Leo's Blog Discussion Mega-Thread

[Magnanimous]

Hey Leo, you told me it took 100,000 - 300,000 pranayamas to reach liberation.

Wouldn't I have to read all your enlightenment books as well?

I'd love to reach liberation in my 20s with just pranayama, but that doesn't sound realistic.

Edited Wednesday at 03:55 PM by Magnanimous

[Natasha Tori Maru]

Hello @Leo Gura

Do you experience a 'flow' state when you engage in long bouts of writing?

I ask because I write a lot - not the sorts of topics you endeavour to outline - but often ideas I am fleshing out that have been germinating for a while.

When this happens to me, it almost feels as if it is a channelled state. Like the writing is coming through me.

Like there is no centre to my experience, no do-er. No writer. Just the hands moving as I act as a conduit for messages to flow out.

Do you experience this?

It is a timeless state for me.

[CARDOZZO]

@Leo Gura

I tend to believe there is a great overlap between consciousness and game design.

The game designer is like a God building a universe from scratch, laws, beings, environment, systems, how to win, how to lose.

How can you see your role as a game designer in the past shaping your skills, levels of consciousness and pursuits nowadays? Is there something happening? A search for finding fundamental patterns?

Game Design - Engineering - Philosophy - Business - Self-Help - Spirituality

I'm curious.

[Leo Gura]

5 hours ago, Natasha Tori Maru said:

Hello @Leo Gura

Do you experience a 'flow' state when you engage in long bouts of writing?

Yes. Once I get warmed up and really into. But entering that flow doesn't always succeed. Sometimes I feel uninspired, exhausted, or distracted.

On 1/28/2026 at 7:54 AM, Magnanimous said:

Hey Leo, you told me it took 100,000 - 300,000 pranayamas to reach liberation.

Wouldn't I have to read all your enlightenment books as well?

No. You don't have to read anything. Reading can help, but it can also be a distraction.

The utility of reading is learning techniques and learning about the many traps in this work. Without reading you are likely to fall into a serious trap and get stuck in it for years.

3 hours ago, CARDOZZO said:

@Leo Gura

I tend to believe there is a great overlap between consciousness and game design.

The game designer is like a God building a universe from scratch, laws, beings, environment, systems, how to win, how to lose.

How can you see your role as a game designer in the past shaping your skills, levels of consciousness and pursuits nowadays? Is there something happening? A search for finding fundamental patterns?

For me there is no direct connection. I like game design just because it lets me be creative and imagine cool worlds that cannot exist in normal life.

The most direct connection between design and philosophical work is that design is about thinking in a big picture, holistic way, and so it philosophical work. I have a designer's mind and I think like a designer. This is the common thread between game design and philosophy. A designer's mind must be very holistic because you need to take the entire product into account. A designer needs to see the game in its totality, not just in parts. A good game is designed top-down as one unified whole. Which is of course how God works.

Thinking very big picture, like a film director, is a very good skill to develop. I have that kind of director's mindset. It is the mindset of an executive, a CEO -- where you are responsible for the entirety of a thing. To invent a game, you must be responsible for the entire thing. It's the mindset of founders.

Edited 18 hours ago by Leo Gura

[bazera]

 

1 hour ago, Leo Gura said:

I like game design just because it lets me be creative and imagine cool worlds that cannot exist in normal life.

Check this out. How do you think this technology affects game dev?

[LambdaDelta]

A little personal anecdote regarding life purpose and a few related matters:

Yesterday I had a call with my lawyers (currently getting sued for alleged property damages during a terrace remodeling, details don't really matter), we were discussing options, the most viable of which is to countersue the company that did the construction work, but for that we must first try to reach a pretrial agreement notified via a certified letter. After the talk, while waiting for amendments agreed upon in the meeting, I re-read the initial draft they sent me, and decided to look up the law they cite. Turns out it's the wrong one, about animal wellbeing and whatnot, so I emailed them that correction + some extra thoughts. What's funny is that towards the end of the call we got into a minor argument regarding which documents to submit to court, and the lawyer started getting visibly offended saying "I'm not going to look like a fool in front of the judge, my professional reputation is also at stake here", so I had to diplomatically de-escalate to not hurt anyone's ego while still holding my ground; and then such a rudimentary mistake happens, talk about professionalism. These are by far and away the best lawyers I've found by the way, after seeing over a dozen, the others are complete buffoons. 

Later in the day after getting in touch with a prospective employer that happens to match my skillset and work style quite well I'm thinking of various things I can use to demonstrate my competence, and that email to the lawyers comes to mind (shows proficiency in Spanish incl. specialized legalese, attention to detail, polite communication, coming up with more efficient alternatives — all in one package). Satisfied, I go shower, but am still ruminating on that mistake — just what could animal wellbeing and pretrial agreements have in common?! Then it hits me: the acronym for the latter is MASC (Medios Adecuados de Solución de Controversias), and mascotas is 'pets'. They 100% used AI to draft the letter, it stupidly hallucinated the wrong law due to this random coincidence, and they didn't double-check.  

Moral of the story? First, the kind of wild insights that can happen through holistic thinking, connecting two seemingly entirely unrelated things. 
Second, they charge me 200€ for that one-page AI-generated letter, meanwhile I'm wasting my time over here generating fake billing addresses in North Carolina or the UAE to save a few euros on VAT in my online subscriptions. A ridiculous imbalance which ought to be corrected not even for egoic reasons (although it is smart to leverage the ego's moral outrage at this perceived injustice as fuel for motivation), but more fundamentally to recalibrate the scales of value. It's not limited to this particular domain or an individual's mind either. Couple of days ago I was doing a deal to sell some of my psychedelics to a friend, one of the items was an MDMA pill for which we agreed on 5€ — that's about the going market rate, so if I overshoot he'll go elsewhere, plus I obviously don't want to rip off a friend. But truly, the way things currently stand, a single effective session with M could save years and thousands in therapy bills, so the pill can easily be valued at 500€. What's 5€? Nothing, not even half of a decent takeout meal. In the future, if I'm financially successful, one of my main charitable endeavors will be making psychedelics cheaply & easily accessible, available, and acceptable for as many people as possible. Everyone's lost their minds when it comes to value of time and money, among other things. 

So start taking serious action, not only to avoid getting screwed over by the world yourself, but to counterbalance the degradation of collective consciousness, if only a little. The network effect will take care of the rest. There's gold waiting to be mined, and if no more gold remains, use your mind as a Philosopher's Stone to transmute scrap metals into gold. It's well within your abilities as God; trouble is, since you're also the ultimate authority, you may thoroughly convince yourself that you do not possess such an ability. 

For me, this whole experience eternally cemented the principle that all suffering whatsoever stems from an improper use of the mind. Bold claim, but give it some thought. Who's to say which uses are proper and which aren't? Well, one example of an improper use is relativizing everything while sitting in the relative domain. Only God has the privilege of holding Relativity as an absolute, that's what makes it Nothing/Everything/Undefined/Formless, and all the other properties we know and love. No such luxury for you, as you've dissociated from God, so it's no wonder we live in hell.
What about children in Africa born into slavery, or some genetic disorder you have because a corrupt company has been polluting your city? Here comes separation again. Are Africa, DNA, oppressive ideologies, DuPont, air, and history not part of Mind? Therein lies the issue, a multi-thousand year history of misuses of mind, sowing divisions of all sorts. A proper use of an individual's mind will not automatically solve suffering, not even for them, much less the entire world, but what it can do is inspire love, connection, and beauty.
Tip: drop the distinction between 'directly' and 'indirectly'; God only works directly.  

That's enough yapping for today I suppose, peace out. 

[Joseph Maynor]

16 minutes ago, LambdaDelta said:

For me, this whole experience eternally cemented the principle that all suffering whatsoever stems from an improper use of the mind. Bold claim, but give it some thought. 

But everybody has done this from time to time.  And often suffering is good when it leads to change that is good.  I'm not sure suffering stems from an improper use of the mind.

[LambdaDelta]

7 minutes ago, Joseph Maynor said:

But everybody has done this from time to time.  And often suffering is good when it leads to change that is good.  I'm not sure suffering stems from an improper use of the mind.

Nothing I said implies you have to make perfect use of your mind all the time (that's actually impossible) nor that suffering is bad in any way. On the contrary, it's the best self-correcting mechanism there is. Whether you're sure about this point or not is up to you to contemplate, I could of course just be talking out of my ass. 

[CARDOZZO]

16 hours ago, Leo Gura said:

For me there is no direct connection. I like game design just because it lets me be creative and imagine cool worlds that cannot exist in normal life.

The most direct connection between design and philosophical work is that design is about thinking in a big picture, holistic way, and so it philosophical work. I have a designer's mind and I think like a designer. This is the common thread between game design and philosophy. A designer's mind must be very holistic because you need to take the entire product into account. A designer needs to see the game in its totality, not just in parts. A good game is designed top-down as one unified whole. Which is of course how God works.

Thinking very big picture, like a film director, is a very good skill to develop. I have that kind of director's mindset. It is the mindset of an executive, a CEO -- where you are responsible for the entirety of a thing. To invent a game, you must be responsible for the entire thing. It's the mindset of founders.

Got it.

Game design is a powerful medium to invent worlds from scratch. Nothing better than to think beyond what is already here on the planet. (Going Meta)

[Clarence]

@Leo Gura Do you plan on translating your book into other languages, such as French? It would be great to be able to hand a copy to family and friends who don’t understand English.

[Butters]

Why the hell is animals not caring about reality their defining mark? They also don't care about movies, trying shoelaces or poetry. Animals don't care about anything, they are inconsiderate bastards.