsi

[Leo Gura]

6 hours ago, Nilsi said:

But what exactly are you going to do after that?

It's just one aspect of this work.

To have a reference experience for God is a great thing to acquire. Of course it's not the end of the work. It's just the beginning. And on your way to acquire that reference experience much inner work will need to happen. So the benefit is not just in that one reference experience but all the work necessary to get it.

Edited July 11 by Leo Gura

[Davino]

My dealing with humans is the amount of bullshit I can tolerate

[Davino]

On 9/7/2025 at 10:55 PM, freddyteisen said:

 I had a talk with my mom the other day about what spirituality/metaphysics is about (& why it interests me) and I tried explaining it was about removing the conceptual overlay of thoughts/ideas onto reality, and seeing the present moment as ‘mystical’ & ‘beautiful’.

I tried showing her a plant, and explaining it’s about ‘experiencing’ the plant and removing the conceptual ‘plant’ overlay.

She was confused and said that’s not very practical, “pull up that plant, it’s weeds you need to remove from the garden”. 

Yeah, survival doesn't allow many people to contact this present moment directly.

Survival is the biggest bottleneck; properly handling your life, outter prosperity and inner contentment, easily open up the way towards higher consciousness and Awakenings.

On 9/7/2025 at 10:55 PM, freddyteisen said:

 And it is tough to communicate your interest in consciousness/now/presence to someone who doesn’t get it—they would need a radical recontextualization of their reality to understand it.@AION

Yes, that is so. There's no way around experience.

I wonder why is that the case?

 

[Rafael Thundercat]

The paradox is that the current society could collapse if everyone got GodRealized but at same time it can collapse because people not getting it. 

[Davino]

1 minute ago, Rafael Thundercat said:

The paradox is that the current society could collapse if everyone got GodRealized but at same time it can collapse because people not getting it. 

Def Society is collapsing if we all God-Realize.

At least as we currently experience it and understand it.

[Max1993]

@Anton Rogachevski If you go deeper you will be shocked. In a good way. You will be like "ohhhhhhhhhh"

Don't fear deep tripping. It is not what you currently imagine it to be. 

[Anton Rogachevski]

6 hours ago, Max1993 said:

@Anton Rogachevski If you go deeper you will be shocked. In a good way. You will be like "ohhhhhhhhhh"

Don't fear deep tripping. It is not what you currently imagine it to be. 

I did some MDMA and 200 microgram LSD that was near non dual and very profound. It's not safe at all and should be treated with great respect and caution.

I just love sanity, I find it central to my epistemology, and I'm not gonna dismantle it with powerful psychedelics for the sake of some supposed "hidden truths". My approach is more akin to Buddhism in that sense, but it's also highly technical and abstract. 

[Guest Nilsi]

8 hours ago, Leo Gura said:

It's just one aspect of this work.

To have a reference experience for God is a great thing to acquire. Of course it's not the end of the work. It's just the beginning. And on your way to acquire that reference experience much inner work will need to happen. So the benefit is not just in that one reference experience but all the work necessary to get it.

Fair enough, but can you not see how this master signifier (“God”) can become a liability once someone authentically gets it, but keeps getting sucked into the language game?

Precisely because “God” is such a radical, life-changing experience, it becomes a kind of traumatic fixation - and as we’ve learned from Freud and Lacan, trauma can also result from overwhelmingly pleasurable experiences - that people keep circling around, trying to relive (death drive), while the aspirational and transformative aspects of it (Eros) are lost.

This is the power of language and signs, and why post-structuralism is more than just “postmodernism” or some intermediary stage of development. It is how you subvert the death drive and the logic of the master signifier - be it God, the homeland, the proletariat, the Oedipus complex, or whatever.

[Leo Gura]

@Nilsi Way overthinking it.

God is an experience and we use words to talk about experiences. The end.

[Guest Nilsi]

7 minutes ago, Leo Gura said:

@Nilsi Way overthinking it.

God is an experience and we use words to talk about experiences. The end.

Very disappointing reply.

Every experience of “God” is utterly singular, and by trying to reduce it to some abstract universal signifier, you’re limiting your spiritual potential beyond measure.

This is precisely why we can’t have a meaningful conversation about extraordinary states of consciousness.