Leo Gura

@Ilya The point of do nothing is expose awareness. Awareness is good in this case. If only you were really aware, you'd be aware that awareness is Nothing.

@Joseph Maynor Yup, that's the gist of the world's problem. Questioning oneself is the hardest work on earth. Which is why people come up with every excuse and distraction imaginable not to do it. The trick is to become more and more aware of how you trick yourself out of doing self-inquiry.

@abgespaced 1) Be ware of turning the art of mental-masturbation into your life purpose. A purpose needs to have an IMPACT statement component. We covered this in the course. What IMPACT are you planning to make on people/world? Generating ideas is not an impact. Eating cake is not an impact. Having sex with a hot girl/guy is not an impact. Taking notes is not an impact. Organizing your closet is not an impact. Reading a book is not an impact. 2) The domain of mastery is like the vehicle you most want to learn and use to make your impact. Like, if my impact is to kill people, my domain of mastery will be explosives, or firearms, or swordfighting, or nuclear physics, etc.

@Joseph Maynor Everything you've ever encountered in your life from age 0 to now, was not absolute. It was all infinitely far from absolute. Which is why it's all disappeared into the past. Even your ideas of "reality" disappear as soon as you turn on the TV and stop thinking about them. If something starts or stops, comes or goes, it is, by definition, not absolute.

@JustinS Hazzah! Now we know their Achilles heel! Ghosts love frozen grapes! Get some more grapes, set them out on your dining table, hide underneath the table with your vacuum cleaner and try to suck one of them in there. Post video on Youtube. Profit. Retire to the Bahamas to sip Pina Coladas on the beach.

I'm saying you could be a non-physical organism All that needs to happen is your memory is wiped, and you're instantiated into this reality. Right now you see yourself like a snake, but maybe you're an organism which is more like a hydra.

What? Why?

The point you're missing is: enlightenment is NOT an experience. It's prior to all experience. Your model of reality doesn't allow for such a thing to be possible -- because you're still operating under a naive realist paradigm without realizing it. Which is why you're confused. Imagine for a second actually becoming "the external world", not just experiencing it, but actually becoming it. And when you do, you realize, it is Nothing, and identical to the "internal world".

@Mert Nonduality and souls are not necessarily mutually exclusive. No more so than nonduality and bodies are. It isn't hard to conceive that a human organism is constructed not only out of physical matter, but the organism is rooted much more deeply into the fabric of reality, at levels which sit below physical reality, or "our universe", or our current life, such that even if our entire universe is annihilated, remnants of the organism you currently think of as yourself may remain in some more fundamental substrata of reality. Yes, everything is nondual, but that doesn't really say jack about how reality is specifically structured and how organisms work. The most advanced and hardcore mystics -- people who've spent 10,000-50,000 hours in meditation -- talk about past lives. Are they just being cute? Are they just deluded? That's a rather arrogant and dismissive stance to take, IMO. In my experience, when a person like that tells you something about reality, you should consider it very seriously, even if it first sounds stupid. Which is not to say you should believe them blindly.

@Principium Nexus Being and awareness boil down to the same thing. The screen is nothing. You are nothing. Everything is known by this nothing. Your job is realize that you are this nothing right now. Which of course means there is no you per se. There is no "who" which percieves this nothing. Nothing just is. Isness is awareness. This cannot be grasped prior to enlightenment. The grasping of this IS enlightenment. If you could grasp it, you'd already know it and wouldn't be here asking questions. Watch out for the this trap of trying to know before you know. You can't know ahead of time. You can't get a "sneak peak" using your mind. You're trying to cheat. Instead just accept that you don't know for now and patiently self-inquire.

@Hardik jain Best way to face any fear is to tackle it head-on. 10 day solo retreat in the woods. Or a Vipassana retreat. It will be painful at first, but massive growth will happen.

A good way to make sense of it is to consider how video games work: In a video game, like a first-person shooter, it seems like the player's view point converges on his eyes, but actually, the entire screen is rendered simultaneously. The avatar's eyes/body/brain in a video game is not responsible for what is seen on the screen, they are part of the screen. It's an illusion.

Totally different. They have almost nothing in common. Shadow work will not enlighten you. Shadow work is like therapy. It operates in the psychological domain, not the existential domain. @Extreme Z7 Good work! Keep it up. Don't get sloppy or complacent. You're just warming up

Good and bad are mental fabrications. But becoming conscious of the Truth will melt your heart. Everything that human beings call "bad" is really just various forms of selfishness. When you stop having a self, it will be harder to do "bad" stuff simply because your selfish impulses get de-fanged at high levels of consciousness. When you're deeply conscious, you have no need to act selfishly. And so others see you as a "saint". But really, you're just cognizant of reality, that's all. When you finally cognize Absolute Infinity, you'll be shocked at how loving it is. You'll drown in its love.

@Alxtrov You'll have to experiment and decide for yourself. Most meditation that's taught these days is not oriented towards enlightenment breakthrough. It's mostly taught for relaxation, etc. I think self-inquiry is the most direct way to enlightenment, short of 5-MeO-DMT. But meditation can be helpful in building your awareness and focus muscles. With meditation, you're not going to break through to enlightenment unless you do massive amounts of it. Like many thousands of hours, and mostly in 24/7 retreat-like settings. A 1-hour per day meditation habit is not going to enlighten you, unless you are super lucky. I suggest hardcore self-inquiry and also doing hardcore meditation retreats, if you really care about results here.

@Anirban657 No, I don't think so. The self hasn't been yet created at birth, so enlightenment is just not applicable. It takes a baby about 2.5 years to start recognizing itself in the mirror. Until then, it is effectively enlightened, but doesn't know it.

@Edvard Read The Book Of Not Knowing VERY carefully.

Yes I speak it. I don't know any other languages. Depends on how you define "junk food". Stuff like candy bars? Pizza? Burgers? Bread? Cakes? Soda? Fast food? No. I always had high maturity. It was there when I was 7 years old, etc. I always thought about adult topics, even at that age. I started existential questioning very early on, since my early teens. It wasn't about reading books. I was about contemplating how life works and why it works the way it works. That's actually a lot more effective than reading a bunch of books. I would call it a deep curiosity about the structure of reality. Genius? No. I don't think so. Some in-born intelligence and consciousness? Sure, probably. But it's still not easy for me to grow. Growth is always relative to your old self, so it's always a struggle no matter where you're at.

@Edvard No, you're still missing the point here.

Nothing is bad per se. Life purpose is one small piece of a larger puzzle. It won't make you truly happy. It's designed to help you pursue success in a better way, but it still has its limits. At least until you realize that success is a hamster in a wheel type of thing. Once you do, you'll still be able to pursue success, but CONSCIOUSLY rather than compulsively. You will stop hoping for success to bring you happiness. There are different levels of growth and advice. Some is for newbies, some is more advanced. Someone like Elon Musk obviously doesn't need more success. He's maxed out on it. You, on the other hand, probably need a bit more success in your life. But it still won't make you happy ultimately. Part of the value of success is acquiring it just to convince yourself that it wouldn't make you happy. Because your mind will not listen to me. You're gonna have to learn this lesson the hard way. But Musk is clearly not learning this lesson. He keeps doubling down on the strategy of: more success! Which is how we know he's a hamster in a wheel.

Run a search. We've had many discussions of Sam Harris here.

No, it's the opposite. It's an escape from spiritual practice. The mind is extremely crafty. It's sole job is to keep you a hamster in a wheel. It may appear arrogant, but I'm just explaining a deep dynamic of how the egoic mind works. It's nothing personal. A proper move in relation to living life and being a good human being. This is not a subjective thing. If he did what I'm saying, he himself would come back in 10 years and tell you, "OMG!!!!! I was so wrong that way I used to live. My life has been saved." It's sorta like you find a mental patient hitting his head against the wall and you tell him, "Hey, it would be better if you stopped doing that." And he responds, "What?!! How dare you tell me what will and won't make me happy! Do you really claim to know what will make me most happy in his life? You're so arrogant!" With a bit of awareness, it's not a giant leap to realize that hitting one's head against the wall cannot lead to happiness, no matter how well its done. This is not a matter of personal style or values. It's just a feature of being human. Humans don't like getting their heads beat in. Success has zero to do with happiness. Success is about ego-perpetuation. Success is specifically designed to NEVER make you happy. Because that's counter to what is necessary for the ego's survival. The ego wants you in constant action without fulfillment. Because fulfillment means the end of action under that paradigm. Look behind all the sophistication, and you'll see that Elon Musk is just a hamster in a wheel chasing an imaginary piece of cheese. A chimp in outer space is still a chimp. I don't say that to be mean to Musk. He's a decent guy trying to do the best he can. And he's certainly better than 90% of businessmen out there. But I say it because there's a deep lesson here that you guys are still failing to grasp: the ego utterly dominates all your motivations and desires. So much so that you're having a hard time seeing it. It has corrupted you through and through. This has nothing to do with me chasing enlightenment. Or trying to preach enlightenment at people. I just understand success. It's EXTREMELY addictive. There's really very little difference between a heroin addict and a businessman, other than how our culture frames it. Except businessmen are actually 1000x more dangerous and harmful to society than heroin addicts. Start to mindfully observe how every day you're being a hamster in a wheel. You will be SHOCKED at what you find. Don't be surprised if a few days of such careful observation sends you into a depression. That's about appropriate. Success is like food. Some degree of it is necessary for survival. But you can eat consciously, or your can eat unconsciously the way 99% of people do.

@How to be wise It's more focused on working through emotions than directly going for enlightenment. If you have a lot of emotional baggage, it can be great to clear that out. But if you really want to go straight for enlightenment, I think self-inquiry/mindfulness practice will be more effective.

@vibrate Great initiative! Hope you got some good insights from it.

@Skenderberg Don't do that. It's gonna end badly.