Leo Gura

Objections To Spirituality Mega-Thread

234 posts in this topic

@Leo Gura I agree on spreading awareness about it. However if the child was severely wounded and/or mentally disturbed you'd probably focus on healing them first. Africa and kangaroos could wait. Most of humanity at this time is deeply wounded and conditioned, aware of it or not. Denying it or not.

Using a spiritual insight to hover above life is certainly not what this is all about. Many, however, fall into that trap after one or two mystical experiences.

A child needs love. That's all.

You would not chase a child (ego) out of town just so you could get where you want to be faster, would you? You would slowly guide it towards the light, while holding it's hand.

Through loving and healing our hearts the puzzle would put itself together much more naturally. Rather than chasing a certain realization or state which can be misused and misinterpreted very easily if we're not quite ready for it. The caterpillar cannot fly before turning into a butterfly. 

It all comes down to approach and there are many, I suppose. I just simply don't resonate with the "everything is illusion, I am God" one, anymore. I guess that's the masculine way to go about it. The masculine is all about transcending. The feminine is about inviting in. Including. Holding space. Nurturing.

Perhaps there is a lack of balance between the two.

Not trying to criticize your work or approach, either; don't get me wrong. Obviously many are attracted and that's great.

Just expressing my view and opinion on what would be most beneficial and helpful to all.

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This always confuses me:

If we agree that words and language (including non-verbal communication) are not the things they represent, just merely pointers to things they (might) represent - how do we:

1. Convey, explain, convince people that spirituality exists and is worth pursuing?

2. Know that my spirituality is the same as your spirituality - and if it's not, then what exactly is it that we're doing, when we do "spirituality"?

Edited by LastThursday

All stories and explanations are false.

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@ivankiss 

Hmm… The old discussion on what’s true vs. what’s most helpful for people. Such a difficult one.
I’d think it’s not misleading but rather a case of ‘Not the right dose - Not the right time’. 

Leo’s mission seems to be finding Truth at all costs. He said recently that he cares more about that than someone’s personal awakening.
There’s no way his teachings can be suited for everyone’s path anyway. Way too many followers.

I’d say it’s up to the people listening to not get lost in too advanced theory without practice. Or ignoring their wounds. That’s really the biggest trap. But what can he do but warn people about it?

Do you want a gentle hand helping you to find out what’s true for yourself? Or do you just want to know up front? I’d argue Leo teaches both. But his audience is pretty ‘rationally’ minded and masculine so they appreciate his straight forwardness. Some people are just not up for loving and ‘up-for-interpretation’ - teachings of other people. I love that. But I’m also a woman;-) Also depends on your personality a lot I guess. Leo’s a thinker (MBTI) so his approach might seem cold to feelers. 

What’s the ultimate goal? No goal? Understanding? Happiness? Peace? One step up? Seeing all the steps? I don’t know.

I like to think that in the end it’ all the same. But I don’t know.

 

"All was revealed. All in good time."

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@flume

Seeking truth is a never-ending cycle. The one who seeks will never find it. 

The truth cannot be told, either. Especially not "straight forward" so that it makes perfect logical sense. The truth is already within us. It is us. And we are it. 

The truth is love. All else is interpretations of it. Love is creative. It is mysterious. It's not a pattern. So it can hardly be analysed. That is why the analytical approach fails in conveying it with accuracy.

Leading is only possible through example. And the examples we present should be rooted in love. Especially if we consciously choose to help others. Only this way can love be recognized within them.

I think Leo's work is fun and exciting. I look at it as a more scientific approach. And that's fine. The passion is obvious. But do I think it could be more rooted in love and compassion? Yes, I do. Definitely. It could also be simplified. 

But again; this is not about ranting against Leo's work. Rather my overall view on what's going on in today's spiritual movement. And that's no surprise, really. We live in an era where masculinity and analytical thinking are dominant. If you ask me, all of this is just about us awakening and embracing the suppressed feminine energy within us. Which has nothing to do with gender, of course. 

What's the goal? 

To be here and now, and to absolutely love it! And we can't do that before we heal.

 

 

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The notion of "proof" really deserves to be a theme for a 2/3 hours next video, actually I thought you already shot one on this !  

In fact this whole thread could make an awesome thought provoking "n" parts series , just sayin' ....

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@Leo Gura I'll try to word this as best I can. What is it that seeks enlightenment? It seems to me that the ego is a fundamental and necessary evolutionary step, without which awakening would not be possible. To say it differently, without the foundation of the lie, the truth could not be realized. Is there an agency built into consciousness that causes it to gravitate towards the pursuit of the absolute truth, or is it really the case that the ego is unconsciously clawing towards its own death? All the while under the illusion that truth will 'get something' for it, and the laundry list of things that fall under that distinction. What confuses me is that it definitely seems that there is something innate pulling us towards awakening, a natural inclination towards truth and away from falsity (eventually), but this is contradicted by the fact that awakening is absolutely not normative, and few actually GET IT.

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On 10/11/2019 at 9:32 AM, Superfluo said:

I've watched your post called A Taste Of Infinity on your blog, and there are some things that I don't get.

If this universe is in the world of the form, hence finite, how could a fractal be zoomed to infinity? In theory you can, but in practice the video will end. The process in your computer that does the zooming will end at some point. Even if there was a way to zoom the fractal until the end of the universe (I'm assuming there will be an end, because if something begins my intuition tells me it will end), there will be a time when the zooming will end. And you wrote:

It's like saying that the number pi is infinite in theory, and can be proved mathematically that it's infinite, but you can't calculate or write all numbers to infinity.

This is a critique from Stage Yellow.

Now you'll say that theory and practice is a duality, so it's illusory. And I get it, but sometimes my mind drags me down to question things that my intuition already proved right.

You ask some good questions.

Infinity is a very tricky beast. It does not work like ordinary finite things that we're used to dealing with.

By definition, infinity is endless and so you must grok that an infinite thing cannot ever be made fully explicit. So in the case of the fractal it is infinite, but what you're noticing is that it cannot be make fully explicit because in practice the computer will run out of finite memory. This occurs because a finite object (like computer memory) cannot ever encapsulate infinity. No part of reality can ever capture the sum total of reality. It's as if you're trying to fit a large box into a small box. Of course you will always fail. Infinity is a singular object with no other in existence, and it includes all other objects in existence inside itself, since there is nothing but infinity and everything is it, including all finite things.

Fractals are really no different than numbers. How do you know numbers are infinite even though, by definition, no human has ever nor will ever count up all the numbers? Numbers are endless, yet nonetheless your mind is intuitive enough to grasp this as true. Really ask yourself, how is it possible that you understand that numbers are endless enough though you have never reached their end? You might say it's just a theory that numbers are endless, but this isn't correct. It's more than just a theory. Your mind can actually grok the infinitude of numbers, not as theory, but as truth.

You are placing an incorrect and naive expectation on infinity: that it be fully explicated in order to be "truly" infinite. But this is precisely wrong! True infinity is pure potential and formlessness. It cannot ever be explicated. Infinity is an implicit thing. No matter how much you explicate, unravel, or actualize infinity, you will be as far from the end as before you began. That is just the paradoxical nature of infinity. It is endless no matter what you do.

Infinity cannot be grasped with the rational mind because the rational mind is finite while infinity is infinite. You can only understand infinity through a hyper-intuitive function of the mind. Intuition is implicit while rationality is explicit. But as we said above, infinity cannot ever be made fully explicit. So the mistake that rational and scientific people make is they demand infinity to be made fully explicit otherwise they believe it cannot be real. But of course this demand turns out to be misguided. You must change your mind to fit infinity. Don't expect infinity to change itself to fit your limited mind.

More over, yes, the duality between infinity and finity must ultimately collapse into Absolute Unity. Hence the infinite and finite are really identical. Unless you imagine they aren't, in which case you create the world of duality to which you are then a prisoner. You become a prisoner of your own finite, dualistic mind. Until such time that you wake up and realize Absolute Unity.


You are God. You are Truth. You are Love. You are Infinity.

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A skeptic might ask:

How do we not know that all spiritual revelations are not simply the mind truly coming to terms with, or becoming conscious of, it's private nature?

How do we know that it is not simply the mind truly embracing and recognizing it's isolation, it's disconnectedness from anything that was presumed to be outside of it?

For example, the skeptic would state that the brain itself simply recognizes that all there is is brain. That all brain has encountered was always fundamentally the brain. That all the brain encounters is fundamentally produced or imagined by the brain.

Would the skeptic not find it peculiar that the statements coming from non-dual masters very much resemble what we would predict such a brain to state if it truly were to become conscious of it's isolation, of the privacy of it's own reality?

 

The skeptic could simply buy into naive realism. The skeptic could say that some imaginations of the brain actually correlate with what the outside of brain is, like for example the model of the brain. He might argue that the more sophisticated the understanding of that materialistic framework is the more truly it will correlate to what exists outside of brain. That way he might be able to avoid the self-referential problem and could reduce all mystical experiences merely as brain states.

After all, he could object, would any experience that represented the totality of the brain actually be total, it would be Absolute. The private reality of the brain becoming conscious of itself would by definition from the perspective of that brain be Absolute, Infinite, all encompassing.

Edited by Scholar

Glory to Israel

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49 minutes ago, Sage said:

@Leo Gura I'll try to word this as best I can. What is it that seeks enlightenment?

Since there is only one thing in existence: consciousness, the only thing that can seek consciousness is consciousness. It is it. A = A. Or to put it another way, nothing seeks enlightenment and enlightenment is nothing.

Quote

It seems to me that the ego is a fundamental and necessary evolutionary step, without which awakening would not be possible. To say it differently, without the foundation of the lie, the truth could not be realized.

That's right.

Truth and lying must ultimately go full-circle and collapse into a Unity.

Quote

Is there an agency built into consciousness that causes it to gravitate towards the pursuit of the absolute truth, or is it really the case that the ego is unconsciously clawing towards its own death? All the while under the illusion that truth will 'get something' for it, and the laundry list of things that fall under that distinction.

Both. There are multiple forces at work. You have an innate attraction to consciousness and love because those are you truest nature and deep down you feel it. But also the ego-mind likes the idea of all the material spiritual benefits and status it will receive for reaching enlightenment. The ego-mind loves the idea of being special and unique and better than everyone else, so of course enlightenment sounds great in that respect. But that's only because the ego-mind doesn't really understand what enlightenment means until its too late.

The ego-mind is like a moth attracted to flame. It does not realize that it will die in the process until it's already on fire.

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What confuses me is that it definitely seems that there is something innate pulling us towards awakening, a natural inclination towards truth and away from falsity (eventually), but this is contradicted by the fact that awakening is absolutely not normative, and few actually GET IT.

You are right. Since you are God and you are One, you cannot ever fully escape yourself. Consciousness will always eventually awaken to itself, it's just a question of time. What pulls you to God is simply the fact that you are God! What's amazing is not that God is pulled towards itself but how God lost itself in the first place. All evolution and life is the process of God pulling itself towards itself, realizing and actualizing itself.

Awakening is beyond normative, it is absolutely mandatory and inevitable. Awakening is Absolute Truth. You don't have to awaken as this human lifetime, but eventually you will awaken no matter what because you are Infinite Consciousness and there is nowhere you can escape to from yourself because you exist in all places.

Eventually EVERYONE gets it. Just not within this short human life you know. You have to remember that God's time horizon is infinite while the human time horizon is 100 years. That's a huge gap! Stop looking at life through the human filter of 100 years. Look at life as it would look if you had 100 trillion years to live across 100 trillion lifetimes across 100 trillion different lifeforms across 100 trillion different universes.


You are God. You are Truth. You are Love. You are Infinity.

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23 minutes ago, Scholar said:

A skeptic might ask:

How do we not know that all spiritual revelations are not simply the mind truly coming to terms with, or becoming conscious of, it's private nature?

How do we know that it is not simply the mind truly embracing and recognizing it's isolation, it's disconnectedness from anything that was presumed to be outside of it?

For example, the skeptic would state that the brain itself simply recognizes that all there is is brain. That all brain has encountered was always fundamentally the brain. That all the brain encounters is fundamentally produced or imagined by the brain.

Would the skeptic not find it peculiar that the statements coming from non-dual masters very much resemble what we would predict such a brain to state if it truly were to become conscious of it's isolation, of the privacy of it's own reality?

 

The skeptic could simply buy into naive realism. The skeptic could say that some imaginations of the brain actually correlate with what the outside of brain is, like for example the model of the brain. He might argue that the more sophisticated the understanding of that materialistic framework is the more truly it will correlate to what exists outside of brain. That way he might be able to avoid the self-referential problem and could reduce all mystical experiences merely as brain states.

After all, he could object, would any experience that represented the totality of the brain actually be total, it would be Absolute. The private reality of the brain becoming conscious of itself would by definition from the perspective of that brain be Absolute, Infinite, all encompassing.

That's right. Nothing stops the mind from deluding itself by adopting an ideology like skepticism.

The key question is: How do you know skepticism is valid? You don't.

Apply skepticism to your skepticism until you realize that skepticism eats its own tail. And where does that leave you?

If you were a true skeptic you would have to surrender your skepticism on the grounds that you cannot tell if it is true or false. By advancing skepticism, you hold that skepticism is true, which is false. On the other hand, if you hold that skepticism is false, that is also false.

So you're fucked either way because the mind cannot grasp Truth. Your mistake was assuming that mind can grasp Truth. Be more skeptical about that assumption.


You are God. You are Truth. You are Love. You are Infinity.

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Also another objection of the skeptic might be the following:

If we assume that the brain produces, or fundamentally in some shape or form is, the entirety of our subjective reality:

The possibilities of what kind of subjective realities that brain can produce are virtually infinite.

Any alteration of the brain and subsequently to the subjective reality, actually alters the perception and the following claims that are going to be made about that particular reality.

 

In other words, an alteration of the subjective reality, or the brain, is due to the nature of what subjective reality is, an fully convincing experience. Because we assume, and cannot otherwise, that our subjective reality is reality, we will subsequently assume that an altered state of that subjective reality is reality as a whole.

 

Therefore, taking something like psychedelics, or altering the brain by meditation, will actually change the reality for that brain. The skeptic might argue that the brain, once that alteration is present, cannot help but come to certain conclusions about reality, namely mystical claims about the nature of reality.

He might argue that the mystical experience will be so convincing, so subjectively real, that even he will not be able to help but fall for that experience and recontextualize it as reality as a whole. Therefore he will avoid taking these substances.

Just now, Leo Gura said:

That's right. Nothing stops the mind from deluding itself by adopting an ideology like skepticism.

The key question is: How do you know skepticism is valid? You don't.

The problem is the skeptic will claim that even after taking the psychedelic and being convinced of whatever mystical truth he might simply have been tricked due to the limitations of his brain. He might say that once he has the mystical experience he will be utterly convinced of it, which is why he must avoid it to stay objective.

It's similar to an argument of Enlightenment leading to a demon possessing your mind and body, a demon that will try to create as many demons as possible, meaning he will try to convince as many people of enlightenment as he can. If that demon did exist, nobody who would not be enlightened could know of him, and anyone who was enlightened would be controlled by the demon.


Glory to Israel

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6 minutes ago, Scholar said:

The problem is the skeptic will claim that even after taking the psychedelic and being convinced of whatever mystical truth he might simply have been tricked due to the limitations of his brain. He might say that once he has the mystical experience he will be utterly convinced of it, which is why he must avoid it to stay objective.

Yes, of course. This is an example of paradigm lock. Since you are God, if you take your own ideas seriously enough, you will get stuck in your mind until you die.

So the solution to this kind of skepticism is death.

There are a million different ways the mind can lock itself into an ideology from which it cannot escape other than through physical death. No amount of reason will solve this problem because reason itself is the problem.

The skeptic must intuitively grok that skepticism is untruthful and biased. If he fails to grok this, he's fucked and nothing can save him.


You are God. You are Truth. You are Love. You are Infinity.

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33 minutes ago, Leo Gura said:

Yes, of course. This is an example of paradigm lock. Since you are God, if you take your own ideas seriously enough, you will get stuck in your mind until you die.

So the solution to this kind of skepticism is death.

There are a million different ways the mind can lock itself into an ideology from which it cannot escape other than through physical death. No amount of reason will solve this problem because reason itself is the problem.

So we might say that fundamentally the ego is that kind of skepticism. The skepticism is it's own life-form and seeks to survive as long as possible.

This will eventually lead to the skepticism to attempt to somehow solve the issue of mortality, so that it can be forever skeptical, or alive.

 

So in essence the skepticisim is like a structure which seeks to uphold it's own structure. Maybe, in a metaphysical sense, that is in some shape or form what biological life-forms themselves are. There is a skepticism in the structure of the brain or mind, but the very organism itself, namely the body, the bacteria, any structure which attempts to uphold itself, is in essence skepticism.

The physical form of skepticism is biological life, as it seeks to remain it's form as is, it seeks to perpetuate itself, to create more versions of itself, to basically uphold it's own structure for all of eternity.

 

Maybe this is even what the atom is. A structure struggling to uphold a certain state, but susceptible to an eventual deconstruction or death. That would mean that the skepticism or ego in a more fundamental sense is embued in the fabric of what we call the physical universe. It would bridge the gap between "physical" and "biological" as both would fundamentally be one and the same. The complete dissolving of the universe into nothingness would then be what the dissolving of the human brain is on a smaller scale.

It would explain why the physical material of the universe struggles to create ever and ever more complex structures. By that design, life is inevitable as it is even part of the very substance of the universe. The ego in the human sense would be simply a more complex structure attempting to uphold it's own structure, while atoms would be the same thing on a more fundamental scale.

 

Thus the entire Universe is basically just Devilry. Duality attempting to remain in duality, but eventually collapsing into one. The genius of the design is that there can be something that self-perpetuates, a structure that in it's very essence structures itself. It is completely circular, it should be impossible.

A structure which by the nature of it's structure creates it's own structure. Yet there is a fundamental weakness to that structure, which we can observe in the very fundamental particles of the universe and which scales up to all forms of life that exist.

 

Imagine how smart you would have to be to create a design that works on such a small scale and yet works perfectly well on a greater scale. A design so smart it by it's very nature designs itself. It designs itself so well that it not only creates structure, geometry, consistency but also contains completely different aspects of reality, like colors, sounds and feelings, and which can create a being that by these different aspects can grasp the nature of geometry. A design so ingenius that it inevitably creates a being which can look at that design and grasp it's nature.

A design in which all of these aspects are not seperate instances, but interact with each other in impossible ways. It's so funny how I thought intelligent design was an absurd argument, but at this point arguing against it seems the most absurd thing ever.

 

This is akin to us designing an AI and then the AI forgetting that it was designed. It would look at all of the intricasies of it's own nature and explain those intricasies with the intricasies, like the physicist is explain physics with physics or the evolutionist evolution with evolution.

They completely fail to see how much intelligence it took to create the physics, the evolution or the intricasies of the AI in the first place. It is so genius, so well designed, that we do not even realize it is a design.

"Evolution is the way because that's just how reality is! There is no design behind it, the rules of reality create the designs."

lol

 

It's not even intelligence. This is like create a Tree by creating the rules that will eventually create a Tree. This is beyond problem solving, you create the Tree by creating the problems that will eventually lead to the creation of the Tree. Whatever that is, calling it intelligence is insulting.

It is not mere intelligence, it is Intuition. It is true Creativity.

Edited by Scholar

Glory to Israel

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If there isn't a difference between unswarability and unanswerability of a question... xD Just writing this leaves me speechless. 

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2 minutes ago, Nahm said:

@Scholar Imagine being what every human who has ever lived, fears. 

Love

Yes God is fascinated with God lol. It's awesome. 

Edited by zeroISinfinity

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5 hours ago, Leo Gura said:

Yes, of course. This is an example of paradigm lock. Since you are God, if you take your own ideas seriously enough, you will get stuck in your mind until you die.

So the solution to this kind of skepticism is death.

There are a million different ways the mind can lock itself into an ideology from which it cannot escape other than through physical death. No amount of reason will solve this problem because reason itself is the problem.

The skeptic must intuitively grok that skepticism is untruthful and biased. If he fails to grok this, he's fucked and nothing can save him.

Valid response if it wasn't for the fact spiritual experience, that will absolutely blow all skepticism out of as skeptics head, are not that hard to come by...

There's blow outs so big you just will not be able to remain a 'rational skeptic' afterwards, even though the tendency may stick it's head out in the form of some thoughts, it just won't be the same.

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If atleast only scepticism gets remove, rationalism gets obliterated too. All isms and What is left is magic. 

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