Leo Gura

@Matt8800 I can't believe no one's asked you yet: how do you get a hot witch girlfriend?

The highest form of Love is most detached. Attachment limits love. But it is easier for egos to do attached love.

@Harikrishnan There is some important overlap between love and gratitude, but I wouldn't call them the same thing.

That was a good start. You must deepen your appreciation for life. Keep at it. You are surrounded by infinite beauty all day long. You just gotta train yourself to appreciate it. Survival rips your attention away from the beauty of being.

In practice I think it's always going to be tricky. Relationships are soaked through with survival issues so there's always a give and take dynamic. A careful dynamic balance is required. See my video on the issue of Balance. Think of relationships like surfing. You're balancing dynamically so it's always temporary victories and occasional wipe outs. But the more you practice the better you get and the less wipe outs you have. Relationships definitely require setting some boundaries. You can't just be lovey-dovey all the time. Setting boundaries is part of Love. But of course being more empathetic and unconditionally loving of yourself and your partner generally helps. Most relationships are ruined with judgment, criticism, and disrespect.

No Egotism itself is an expression of Love. Just a limited form of it.

Those are just two different ways of framing the same thing. Learning how to love is about eliminating various judgments and selfish attachments. But it can also be proactive. Just, like, practice loving things more! It can be that simple.

@Serotoninluv Yes, that's a good example. What happened there was by reading that sign, your small picture was expanded to a bigger picture. As the picture got bigger is put otherwise ugly & bad things into proper context, thus erasing the badness and ugliness. Now imagine that extrapolated to the entire universe. My claim is this: if you adopt a large enough picture, every action that has ever occurred or will ever occur in the universe will be seen as an expression of Absolute Love. But you need to seriously expand your picture. It's far too small. In fact, your picture must become infinite.

Nonduality IS pure Love. The only way is to realize that you ARE Love. This results in total absolute self-acceptance and self-love. Since you are God, your love for yourself is Absolute and unlimited. Since you are God, no one can love you but yourself. If you cannot love & accept yourself, no one else can and you are forever doomed by your own self-denial and self-hatred until you realize that self-love is the only true love. Religion is highly corrupt. The devil has co-opted all religion to use as a control mechanism. Fear (of Hell) is a powerful control mechanism. Many humans do no know how to follow basic rules of decency unless they are threatened with eternal Hell. When a child misbehaves, the easiest way to make it behave is to threaten it with a beating. Then the child quickly falls in line and obeys. Like a dog. This is the level that many people function at.

This is where things necessarily get paradoxical. Yes, everything IS Love. But also, what is includes everything that is occurring at all levels and orders or reality. So just like at the order of atoms, that is Love, at the order of human social activities, that is love. So when the US bombs targets in the Middle East, the bombs are literally made out of love and with love, and they are dropped out of love -- despite the fact that they kill innocent civilians. This is so because there is a bigger picture to the universe which transcends the death of any one living being, no matter how innocent. The ego of course hates this idea and vehemently denies it. Because it's too dangerous. Love is maximized precisely BECAUSE everything is love! Metaphysical is just another word I use for Absolute. Common conditional love is just a very narrow version of Absolute Love. It is like Absolute Love diluted to 0.00000001%. What makes it conditional is the desire for survival. Humans don't love unconditionally because it's far too dangerous. If you loved a grizzly bear unconditionally it might eat you. Attachment to survival requires modulation of unconditional love because survival is by definition conditional! You need certain conditions to be alive. So you are in an existential bind. You must either choose survival or unconditional love. For most people this isn't even a choice. Survival dictates the choosing of survival. Otherwise you couldn't be here to make the choice. It's the ultimate catch-22.

Appreciation of the person's innate beauty. Not physical beauty or function. But the beauty of their totality of being. When you can look Hitler in the eye and see his beauty, there is your love. P.S. You are still free to kill him. Love and killing are not opposite. Seeing the beauty of a thing says nothing about what you should do from a survival perspective. You can see the beauty of cancer, but then decide to destroy the cancer. Destruction is part of the total beauty of reality. Try this: The next time you want to kill a house fly, first, stop for moment and admire it's beauty. Then kill it and admire the beauty inherent in the destruction. Notice that without destruction there could not be life. Admire the beauty of your internal conflict and moral deliberations about killing that fly. That too is love. You feel bad because you wish you could love that fly. Yet you also know you needed to kill that fly because you cannot allow a house full of dirty flies and maggots. Admire the beauty of survival. Yours and the fly's. Admire the inherent conflict between the two of you. Let the magnitude of it hit you. Imagine yourself as the fly being killed. Notice the sad beauty of that too.

Survival dominates your life. Universal Love can be counter-productive to your survival. But also it's not so elusive. You love certain stuff all day long. You go to lunch and you love it. You jerk off and you love it. You watch Netflix and you love. You see a sunset and you love it. Your dog licks your face and you love it. You take a big shit and you love it. You earn some money and you love it. You crash on the couch after a long day and you love it. You read some profound book and you love it. You take a hot shower and your body loves it. If your life didn't have love in it, you would kill yourself pretty soon. What is the universe doing as a whole? Forget about individual people or atoms. What is the ENTIRE thing up to? Is it just a random mess of stuff? No! It's doing something intelligent. Consider the possibility that what it's doing is maximizing the expression of metaphysical love. If this were true, you can see how the movement of every atom would contribute to that ultimate goal in the same way that every atom in your computer's hard drive is contributing to the function of the hard drive storing data. The materialist paradigm goes very deep. I think many people just assume that reality cannot be loving because it must be neutral or empty or mechanical and impersonal. Love is a distinct awakening that one must have. Some people, especially masculine men who tend to skew towards autistic may have a limited ability to realize love. Many men have closed hearts or avoid emotional expressiveness. For example, I'm not sure if a clinical psychopath can realize Love. My guess is he can, but he's just not very likely to. Ralston's style is very reductionistic, clinical, masculine. It's that classic sort of Zen style. But this is only one style of spirituality. It's not Truth per se. It's a style. It's one expression of Truth. But honestly I don't know why he doesn't get it. That's a good question that requires some scientific research.

@Lynnel I hadn't thought of that, but an annual gun tax might be a great idea. This would keep people from stockpiling weapons they don't use for hunting/sport. That money could then be funneled to mental health, gun training programs, suicide prevention, and helping victims of shootings. It would be a like a gun insurance pool.

Stage Blue has authoritarian tendencies. Because they like to follow a strong leader. So once a strong leader emerges by conquering everyone else, Blue falls in line and conforms. Blue loves, loves, loves conformity. It gives Blue a sense of security & comfort. Blue loves unambiguous black & white leadership style. Like in the military. Everyone knows his rank and knows exactly what is expected of him. Blue makes excellent soldiers because they are so loyal. Of course the problem is, Blue also makes excellent Nazis.

Well of course what one chooses to emphasize when teaching is rather subjective and arbitrary. I am interested in teaching all aspects of the Absolute. But this makes the teaching far more complex. And it requires time to roll the teaching out. Keep in mind that what you see of my teaching is a very early version, a work in progress that isn't even 10% complete. So when the full teaching is complete 10-20 years from now, then you can nitpick what I left out. But when you finally see the full teaching, you'll be more than satisfied. Love & Perfection as so closely related that it's not a big deal. When speaking you're gonna have to choose one framing vs another. All speech is limited and cannot fully capture what needs to be said. More practically, Love is something ordinary people can resonate with and learn to practice in their daily lives. Videos on that coming soon. Contrary to Love being some philosophical abstraction, Love is the fastest way to get people onto the spiritual path. People have a deep intuitive feel for love. Love cuts through the rational mind. If you've ever deeply loved another being, you'll understand how much God loves you and how powerful Love is. There is no power higher than your capacity to love. Love overcomes every single obstacle.

All meaning is a construction of the mind. You are creating it while not realizing you are creating it. This doesn't make meaning good or bad. It just is what it is. Become aware of how you create meaning.

There is already a thread on this topic where your question was answered at length.

Yes. Perfection, Paradise, Heaven, etc. But Love is yet distinct from Perfection. You cannot reduce Love down to anything else, even though Love is identical to Truth / Being / Consciousness / Nothingness There are aspects of the Absolute even though it is ONE.

And yes, there will be many videos about loving coming soon. It takes time to explain all these things methodically.

This is precisely incorrect. You guys need to appreciate that I am pointing to something deeper which you are as yet missing. I would not make such a big deal out of this if it wasn't really fucking important. Not all spiritual paths lead to the same place. Some paths and teachings lead deeper than others. If I am emphasizing something to this degree, it's not a mere word game, it's something massive you're missing. I can lead a donkey to water, but I cannot make you drink. The word Love is used precisely because that's what it is. No other word is correct for this aspect of consciousness. To use other words just to appeal to egos would be a corruption of the highest truth. This corruption comes from lack of understanding. The truth is just too radical for people to accept. Even so called enlightened people. They can still deny love. How can God reveal itself to you when you are so adamant in denying it?

Some people are very spiritually talented. But such exceptions prove the rule.

Many people live with a lot of repressed emotional baggage and truama that they have been in denial about for years. It can be painful to open those old wounds. But this is by no means unique to psychedelics. Intense meditation can also cause such problems. Purifying the mind is not always a walk in the park. Especially if you have a dirty mind.

Both ways can be great. But for my deepest contemplations I turn the music off.

Good deployment of radical openmindedness! Lol

Because it doesn't earn them $$$$$ Mainstream media is all about what maximizes their $$$$$