Leo Gura

@Mike Bison You're thinking of consciousness as human awareness. That's not what is meant when we say everything is made of consciousness. What's meant is more like: The substance of everything is no-substance, which is consciousness. Think of consciousness like atoms making stuff up. Except the atoms themselves have no qualities whatsoever. And therefore, they cannot even be called atoms. And there is not many of them, but one. Look at your arm right now and notice that it's not made out of atoms or "physical stuff". It's made out of consciousness. Right now! Do it. Touch your arm and feel consciousness. That's it! Right there! Your entire visual field made of consciousness. Look carefully at it.

@unknownworld I don't say they're invalid teachings. I just make fun of the way newbies misinterpret them. Buddha was definitely seeking. He sought so hard he nearly starved himself to death. You cannot even begin to appreciate that kind of seeking. Seeking is the whole path! You seek until you can seek no more. Telling people not to seek is worse than telling people to seek. The oldest Indian scriptures tell us to seek like our hair is on fire. What the Buddha called the Middle Path would make you shit your pants, it was so hardcore. Don't go romanticizing the Buddha, or Jesus, or Mahavira, as some softy Ekhart Tolle figure. They were certainly not that. The non-seeking is the organic END RESULT of seeking! You cannot skip the seeking part and go straight to non-seeking. Your logic is so silly! It's like saying, "Don't go to school to become a doctor. You already are one!" Yes, it's true, once you're a doctor, you no longer need to work hard at being a doctor. Of course! But you don't tell that to newbies. What you're doing is taking a nuanced piece of advice -- "Stop seeking" -- which was meant for highly advanced practitioners and hardcore seekers who've been seeking for years like their hair was on fire, and you're dolling it out to newbies who haven't truly seeked a day in their lives because they are so addicted to internet, TV, food, porn, shopping, success, family, work, ideologies of all kinds, etc. and expecting that to help them get enlightened. Well, it will have the opposite effect. All nonduality pointers and advice is contextual and individual. You need to match the medicine to the disease. The mind entangles itself in many ways, both to the right and to the left on the spectrum. The advice is only useful when it helps people mitigate their personal excesses. Excess of seeking is NOT most people's problem today. Complacency is the overwhelming problem. The proof is always in the results. If the Neo teachings worked as they are advertised, the whole world would be enlightened. And yet we have Trump for president. So it just doesn't pass muster. So much for Tolle's New Earth. The New Earth might turn out be nuclear winter. The problem you, and Ekhart Tolle and Rupert Spira, have to explain is why the whole world isn't enlightened, if no seeking is required. And also why the vast majority of the most-enlightened masters where such hardcore seekers that they abandoned their careers, houses, wives, and children. This whole non-seeking debate is just absurd. Just factually false and confuses newbies. The problem is not that they're trying too hard, it's that their trying too little. The 100 million Ekhart Tolle fans out there are trying too little. Which is why they aren't enlightened and don't even have a clue how serious enlightenment is. They are dabblers. And that's fine. But don't go spreading that dabbler mentality around here. You can go to Ekhart Tolle for that.

@Edvard You are coming at this from egoic consciousness. Of course it doesn't make any sense to an ego to die. It will fight to the death to maintain itself. But self-actualization is a process of moving out of that level of consciousness. Imagine a level of consciousness where you don't care if you die because inside you are already dead, and so in fact you are happy with no matter what happens. I know it's hard to imagine for an ego. But hey, Jesus did it. And those conservatives sure love Jesus! Wouldn't it be nice if they actually took him seriously and walked his path? The only thing standing in the way of your happiness, is you.

@username It might help you do your inquiry on paper. Journaling it out. Like Jed's spiritual autolysis method. If you're a conceptual person, you need to get all the bullshit concepts and pet theories out of your head. Writing them out on paper can help.

You have no idea what you're in for yet with enlightenment, hehe. It is your very death. All your fears << now there's something worth being skeptical about! Who'd of thunk! Isn't it interesting that "skeptics" are skeptical about everything but what's going on inside their own minds and bodies. Hmmmmm... is that just an accident?

@SLICKHAWK You'll never have 90 Rolls Royces with that attitude.

I wouldn't be surprised to see a photo of Sadhguru helicoptering into Osama Bin Laden's hideout with a grenade launcher and a big shit-eating grin on his face.

Time is much less important than quality. 20 minutes of high quality is better than 3 hours of sloppiness. So tighten up your practice if you are past the newbie stage.

@username I find that self-inquiry is quite difficult. Meditative techniques can be more effective for getting first glimpse. For example, mindfulness meditation with labeling is how I got my first glimpse. But that glimpse was nowhere near as deep as is necessary. Still, an important step. No matter what technique you do, you need enormous focus and momentum to break through. Just doing a few hours per day is not enough in most cases. You need overwhelming momentum. Like 100 hours straight of self-inquiry or meditation. Non-stop, non-stop, non-stop. That's when you really have a decent chance of a breakthrough. At least that's been my experience. If you just want a glimpse, psychedelics make it SO ridiculously easy. You can accomplish in 10 minutes what you couldn't accomplish in 2 years. Yes, dabbling in techniques will get you nowhere. Eventually you gotta pick one and go balls to the wall with it. Doing retreats is the key to breakthroughs. The stuff you do at home is child's play by comparison to the work accomplished at a retreat. Stick with it. Remember, it took the Buddha 6 years. And he was going at it HARDCORE. If you're really serious, you need to be much more hardcore with your practice. Most of ya'll here are WAY too soft and lazy. You haven't yet felt what true seeking feels like, where your mind is ready to explode from effort. All those Neo-Advaita people like Ekhart Tolle and Rupert Spira have filled your minds with fairytales of effortless instant enlightenment. Common sense should tell you that if it was that easy, every damn fool would be enlightened.

The problem is that you're putting the cart before the horse. If you care about consciousness, you first gotta experience the depths of it, before you make plans for how computers may play into it. It's sorta like you have found a magic egg. You don't know what will pop out of it once it hatches, but since you know chickens pretty well, you assume it's gonna be a chicken. So you make plans for this chicken to hatch, building it a little chicken house, etc. But once it hatches, it turns out to be Tyrannosaurs Rex, not a chicken. Now what good is that chicken house? Maybe you can use it to raise chickens to feed him This reminds me of foolish folks like Ray Kurzweil who thinks he can invent a computer singularity while never realizing that he never existed in the first place! It's just a sad farce. If he just bothered to pursue conscious he would have realized a long time ago that the singularity is already what he is, and all his attempts at immortality are utter nonsense. The amazing thing about consciousness work is that tends to flip everything upside down and inside out. So if there's one thing you can be sure will happen, its 180 degree shifts in your perspectives. Which makes conventional planning rather challenging if you try to do it ahead of time.

Yes, it's called CONCENTRATION! Practice it. You cannot think your way into concentration, you must concentration your way there. With bird sounds it's actually quite easy. Just focus on the other thing.

Until you die, you will not understand that reality is absolutely perfect. That, and only that, is Buddha-mind. All your human squabbling about what is right for reality means no more than the squabbling of turkeys.

Idolizing me is counterproductive. Just take whatever info makes sense and grow yourself. That's all. There is nothing special or important about me at all. Although I appreciate the thought.

You can do anything consciously, I suppose. The question is, will you? Where there is a vision, there is a way. When I denounce coding, I'm mostly talking about the typical way it is done. That doesn't mean you can't find a better way to do it. You have to be creative and think outside the box if you want your career -- no matter what the career is -- to align with higher consciousness. Working 8 hours a day at a computer is a problem for everyone these days. Fundamentally, it's anti-human. You were not designed to do that. It's not healthy. Are you noticing how you've domesticated yourself, like a factory farm cow? If you spend some time living in a good ashram, you'll see just how toxic and dysfunctional your entire lifestyle was. And you'll never want to go back to it. None of this is to say you can't do it. I'm just pointing things out here to people who claim they want high-consciousness living.

@username Organizing all this material in a comprehensive way is extremely challenging. There are so many traps and nuances and depths of understanding, all of which need to grounded in direct experience. It's really a life's work. I am trying to do it, but it will take a good 10-20 years. If you notice, very few teachings or teachers give you a comprehensive, big-picture view of anything, not even their one specialized domain, let alone all the important domains of life. They just give you tidbits. Because organizing it all in the right way takes 100x more work. For example, before one can talk about psychedelics properly, one has to try at least a dozen different ones in different ways. Almost nobody does that. They just speculate and give excuses. Show me a guru or teacher who has dozen 12 different psychedelics and understands nonduality. They don't exist.

There are many good communes, ashrams, and monasteries all over the world. Where you can devote your life completely to spirituality, if that's your desire. It's all a matter of figuring out for yourself what the hell you want out of your life. Why are you alive? What do you care about? Get clear and then take action. Enormous courage will always be required to follow your truest path. If you are young, and you don't have a family to support or a big career or business to maintain, then you've got very little to lose. You can afford to be bold. Now is the best time. You can always return back to your old, crap lifestyle.

@Tony19 You eat an elephant one piece at a time. What's the rush? Get comfy and dig in. This is the whole point of your 70 or so years here in this life. There is nowhere to get to. So enjoy the process of research and discovery. Just balance your theory with practice. A combined, holistic understanding of all the concepts will take you at least 10 to 20 years. And that's assuming your doing it actively every day, and are wise enough to avoid most of the traps of this work.

@electroBeam All koans mean the same thing: Truth There is no point in "answering them". The answer is the Truth itself. You either experience it or you don't. There's nothing to puzzle out about koans. When you become so openminded that you cease making a distinction between reality/unreality, and life/death, you will experience physical death. That is enlightenment. You become so openminded that you literally kill yourself.

Of course it doesn't want to stick. That's the thing you gotta break through past, not avoid! You should be able to focus on one thing for 5000 hours. Boring is in your mind.

Do it your way. But the proof will be in the pudding. You've been warned. Look at all these Zen devils in the making... sigh...

@The White Belt Yes, that's tricky. Requires real vision, intuition, and contemplation to get clear about that. This is where reprogramming your subconscious mind comes in handy. Just as a thought-experiment, you could imagine all your fears and limiting beliefs disappear for a moment. Imagine you couldn't fail. What would you pursue in life? Go through and answer the list of life purpose questions from the course. There's like over 50 of them there. Set your fears aside for now. We don't care what you fear. We care what you WANT.

It's extra-bad for coders. I've coded quite a bit myself in the past, and I worked in an industry with professional coders. It's an obscenely unhealthy and unconscious lifestyle. Much more so than being a writer. Coding has a way of sucking you in. I don't spend 10 hours a day starting into a box. I could minimize my computer activity to maybe 5 hours per week. I'm pretty flexible. The core of my work is not dependent on computers. And I'm far from the best role-model as far as high-consciousness lifestyle.

Because it's setting a stupid expectation based on arrogance and delusion, promoting further arrogance and delusion. You can practice mindfulness 24/7 all you want, but don't tell yourself you're gonna master this field in 1 year, or even 10 years. You won't! Not even close. Don't get cute here. You master it by doing, not by bullshitting yourself with cute neo-Advaita phrases about cats and blooming flowers. When someone comes and rapes your mother, let's see what tune you sing then. Let's see how enlightened you are then. You have no idea yet how much work it will take. You are a human being, not a cat. Cats aren't doing mastery. If you want to be a slob and sleep for 75% of the day, follow the cat's example.

Just because one studies or models the mind in an academic setting does not mean they are doing anything to raise their own personal consciousness. It's like: just because you're a heart surgeon doesn't mean you have a healthy heart. Meany heart surgeons are fat and unhealthy. Also, consciousness != AI. This is big misconception. Consciousness is the very fabric of existence. AI is about mechanical algorithms which resemble the actions of mind. But mind != consciousness. Consciousness is actually almost the inverse of mind. All that said, I don't want to bum you out. If you really have a passion for AI and programming, that could be a valid life purpose. But just don't confuse it with raising your own consciousness, or other people's consciousnesses. Additionally, if you want to make your life purpose about using technology to help people actually raise their consciousness, that is a viable path. But note, very few people are doing that. There is a lot of self-delusion in the tech industry about how their technology affects consciousness of ordinary people. Most of the tech actually makes things much worse for people. And AI is not about helping people raise consciousness, it's about making computers more efficient or more capable. So you have to be very careful here, otherwise you could end up having the opposite impact of what you intended. Also, you should consider what affect sitting at a computer for 10 hours a day coding has on your consciousness and quality of life. Is that how you really want to live your life? Staring into a box while telling yourself you are living a high consciousness lifestyle? How are you different from a slug hooked up to a VR machine?

@The White Belt That's definitely a good clue. Your first clues will not be crystal clear because you suck, so you do have to mentally adjust for that fact. There will be unnecessary fear and doubt clogging up your clarity of vision. That said, also be careful about the praise/validation part. Egos love validation, so you cannot rely on that. It's also completely unsuitable for fueling the mastery process of anything. Instead of basking in the validation, ask yourself, "Do I really love this craft? Do I want to go deep in learning the craft of acting? Do I really enjoy it? Do I consider it beautiful in itself even without money or validation?" If YES! then that's a very strong positive clue.