Leo Gura

This is just untrue. There are dozens of techniques which lead to nonduality/enlightenment. It's a mistake to assume that only one school or one technique has a monopoly on Truth. If that were really the case, everyone would be using that one technique and nothing else. The vast diversity you see in the spiritual marketplace bespeaks the multitude of paths up the mountaintop. As you do more research and experiment with diverse techniques yourself, you'll start to see this.

@Nahm Sweet!

@John Good. So you've taken your first step. But that's just the beginning. One trip won't radically change you. It takes many trips and combining it with contemplation and meditation and self-inquiry and read books and building good habits to start to make lasting changes. And even then, the changes are gradual. You cannot change the shape of your teeth overnight. You have to wear braces for years to gradually correct them. Same thing with your mind and this work. I like to trip every 2 weeks, consistently. I have found this to be the perfect schedule. Unless I have a really deep trip that requires more time to integrate. I have gotten to the point where any trip on any substance, even small doses, takes me to straight to Absolute Infinity, and I can largely control the trip without any fear. I can use the trip to heal myself physically and psychologically and introspect about many things. I have access to infinite wisdom. But that's taken about a year and a half of tripping to achieve. Not to mention the thousands of hours of meditation, contemplation, research, study, and self-inquiry which I've done. It all adds up. 5-MeO-DMT is really helpful for taking your tripping to a whole new level. Although I haven't even done 5-MeO in over a year. Half a tab of LSD will send me to infinity the likes of which most people have never experienced. For me, visuals on 1 tab of LSD (125ug) are mild. But my consciousness goes to total infinity. At this level of consciousness, there is zero difference between life and death, all living beings are one, all of nature is understood, and the love is heartbreaking.

@Charlotte That feeling of feeling shitty is the sting of truth, and a sign that spiritual purification is happening. Did you think your mind would send you happy, positive rewards for trying to hack it?? Of course not! The mind will ruthlessly punish you for trying to disrupt its carefully-laid deceptions. When you fuck with a tyrant's plans, expect a tyranical over-reaction. Rebels (freedom fighters) are squashed like ants by The Empire.

What existed before you were born? If it didn't exist before you were born, it's not real.

In an effort to make this forum more useful and resource-packed, I want to get some practical "mega threads" going. For this, I need your help! This thread is specifically for all kinds of meditation techniques. If you have videos, links, or personal experiences with a specific meditation technique, post it here. Discussion is also welcome, but keep it constructive. Try to avoid armchair philosophy, debating, or keyboard-jockeying. Try to speak from your direct experiences with these techniques. There are 100s of techniques out there. Let's get to work analyzing and cataloguing them. Our aim here is to create a comprehensive resource for people getting started with meditation or people trying to broaden their practice. Let's keep resources for self-inquiry or direct-pointing-to-enlightenment for another thread. This thread is specifically for meditation and concentration practices.

I want to remind people that anyone caught using this forum or the PM system to recruit members to off-site discussions like Skype, Discord, private chatrooms, etc. will be banned without warning. This is not only against Forum Guidelines, but a danger to this community, which risks creating fractures and corruption. Moderators have zero oversight or control of what happens outside this forum. I take the recreation of cults very seriously. Do not use this forum to recruit anyone or pitch any groups or schemes, regardless of whether they are "free" or anything else of that nature. In doing so, you are opening a can worms which you do not yet understand. The potential for abuse here is very great, which is why I have a zero tolerance policy about this. Please keep all conversations on this forum. Or otherwise, find yourself a different community to join. Anyone found joining such secret groups is subject to perma-ban without warning. If you see people doing this, please report them to a Moderator or myself. Thank you

@Omario You can expect to have your mind blown in ways you cannot expect.

@Philipp https://www.actualized.org/blueprint That was my early attempt at doing what you want. But ultimately I found it a failed project because there is just way too much complexity to this field to make a simple ranked list which will work for everyone.

Consciousness makes everything better. Including women. You haven't really lived yet until you've experienced conscious living. Enlightenment doesn't rob you of anything but your illusions. You can still have sex and play video games after enlightenment. Whether you will still want to or not, is another matter. Don't think too far ahead in this work. Just trust that pursuing the Truth is best strategy, and it will be. When an enlightened yogi stops having sex, it's because he gets way bigger orgasms from his meditation than from sex. Samadhi is way better than sex.

@playdoh Spiritual inquiry is hard work, and sometime it will feel like hell. But not always. There will be ups and downs, as with any serious project or endeavor. It will not be 10 years of suffering That said, you have to take into account the fact that you're currently already suffering a great deal. If you stop the inquiry, what are going back to? Suffering! Suffering! Suffering! The more unconscious you are, the more you suffer. 10 years of suffering is what you can look forward to if you stop the inquiry. That much is guaranteed. So you're damned if you do, and damned even more if you don't. Besides which, if you're already here, you probably already know too much to fall back asleep forever. You can't really ignore enlightenment once it's on your radar screen. What are you gonna do? Go back and live a lie? And be happy with that???

This is a topic that needs to be very seriously contemplated, and not debated or discussed. You have to sit down and force yourself to contemplate your rock-bottom assumptions about reality: Why do I assume reality exist? How can I be sure reality is real? What does "real" really mean, anyway? What is existence? Could I be deceiving myself? Does consciousness exist in a brain? Or is "the brain" existing within consciousness? If the brain is inside the universe, how can the universe be inside the brain? Etc. This contemplation must be done extremely carefully, avoiding all personal self-biases and cultural assumptions. Very few people do this kind of contemplation seriously. And discussing it with people will not help you, but only distract you. It works like doing a mathematical proof. You have to trace through the logic of it to see how the materialist paradigm contradicts itself. And it definitely DOES contradict itself. I can tell you right now, having spent years doing this contemplation, and experiencing the Absolute many times now, there is no such thing as reality. But believing me is totally useless. You need to go through the proof yourself. I'm just telling you what you will discover in the ultimate end. Don't be surprised if this process kills you. That's precisely the point. You are deeply involved in this process. The misunderstanding of reality runs straight through you. Which is why it's so difficult to correct. But it's doable for those who are really serious about life. Good luck and have faith that it will be worth the effort. You will be pleasantly surprised if you succeed

That's not going to work because techniques are designed to address different problems for different people. You have to tailor them to fit your needs. Everyone has different needs at different times in their life. Pickup might be useless to one person, but life-saving to another. Etc. You should take an experimenter's approach, where you play around with different methods and theories and stick with the ones that resonate with you. This field is much more broad and complex than the mind initially expects. There are hundreds of highly useful theories and techniques. Like a good handyman, your toolbox will have hundreds of tools, not just 2 or 3.

@Seed Of course you don't flip the camera screen facing you while you talk, you flip it back. Just talk directly to the camera lens.

@playdoh Notice that "the voice obviously comes from the brain" isn't a brain, but actually just more voice. See my video: Why Brains Don't Exist See my video: Understanding How Paradigms Work See my video: A Rant Against Naive Realism See my video: Reality Is A Strange Loop And make sure you have a very open mind. The reason this isn't making sense to you is because you're stuck in the materialism paradigm. There is no such thing as a physical universe. That's a construct of the mind. And the mind does not reside in the brain. The brain is also a construct of the mind.

@StephenK Reground yourself in the beauty of being. All your good motivations will come back as you make it through this work. Let the fraudulent, inauthentic motivations fall away. This requires courage and faith.

The only problem here is that the concept of solipsism carries with it a slew of misleading associations. Yes, all there is, is the Infinite Self. But thinking of it as solipsism will mislead you. Solipsism makes the ego feel more real, which is the opposite of what we want.

@David_eh Nihilism? That would be your judgment. Death is the ultimate, infinite beauty. P.S. Obviously don't shoot yourself in the head. Attain death through existential inquiry.

@Psyche_92 Schedule x4 10-day solo meditation retreats per year. That will auto-correct your problem. Cutting internet is not a viable solution. The solution must come at the level of your consciousness. Psychedelics help a lot too for this.

Lol Maya at her finest.

@Source_Mystic You're underestimating enlightenment. The distinction you make between symbolic and actual is a duality, and it will collapse. See, you're assuming physical existence has reality to it (materialist paradigm). But it doesn't. You were never alive to begin with. That is a self-deception. Once all dualities collapse, there will literally be no difference between life and death. I said what I said precisely to puncture this illusion of physical existence which was assumed in the questioner's question. The problem here is a misunderstanding of what "death" means. "Death" isn't about the body, so much as it is about the idea of "you". This was explained in the Self-Deception episode. Stop thinking of death as a physical process. Death is a mental process. What death really means is: death of the idea of you. Because the truth is, there never was a you to begin with. So the only thing that can die is the idea of you. Death is not a problem of physicality. Death is a problem of false identity. See, you're sort of like an insane person who thinks he's Napoleon. Of course he isn't really Napoleon, but he believes it so much that to him, if he ever stops believing he's Napoleon, that will be his death.

Of course

@MM1988 You're not getting it. Enlightenment IS death. Once you're dead, will you still worry about death??

@egoless The answer is simply: Absolute Infinity. There is nothing to stop it. No, it has no personality. It is emptiness.

That's right. It's a strange loop. It is struggling to control itself.