Leo Gura

@Michael569 The most important and hardest part of blogging is CONSISTENCY! If you decide to blog, you need to commit to doing it every single week, for years into the future. Like clockwork. No one visits a blogger who blogs randomly once a month whenever he feels like it. Pick a topic you're deeply passionate about and could write on every day for 10 years to come. That is the key.

That's when you know you're making real progress

@kieranperez Well of course it's true: you don't matter. So what? Life goes on. Your problem is not that you don't matter. It's all the social and cultural expectations you've got about who you're supposed to be and what you're supposed to do, which have got you tangled up. Culture fills our minds with stupid, unquestioned notions like: "I'm supposed to matter", or, "mattering is good whereas not mattering is bad.", etc. These all need to be questioned deeply until they are seen to be the groundless absurdities that they always were. Meaning is a projection of the human mind. It does not really exist. You can project any kind of meaning you want unto the work. The world is like a blank canvas. Which means you're free to paint whatever kind of life you want. It's precisely because nothing matters, that life is great, and that anything can matter to you if you choose it.

@sleeperstakes That's all perfectly normal and how it should be. Have you seen this? https://www.actualized.org/start Sounds like you're doing good. You just now need to balance out your intake of theory with installing concrete daily habits. See above link for ideas on the highest leverage habits. Pick one and implement for 1-2 months, then repeat. All you need to start to see big changes is 1 high leverage habit successfully installed every few months. At that rate, in 2-5 years, you'll be killing it.

I would strongly disagree with that as well. I've spent over $20,000 on workshops and retreats in the last few years. Best money I've ever spent. But then again, I love this stuff and I've got some money to burn.

Binaural beats def work. The question is: what are you expecting them to do? If you're hoping they do all your personal development work for you, you'll be disappointed. If you're hoping they will make you enlightened, you'll be disappointed.

@username You gotta put this into proper context. Any industry you might want to work in -- not just academia -- is corrupted with unconsciousness. The whole world is! You're gonna have to deal with some constraints no matter where you go. There do exist some amazing academics. Of course they are rare. Anything amazing is rare by definition. If you wanna be an academic, go show them how it ought to be done by leading by example. The only way to stamp out corruption is from the inside out. Then again, maybe academia isn't for you. I just know that for me, for example, I would never fit in there. But that's just me. You gotta figure that out for yourself by closely examining your values and other options. There are so many options available. Martin Ball makes it work because he's found a nice liberal-as-fuck community there in Ashland Oregon. They're pretty much all hippies and New Agers around there. That's his niche. And if you read his autobiography, he struggled though hell just to barely get by as a part-time professor. The system screwed up his whole career.

That's the thing. It's impossible to imagine. That's the most amazing part of this whole journey. It's infinitely more than you ever expected to get out of life.

@cetus56 Imagine that lollipop is your head. Now we take a nuclear bomb and detonate it inside there, and the candy shards scatter out into space and to the edge of the known universe. That would still be infinitely smaller than Absolute Infinity as seen on a breakthrough dose of 5-MeO

@egoless Start with 1g of mushrooms or half a tab of LSD. So you get some idea of what psychedelics can do. Then you won't worry so much about "fatal side effects". It is not like psychedelics are some unknown quantity. They have been empirically tested by tens of millions of people all over the world, for over 5000 years, both in clinical settings and in real life settings. Psychedelic deaths are extremely rare, and almost always trace down to ridiculous levels of improper protocol, like taking mushroom on a rooftop.

There's no hard rule here. It would probably be wise for you to first do a guided meditation retreat first, like Vipassana, where you will have peer pressure on you to stick through the whole 10 days. Solo retreats require lots of self-discipline and planning. Otherwise you'll just quit when the going gets tough. Start to unaddict yourself from all forms of media: TV, internet, phone, news, magazines, etc.

If you want that, you need a very deep enlightenment. Start with daily self-inquiry and meditation, and then start doing 10 day solo retreats. By the end of one retreat, you should start to get hints of magic. Your mind needs to become very very present.

@ThirdEyeSees I never said you're wasting time raising children. Having children is a very serious choice and commitment. You need to make the choice consciously and then stick with it, otherwise you're gonna spawn the next Hitler. The problem is that people reproduce mindlessly -- as an escape from consciousness work -- and then once the deed is done, it's too late. And they of course don't have the capacity now to raise their kids consciously, so they do the best they can, but they end up making their kids as unconscious as they are. And then we all have to deal with the fallout. The Devil has an interesting way of procreating himself, doesn't he? If you're stuck in that situation, you're gonna have to work overtime to fix it. Just like any other situation you got yourself into unconsciously. And if you had kids consciously, then good for you. Raise them well.

Any career that chiefly resembles this

@Voyager Success is addictive fo sho. It's like ego crack No thing makes you forget about enlightenment/Truth as quickly as success.

@Shin Start with 1 week, or you'll be failing worse than your buddy LaBeouf Talk is cheap

@Voyager There are many paths up the same mountain. If you want to go ALL IN, you can, and that will be great. If you want to work on your career, and then go ALL IN, that also works. If you want to work on your career, and never go ALL IN, but still have a spiritual practice, that also works. Just depends on what you really want. It's gonna be a challenge either way. It's sorta like the difference between ripping off a Band-Aid quickly vs slowly. What's most painful (and I speak from experience with this) is not making a clear-cut decision and trying to do all 3 at once.

Then you shall remain unaware, as 99.9999% of people are, for that very reason. It's called a leap of faith for good reason. First you die, then you see what's up. You don't get to plumb "the mind of God" and stay yourself. The weight of that kind of knowledge would send an unprepared grown man running for Mommy. If you're not willing to face fear of death, then your mind has you by the balls, doesn't it? Sure it does! It can manipulate you into believing any kind of nonsense just by hiding the truth behind that one little fear. Trying to interpret Absolute Infinity at your current level of understanding and consciousness is bound to lead to all kinds of nonsense images of what it is like. It's not about vampires and black holes. It's more about how you constructed all of reality so that you could exist as your present self. But that won't make sense to you either. How could you have constructed all of reality???? Do you realize the significance of the questions you are asking? You are asking to understand ALL OF REALITY! ALL OF IT! Beyond life and death, before the Big Bang. You're asking to know the "mind of God". And yet you're unwilling to invest a couple thousand hours to do the work? Well then, you're not really serious about your inquiry. Your inquiry should bring you to the brink of tears. You should be willing to abandon food, sex, money, fame, family, friends, work, media, home, culture, science, religion, and everything else. If you were willing to do all that, then you'd be demonstrating the proper attitude of someone who cares about Truth. For all the disbelievers, I specifically went out of my way to find and promote 5-MeO-DMT. It is the most direct and scientific method of glimpsing the Absolute within 15 minutes. It will cut your learning curve by a factor of x1000 or more. And yet people still come up with excuses. You've been handed the magic pill to infinity, and yet, there's always a good excuse for staying yourself. Getting enlightened has never been easier. The problem is, no one really wants it. Hell, even I barely want it and I've glimpsed is fully glory. It's just so big.

Well of course all story-telling started out with the purpose of not merely entertainment but psychological, moral, and spiritual edification. What is the hero's journey story but that? Aesop's Fables Bible stories Homer's epics The earliest Vedic texts like the Upanishads Creation stories from all pre-historic cultures Star Wars Etc. etc. etc This list could be 10,000 items deep. Mankind has used stories to teach about all the vices and virtues of mankind: greed, arrogance, lust, gluttony, selfishness, violence, lying, backstabbing, goodness, selflessness, love, courage, humility, etc. These were not meant to just be entertainment, but stories containing lessons of how to (and how not to) live life. Yes, you can learn a lot from art, literature, and storytelling if you know how to read between the lines. The danger is, your mind goes numb from watching all that media. And you could have arrived at those lessons yourself by just sitting alone in room in silence for a week, or a few years.

@KaleKing To realize your dreams, you're gonna have to work your ass off. Which is the whole point of finding a juicy dream. What dream would be worth busting through the procrastination for? You need to find a vision which you'd be willing to bleed a bit for. And then you're gonna have to bleed a bit. Just do it and bust through the procrastination. There is not theoretical solution to procrastination. You just gotta develop and juicy vision and start taking baby steps every day. Of course it's gonna be hard.

No

@Nahm Exactly as beautiful as anyone else.

What happened to him is that he couldn't handle being robbed of his illusions. That's what Truth/consciousness does. It strips you of all human constructions and pretensions. You need to love that. Love Truth over everything else. That life is pointless is a great thing. It means you have total freedom to play. Being is far greater than purpose. (Those taking the LP course, don't misunderstand that last sentence. You're NOT off hook for finding your LP.)

@How to be wise No, it will make enlightenment easier.

@Anton Rogachevski Well sure, "experience" is just a label we attach to everything you're sensing. Don't overthink it. Experience simply means: the 5 senses plus thought. In other words, EVERYTHING you've ever encountered from the moment you were born till today. But then there's consciousness beyond that. It can't really be imagined because imagination is related to sense experience. Try not to think of it as anything. Not some alien landscape or anything. Consciousness may just be Nothing