Leo Gura

Spiritually gifted folk. You can meet them in various spiritual circles. Healers, psychics, masters, yogis, sages, prodigies, shamans, witches, channelers, saints, etc. It's a combination of factors: diligence, discipline, willpower, passion, focus ability, existential curiosity, openmindedness, baseline level of consciousness, appropriate personality type, and more. Notice, it's much easier to stick with a technique when is produces immediate significant results. Some people sit down to meditate and start having mystical experiences within days or weeks. This of course makes it much easier to stick with the habit compared to a person who meditates for 3 years and doesn't have a single mystical experience. I've met people who've sat down for one weekend, did 2 days of self-inquiry and awakened. That's totally unusual results. The average person can self-inquiry for 5 years and still not awaken. And it has to be this way. Otherwise half the people on the planet would be awake, but less than 0.0001% are. So you need some explanation for why that is. The explanation cannot just be that they're lazy or uninformed.

@electroBeam Of course environment is very important. Genetics/physiology + environment + training/effort = all important The most successful people do well in all 3 categories.

That's very humbling to realize. Yes, consciousness is capable of experiencing intense suffering. By experiencing some of that yourself you become more compassionate, loving, tolerant, and understanding. Try to imagine what it's like to live as a little child in Syria whose entire family was killed in a bombing. Yeah... that's some hardcore suffering and it goes on around the world by the millions every day. Makes you appreciate how good you have it in this life. Most people are totally ignorant of who deeply humans can suffer. Which makes those people arrogant and callous. Only through deeply suffering themselves will they come to realize their callousness and arrogance. 4-AcO-DMT is a very powerful substance. Be careful with it.

He would likely discover new realms, depths, and aspects of consciousness. They certainly take you beyond what would be natural for most humans. Of course even then there are still limits to what the body/mind can handle. Even the strongest psychedelic does not totally free you of human form. Some humans are like naturally high all the time because their brain chemistry is that way. This is quite rare, but still, not that rare. You can find such people. They probably are somewhat gifted. But also, the psychedelic catalyses that by 100x-1000x. Which would be hard to do any other way. A psychedelic is similar to Jesus spending 40 days in the desert with no food or the Buddha sitting under the tree for 2 weeks straight without moving. Only it happens much faster and easier, not requiring so much suffering.

@AlwaysBeNice I feel pretty confident that a kangaroo is ignorant of metaphysics. If you have evidence to the contrary, please share.

@Schahin Practically speaking you can make choices and steer your life. Using your intention properly is critical to personal and spiritual development. You are the CEO of your life. God has delegated this power to you, so use it well.

Ha! If only life worked so easy. This is one of the best forum softwares available. Months of work went into setting it up and getting to function well. Lots of money was paid to customize it for our needs.

Sidhhis do not remove all limits. Many limits still exist even if you are Jesus. It's very much like Neo in The Matrix. He learns to bend some of the rules but he is still constrained inside The Matrix. There are still many things he cannot do.

The key is how you understand the word "self". That's an extremely loaded word. If Self is understood in the widest possible sense as God, then all of life is self-imposed and self-created. But that does not mean you as a human body are not bound by constraints. You as God have imposed constraints on yourself which you do not know how to undo without physical death. For example, God constrained itself to be that bird, but that bird has no idea how to break the constraints of bird-ness. That is the whole point of death, to escape one's self-imposed constraints. But you can't have it both ways. You can't be alive in a body yet totally unconstrained. The body is a serious constraint. Life itself is a constraint. All form is limited, whether you're a rock, a tree, a bird, a kangaroo, Albert Einstein, Jesus, a DMT machine elf, or whatever. Whatever you are is what constrains you to be less than infinite. You are lost in the labyrinth of your own consciousness and your only escape is death.

Try to hatch an egg. Post on YT when you succeed. Like I said: madness.

Is a bird outside in nature free or not? Seems free, but it is also extremely limited. It's important to understand the limits of a bird. It would be madness to try to ask the bird to solve calculus equations. Likewise it would be madness to try to ask a human to hatch an egg. An important part of growing up is learning your limits. Paradoxically acknowledging one's limits can be liberating, as one then surrenders to them and stops trying to act in some loftier, idealized way. Telling a child who's not suited for math to be good at math would traumatize the child and ruin his self-esteem because he will always feels inferior and not understand why. He will then blame himself for being defective or inadequate when in fact he's just suited to other things.

@Schahin No, I would not call anything destiny. Humans exercise a tiny portion of God's Free Will. God has infinite Free Will. But also all of that Will is fully put towards actualizing Love. So in a weird strange loopy sense, God has no choice but to actualized Infinite Love. Then again, God freely chooses Infinite Love. But then again that is because God is so Infinitely Intelligent that it would never choose anything less. Which means it cannot be anything but Love. And so it goes, round and round in a vicious circle. As it must, because free will vs destiny is another one of those pesky dualities which must eventually collapse. Contemplate this: what is the difference between free will and destiny? Eventually you'll see that the two poles must meet and become one. This issue is analogous to the wave/particle duality in quantum mechanics. The true nature of light is that it's not one or the other but has features of both. Likewise with free will and destiny.

This forum software is too tricky for even God to fix. The reason it, this is a 3rd party platform. Which means I can't just go in there and make changes to the code willy-nilly because the code needs to be upgradable, making changes very tricky as new upgrades override old changes. Basically we are stuck with the forum as-is with only minor cosmetic changes. And even those are problematic as they get overridden. And because the code is so complex, every new update introduces new bugs and problems even if it solves old ones. So there's no perfection in this game.

I've done over 70 psychedelic trips. Many very deep ones. Never once have I vomited. Totally unnecessary unless your body feels a need to do it. Healing happens regardless of vomiting. If you eat before the trip, you will almost certainly vomit on a heavy trip. Don't take Martin's method / attitude as the only one. It's one out of many. My trips tend to go differently than Martin's descriptions.

You have to be very careful about biased selection. People certainly do become enlightened using those methods, but less than 1%. How do you account for the other 99% for whom the methods do not work? Just saying they are lazy is not a good enough explanation. The people who get enlightened using those techniuques are the ones who are already highly predisposed to it. You must be highly predisposed already just to do the practices seriously. Don't discount that. Training is important, but also not sufficent. You can train a donkey all you want but it will never reach the deepest levels of consciousness because of its fundamentally limited physiology. Ditto for humans. Shinzen Young proves my point. I do not consider him to have reached the deepest levels of consciousness, and he's been at it for 40 years. Sure, he has gotten a lot better. But he does not understand the deepest mechanics of God. And he probably never will without better neurotransmitters. The Buddha very clearly also had supernatural talent. Those talents just lay dormant until he left to be a monk. Just the decision to give up his kingdom and become a full time monk was already an extraordinary act which could only have been made by a spiritually advanced person. Stories say that the Buddha tried various yogic methods and aced them all within a few years. Clearly a sign of supernatural talent. Be careful not to misunderstand my teachings. Life comes in a spectrum of spiritual abilities, from bacteria to kangroos to humans to aliens to God itself. Clearly a kangaroo is not going to fathom the depths of God no matter how much training. Why? Because of its physiological limits. It is too limited. Humans are better equipped. But still basically not good enough to fathom all of consciousness without augmentation. Humans lie all across the spectrum of consciousness. Some of us are totally retarded while others are Buddhas. This is certainly not explainable by lack of training, although training is often necessary to actualize our full potential. But what your full potential is, is highly constrained by physiology. Also, I am speaking about a lot more here than enlightenment. Consciousness is not merely about enlightenment. There is a width as well as a depth to it. Very few people explored the full width or depth alone, let alone both at once. So just saying, "But Leo, person X is enlightened" doesn't mean much. That is not a nuanced enough understanding of the spiritual terrain.

No, that's not enough to explain it. There are people who access realms of consciousness with zero training which other people cannot access with 40 years of professional training.

What I'm talking about goes way beyond beginners luck. I am talking about physiological brain differences and neurotransmitter differences which give people access to different realms of reality. Training is a thin vineer on top of this fundamental foundation.

The more I study and explore spirituality, the more convinced I am that spiritual talent plays a bigger and bigger role. I have met and talked with people who access crazy superhuman levels of consciously totally effortlessly without training. And these people can go deeper than those who practice for 40 years. It's quite unfair and outrageous. This is like a dirty giant secret of spirituality and meditation which no one tells you about because they want to believe we are all equal. Well, the truth is, we are nowhere close to equal. My experiments with psychedelics back this up. There are levels of consciousness so radical that you will never access them if you lack the proper neurotransmitters.

Actually, if you study some Spiral Dynamics and if you work on your own consciousness, it becomes easy to assess the levels of consciousness of politicians. This allows you to size up people very quickly. You will come to recognize the common tropes of every stage of development. It can take as little as 5 minutes to size up a politician, especially if they are low in development. People are harder to size up once they get into Tier 2, but so few people are in Tier 2 that it's not a problem.

@Harikrishnan No, no, no.

Locking this because I have a feeling people will share things they will later regret and then pester Mods to delete it. Remember, this is a public forum. Don't post things you don't want to be public permanently. Some things are best kept to yourself, close friends, therapists, and lawyers.

My Mom was loosely religious. She read me Bible stories when I was young. My Dad was scientific/amoral/atheist. My parents did not push any beliefs onto me. I was free to think as I liked. I was a pretty firm atheist by middle school because Christian metaphysics seemed silly. But in high school I realized that atheism too was a position and technically groundless and unjustified. But still I assumed it was right because the origin of God was not explained by religion as I knew it back then. I did not realize back then that it was possible for God to create itself. Now I am able to explain how Christianity & God really work to my Mom. And she basically understands. At least conceptually.

@Schahin The difficulty has to do with how you define "you". A person who has never awoken cannot resolve the issue of will because he assumes he is real. That you is illusory. You must discover the Universal You. Then we can talk. Ego assumes it is in control. But ego is illusory. So what then is actually in control? The Universal You.

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That which happens inside a dream is imagination.