Leo Gura

Name one thing which isn't in your direct experience. I dare you. Realize this: there is nothing but direct experience. Nor can there be.

Haha Let me rephrase your question back to you in a way that you can relate to: Aren't scientific experiments based on what we're interested in? So if a serious scientist makes a discovery in the lab, and some kid is just dicking around in the lab and simply gets a fun, erroneous result, isn't that proof that science happens BECAUSE of us, and not TO US?

You just have to be careful with how terms can have different meanings. "Self-consciousness" is a mainstream cultural term, not a technical term from spirituality. Mainstream culture does not understand what the self or what consciousness is. So understanding that, when ordinary folks say "self-conscious" they are not talking about spirituality or awakening or Truth. They simply mean: a neurotic sense of social anxiety and self-judgment. Don't be fooled by the surface similarity of terms. Just because two words look the same or sound the same does not mean they have the same meaning. Of course the problem is not self-consciousness per se, the problem is an obsessive anxiety over one's self-image in social situations. In a sense, the awakened person is not self-conscious when he acts. He's not thinking of his self-image, he acts spontaneously. The self-conscious person self-obsesses and is stuck in monkey mind.

Same as how Trumpists defend Trump. Rather than admitting Trump's ignorance they explain it away as actually a higher level of intelligence and strategy. A stage Blue mind will rationalize away any evidence contradicting its worldview. Stage Blue is prone to mythological thinking. They tend to take myths literally. For example, Noah actually put 2 of every animal on his Ark and got them to fuck successfully.

Because I'd have a hard time finding anyone who would understand or appreciate the depth of the things I want to say, so I just focus on buliding my body of work. The stuff I want to say will only be understood by one in a million people. Who is gonna interview me? Who knows which questions to ask? How many hours would the interview need to be to convey the things I want conveyed? It would largely be a waste of my time. Rather than waiting for the right person to ask me things, I just say the right things straight to your face and cut out the middle man.

That's his defense mechanism for surviving as the self that he's attached to. That is the function of such emotional reactions. It's like a baby crying when you take away his favorite blanket. To your friend, losing his national identity is scary and painful so he's in denial about it because it would seriously threaten his entire worldview. He might have to admit that Islam is not the one true faith. This would lead to a profound existential crisis as he loses his grip on reality. The mind cannot admit that reality is self-constructed. It needs reality to be objectively real!

@FoxFoxFox Don't come a crying when your camel runs away.

Understanding and insight goes way deeper than ego or langauge. Eliminating internal dialogue is not necessary for awakening or insight. You can be going through an awakening and still have access to some internal dialogue which comments on and makes sense of what is happening. An ego self is not required for this. After an awakening it can be a good practice to sit down and write out what happened to you. This is not ego. This is a good way to clarify things in your mind. It's not enough to just have awakening experience, you also have to then purify the mind. The mind needs to upgrade its logical understanding of itself so it can communicate about these things better. All of this is part of the awakening process. It is certainly possible to have an awakening but then return to a muddled and confused mind which misunderstands what just happened to it. You have to grow your mind along with your consciousness.

Some great questions here. I had many of them myself when I was starting out. Yeah, consciousness is tricky, tricky stuff.

One day Mohammed saw a Bedouin leaving his camel without tethering it, questioned him as to why he was doing this. The Bedouin replied that he was placing his trust in Allah and had no need to tie the camel. The prophet Mohammed then replied, “Tie your camel and place your trust in Allah.” So don't forget to tie your fucking camel.

Classic stage Blue nationalism and ethnocentrism. You see it on Fox News all day long. That is their whole business model.

@FoxFoxFox Creativity is not about finding fault, it's about expressing love. And at a deeper level, finding fault is also love.

Because I am Love. What are you?

That was a mild samadhi state. Good stuff. Headed in the right direction, but just the tip of the iceberg. It is true, I am you. But what is you?

You should not get PTSD if you dose properly and reasonably. PTSD comes from overdosing. Careful, gradual dosing is critical in this work. Don't just double your doses willy nilly or eyeball doses like many fools do.

You need to have an awakening to what Love is. It cannot be told to you in words. I understand your skepticism, but all happenings truly are an expression of Love. It's too epic to believe. Even when you awaken to it you will be too amazed to accept it. It's too good to be true. Yet it is Truth itself. Psychedelics help. Take some DPT and ask it to show what is Love. Brace yourself for a mindfucking of unspeakable proportions. The only thing capable of understanding the full extent of God's Love is God itself. A human is too tiny to fathom it. Only God understands. Fortunately, you are it! Your awakening is not complete until you understand why you created it all. It will melt your heart with pure Goodness. It is a Goodness without an opposite.

Good, keep 'em coming. But also, try to state objections you actually have, rather than restating the well-trodden objections of cynics. I want objections which are grounded in genuine confusion and puzzlement, not just cynical trolling or devil's advocacy. What aspects of spirituality are genuinely confusing to you?

But what you're overlooking is that oneness does not require that you experience my experience. You have set up that stipulation. Now you must realize that it's you who set up that stipulation, so undo it. Your fantasies about how oneness must be is getting in the way of realizing how oneness actually is. Oneness includes twoness and all the rest. I doesn't make sense because you're not awake. If it made sense, you'd already be awake and we wouldn't need to have this conversation.

A dark room retreat requires 24/7 darkness. People have done 30 day dark room retreats. Of course not solo. They had help from outsiders.

This is simply the dualistic nature of language & distinction. See my 3 part series about Understanding Duality, where stuff like this was resolved in great detail. "Spirituality" is used in two senses: relative and absolute. In the absolute sense, everything is Spirit. But in the relative sense we make a distinction between those who are conscious of Spirit and those who are not (the materialists). So even though a materialistic scientist is studying Spirit in this lab when he is doing his chemistry experiments, he isn't conscious that chemicals are Spirit. And so we say he isn't being spiritual. He has mistaken Spirit for matter. It is like that man who mistook a coiled rope in a dimly lit room for a snake.

You can't understand it without awakening. And it's too radical to explain to you verbally. You have to stop being a self to understand it. Your self-hood is getting in the way. Self-hood is the illusion. There simply isn't no such thing as a self. It's being imagined. What I'm telling you is: your birth is imaginary. You were never actually born, you simply believe you were.

I love that nostalgia feeling.

Yeah, the devil loves nothing more than to cloak itself in God. That is the devil's cleverest survival strategy.

Fruits and nuts will not be enough to sustain you. You will be extremely hungry and quit. It would be more reasonable to light-proof an entire bedroom plus attached bathroom, so you have more space to move around, sleep, and store food. Right now I pretty much sleep in a pitch black light-proofed bedroom. All the windows and even the door is totally blocked with special thick curtains. That would be the way to go about it. Logistical planning for retreats is very important. You need to address all practical issues ahead of time so you can fully focus on the retreat without distraction. You could even install a small fridge in your bedroom to hold pre-cut fruits, sandwiches, pasta salad, etc. You could stock up on beef jerky.

I was responding to your usage of that label.